May 1, 2026
A response to Samuel Estefanous’s “The Unbridgeable Chasm”
by Emedo Farda
Samuel Estefanous writes with the unmistakable voice of a man who loves his country and is genuinely pained by what he sees. His April 25 piece captures something real — the growing disconnect between government rhetoric and the lived experience of ordinary Ethiopians. That frustration deserves to be heard. But frustration, however legitimate, is not a complete analysis. And the media ecosystem in which this piece circulates — anchored by outlets like Borkena and Zehabesha, which have become reliably and almost exclusively oppositional — risks hardening that frustration into a caricature that is no closer to the full truth than the government’s own propaganda.
The honest account of Ethiopia in 2026 is neither the gleaming “Prosperity Chariot” of PP’s official narrative nor the collapsed, puppet-state horror that Borkena’s contributors traffic in weekly. It is something considerably more complicated and, in its complexity, more instructive.
What the Critics Get Right
Let us be clear about what is not in dispute. The cost-of-living crisis in Addis Ababa is real and severe. According to the World Bank’s October 2025 Poverty & Equity Brief, Ethiopia’s national poverty rate has surged from 33% in 2016 and is projected to climb to 43% by 2025 — threatening to erase decades of development progress. The author’s image of the fifty-birr coffee and the “eating walk” are not literary exaggeration; they are the direct downstream consequence of the July 2024 macroeconomic reforms, under which the birr depreciated by nearly 50%, making imported goods significantly more expensive.
On human rights, the evidence is similarly damning. A December 2025 report by the Observatory for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders documented widespread patterns of arbitrary detention, torture, enforced disappearances, and killings targeting human rights defenders and journalists, with civil society organizations recording at least 244 arrests involving 201 journalists since 2019. The Premier’s claim that his government has no time for harassment is directly contradicted by these findings.
And the inequality critique has teeth. Business opportunities have been monopolized by a small group of connected actors, while bureaucratic measures introduced under the guise of reform have created barriers to investment for ordinary Ethiopians. The author’s “Plutocracy” argument is not conspiracy thinking — it reflects a structural reality documented by independent analysts.
What the Narrative Omits
Here is where the piece — and the broader Borkena-Zehabesha current — begins to distort through omission.
The commissioning of the 5 GW Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam in September 2025 doubled Ethiopia’s generation capacity, presenting a genuine opportunity to improve domestic electricity access while scaling power exports to regional markets. This is not a trivial achievement. Built over 14 years using almost entirely domestic financing, GERD represents something rare in African development history — a transformational infrastructure project completed without surrendering to foreign ownership. Critics may question who benefits and when, but to ignore it entirely is to write a partial history.
Ethiopia’s inflation rate has been steadily declining, falling from 29.4% in January 2024 to 15.5% in January 2025 — a meaningful improvement, even if ordinary Ethiopians are still squeezed. GDP growth is expected to remain at 7.1% in the 2025-2026 fiscal year, driven by macroeconomic reforms agreed with the IMF, which include exchange rate liberalization, the creation of a stock exchange, and the gradual opening of the economy to private investors.
Ethiopia’s GDP per capita has more than tripled between 2004 and 2023, and the country has improved its ranking from being among the three poorest nations globally to 27th — a significant shift, achieved despite droughts, floods, conflict, and the COVID-19 pandemic. These are not propaganda figures invented by the Government Communication Service. They come from the World Bank and the African Development Bank. Acknowledging them does not excuse the poverty crisis; it contextualizes it.
The Problem with the Opposition Press
Reading Borkena and Zehabesha consistently reveals a pattern worth naming directly. Articles routinely describe Abiy Ahmed as a “mole implanted to destroy Ethiopia,” a “UAE puppet,” a figure whose Nobel Peace Prize was purchased by foreign interests, and whose government is engaged in nothing short of genocide against the Amhara people. One recent Borkena piece concludes that “the Amhara struggle for survival” requires alliance with Eritrea, Egypt, and Sudan — the precise foreign actors who have historically destabilized Ethiopia. This is not political commentary. It is ethno-nationalist advocacy dressed in the language of resistance journalism.
This matters because it corrupts the legitimate criticisms buried within it. When every piece is written at maximum alarm — every reform a conspiracy, every criticism suppressed by a blood-soaked tyrant, every election a coronation over mass graves — readers have no ability to calibrate. The genuinely alarming things (secret detention, rising poverty, crackdowns on journalists) get flattened into the same register as the paranoid things (UAE puppet theory, Oromo supremacy plots). Everything becomes equally credible or equally dismissible, which serves no one.
Toward a More Honest Conversation
What Ethiopia needs — and what its commentary class has largely failed to provide — is the kind of analysis that holds two things simultaneously: that significant infrastructure development and macroeconomic reform are underway, AND that the human cost of those reforms, compounded by conflict and repression, has been devastating for millions. That the GERD is a genuine achievement AND that 15 to 18 million Ethiopians are facing acute hunger. That the World Bank and IMF stress macroeconomic stability must be paired with strong social protection and inclusive growth — a pairing that is demonstrably not yet happening.
Editor’s Note : Views in the article do not necessarily reflect the views of borkena.com
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