July 29, 2026
Editor’s Note: Views in the article do not necessarily reflect the views of borkena.com
By Tesfatsion Dominiko (PhD)
A Lesson Before the Argument
There are cities that seem, for a brief moment in history, to embody the future. In February 1984, Sarajevo was one of them. For two weeks, the capital of socialist Yugoslavia became the center of the world, as television cameras followed skiers down the slopes of Igman, watched bobsleds thunder through the curves of Trebević, and lingered over a skyline where Ottoman minarets stood beside Austro-Hungarian facades and socialist apartment blocks overlooked medieval streets. Cafés filled with Muslims, Serbs, Croats, and Jews suggested that diversity could be lived, not merely proclaimed. The Winter Olympics announced Sarajevo as a confident, modern capital.
Less than a decade later, those same venues had acquired entirely different meanings. The bobsled track became a military position. The stadium hosted funerals instead of competitions. Apartment blocks that had symbolized urban progress were reduced to shells by artillery fire, during nearly four years of the longest siege of a capital city in modern history. The obvious explanation is war. It is also an incomplete one. Wars destroy cities every year, yet some recover quickly while others lose not only their buildings but the social fabric that gave those buildings meaning. Sarajevo’s tragedy was not simply that its infrastructure was damaged. It was that the political and civic foundations capable of protecting that infrastructure had already fractured, in the relationships between citizens, institutions, and the state, long before the first shell landed on an Olympic venue. Concrete was merely the final casualty.
That distinction matters because cities are usually judged by what can be photographed. Governments inaugurate highways, parks, and boulevards because these are visible expressions of ambition; far less visible are the investments that determine whether those achievements still matter thirty years later — schools that cultivate skilled workers, institutions that command public trust, jobs that give young people reasons to remain, and political systems that persuade competing communities they hold an equal stake in the future. These unfold slowly and produce no ceremonies, yet history suggests they are what every successful city ultimately depends on. I do not raise Sarajevo to suggest Ethiopia is destined to repeat Bosnia’s tragedy — the two countries differ too profoundly in history, institutions, and conflict for that comparison to hold. I raise it because it proves something more useful than any direct comparison could: cities are built twice — first with concrete and steel, then with educated, economically secure, and socially invested citizens. Without the second construction, the first remains vulnerable no matter how impressive it looks on the day the ribbon is cut. If infrastructure is the visible face of development, the social contract between citizens and the state is its invisible foundation, and no amount of cement can substitute for it.
That is the argument of this article, stated plainly: infrastructure is a necessary condition for national development, but human development — the education, employment, trust, and inclusion that allow a society to sustain what it builds — is the sufficient condition for making that development last. Everything that follows is evidence for that single proposition, not a list of separate complaints.
That lesson feels unexpectedly relevant today, in another capital undergoing a remarkable physical reinvention. Few visitors returning to Addis Ababa after a decade away fail to notice how profoundly the city has changed. Roads once permanently congested have been widened, public squares redesigned, parks planted where neglected spaces once stood, and historic districts restored under the Prosperity Party’s corridor development program — Sheger Park, Friendship Square, the renewal of Piassa, the reconstruction of Churchill Road. Whether one supports the government or opposes it, intellectual honesty requires acknowledging the scale of this transformation is extraordinary. International conferences increasingly use the city as their venue; tourists and investors now encounter a capital eager to present itself as one of the continent’s emerging metropolitan destinations, and after decades in which Ethiopia abroad was often synonymous with famine, conflict, or crisis, there is understandable pride in seeing the capital recognized for something more hopeful. None of that should be dismissed. Better roads reduce the cost of moving goods and people; attractive cities encourage tourism and investment. Physical infrastructure is not an indulgence — it is one foundation of economic development, and countries that neglect it rarely prosper.
What Concrete Cannot Do
Acknowledging that truth, however, should allow us to ask a harder question: what ultimately determines whether such investments keep generating prosperity long after the construction crews leave? The answer has surprisingly little to do with concrete. Roads do not maintain themselves. Bridges do not inspect themselves. Parks do not generate the tax revenue required for their upkeep. Every physical achievement ultimately depends on something less visible: the capabilities of the people who inherit it. For the sake of precision, I mean something specific by human development — productive employment, quality education, civic trust, political inclusion, and social mobility. Every example that follows in this article is a failure or success in one of those five categories, not a free-floating grievance. Education determines who designs tomorrow’s cities. Employment determines who can afford to sustain them. Trust determines whether citizens treat public property as a shared inheritance or someone else’s possession. Political inclusion determines whether development is experienced as a common project or as one group’s achievement at another’s expense. History repeatedly demonstrates that infrastructure is a necessary condition for prosperity. It is rarely the sufficient one.
That distinction may sound abstract until one asks a simpler question: what keeps a city alive once the cranes disappear? Construction is an event. Development is a process. A government can widen a highway in three years; it cannot educate an engineer in three years. A bridge may open with a ribbon-cutting ceremony, but the institutions that inspect its safety, collect the taxes that finance its upkeep, and train whoever repairs it are built over decades. Economists call this complementarity: infrastructure and human capital multiply each other’s value rather than substituting for it. A road connects a farmer to a market only if that farmer has the capital, literacy, and trust to use it productively; a corridor without a skilled workforce simply moves goods more efficiently toward a market that still cannot absorb them. Infrastructure creates opportunity. It does not, by itself, create the capability to use that opportunity — which is close to what the economist Amartya Sen meant in arguing that development should be judged by the real freedoms people gain rather than the assets a country accumulates. A road is a corridor for whoever is capable of traveling it, and capability is built in classrooms and workplaces, not on construction sites.
History offers remarkably consistent lessons here. The world’s most successful cities are not simply those that invested heavily in infrastructure; they are those that built the human capabilities necessary to sustain it. The post-war reconstruction of Germany, Japan, and South Korea is often remembered for factories and modern skylines; less visible, but arguably more important, was the simultaneous investment in universal education and professional public institutions. Their roads accelerated prosperity because millions of educated, economically secure people knew how to use them productively — infrastructure did not replace human development, it amplified it. The reverse is equally true. Ancient empires left behind roads and monuments that testified to remarkable engineering, yet those achievements could not preserve societies weakened by internal fragmentation, and abandoned industrial cities today are a quieter version of the same lesson: buildings rarely become obsolete before the economic and social systems supporting them do. Infrastructure seldom fails first. Societies do. A state that has proven, in record time, that it can build roads has not thereby proven it can build the institutions those roads depend on — universities, professional civil services, and independent courts take decades to build and can be undone far faster than they were created, because trust is not something a corridor project can manufacture on a construction schedule.
Where the Foundation Is Being Tested
Viewed from that perspective, several of Ethiopia’s current debates look less like isolated controversies than different expressions of the same underlying challenge. The National Dialogue Commission, established in 2022 to build national consensus after years of conflict and polarization, has been assessed by independent analysts — including researchers at the Clingendael Institute and the Institute for Security Studies — as undermined by its own exclusions, with armed groups and significant opposition figures remaining outside the process, a gap the Commission’s own chief commissioner has publicly acknowledged. A nation cannot ask citizens to invest emotionally in a shared future if parts of that society remain uncertain; the conversation includes them; reconciliation is part of the social infrastructure every other development project depends on. A related question runs through the continuing dispute over Addis Ababa’s constitutional status. It is often framed as a legal argument over Article 49, which names Addis Ababa the federal capital while granting Oromia a “special interest” in the city — language two sides now read in irreconcilable ways, with Oromo activists and officials insisting the city’s land will not be negotiated away, and many other Ethiopians, including figures inside the Prosperity Party’s own ranks, regarding Addis Ababa as shared national ground belonging to no single group. Beneath that constitutional argument lies a deeper question of belonging: who sees Addis Ababa as their city, and can a capital undergoing unprecedented transformation become a place its people experience as a common home rather than a prize in a political contest? Even the frustrations surrounding condominium housing reveal something larger than administrative inefficiency. Thousands of Ethiopians who spent years — in some documented cases close to two decades — contributing to government housing schemes have found themselves bypassed, delayed, or caught in disputed lottery draws later annulled for credibility concerns; in one case, more than seven thousand completed units sat unoccupied for years because promised infrastructure was never finished, prompting Ethiopia’s own Ombudsman to formally intervene. For those citizens, the issue is not simply a delayed apartment; it is whether patience and participation in public institutions are rewarded, and when citizens doubt that, the damage extends well beyond housing policy. These three threads are not identical and should not be forced into one political narrative, but together they illuminate a question that receives far less attention than the next redevelopment announcement: is Ethiopia investing as deliberately in the relationships that bind citizens to one another and the state as it is investing in the roads and buildings reshaping its capital?
People protect what they believe belongs to them — a simple idea, easy to underestimate. Development becomes durable when citizens experience it as something they are building together, and fragile when they experience it as something being done to them. Reports of displacement connected to corridor development have generated real public concern, and whether every individual account proves accurate matters less than the underlying principle: a city beautified over the resentment of the people displaced to build it has not solved its underlying problem, only postponed it. This is felt most acutely by Ethiopia’s young people. A beautifully designed city cannot substitute for the expectation of a future. Boulevards do not remove the anxiety of unemployment; restored public squares do not replace confidence that education will lead to opportunity. Societies remain stable not because every citizen is equally prosperous, but because most believe tomorrow offers more possibilities than yesterday. Hope, in that sense, is not merely an emotion — it is a form of national infrastructure, and once it erodes, no amount of concrete can compensate for the loss. I am not an urban planner, and I do not claim the standing to evaluate traffic modeling or drainage engineering; what I bring instead is more than a decade in youth development and civic engagement, and from that vantage point I would add only this — young people do not stay in a city because its sidewalks are attractive. They stay because they can imagine a future in it.
The question, in any case, is larger than Addis Ababa. A nation of Ethiopia’s size and diversity cannot build its future through one capital alone. South Africa’s economy is not carried by Johannesburg alone but by Cape Town and Durban as well; China’s rise was not built on Beijing and Shanghai in isolation but on a network of cities each developing its own comparative advantage. Ethiopia has its own version of this potential. A genuinely resilient strategy would treat Addis Ababa as one part of a broader network of thriving regional cities — an economic imperative and a political one, since societies stay cohesive when citizens believe the future belongs to them wherever they live, and grow fragile when prosperity appears concentrated in places that feel distant from their own lives.
None of this is an argument for slowing Ethiopia’s development; it is an argument for making that development more durable. Public debate often imagines a false choice between infrastructure and people, as though every kilometer of road comes at the expense of a classroom. History suggests the opposite. Great cities are rarely remembered for their buildings alone — Paris did not become Paris simply because boulevards were constructed under Haussmann, and Seoul is not admired merely for its highways. In each case, physical investment unfolded alongside sustained commitment to education and expanding opportunity, until the skyline became a symbol of a development the society had already begun to earn.
Which brings this back, one final time, to Sarajevo. When the world watched the Winter Olympics in 1984, it saw a beautiful city. What it could not see were the fractures already forming beneath the surface. Buildings can conceal division for a time; boulevards can create the appearance of confidence. None of that substitutes for a society in which citizens genuinely believe they share a future. That is Sarajevo’s enduring lesson — not that beautiful cities inevitably fall, and not that Ethiopia is destined to repeat another country’s tragedy, because history is never that deterministic. The lesson is simpler and more demanding: cities are not ultimately sustained by concrete. They are sustained by the relationships that concrete is meant to serve. As Ethiopia builds a capital worthy of the twenty-first century, the real question is whether it is building a society capable of sustaining it through the twenty-second — whether today’s investments are cultivating educated citizens, trusted institutions, and a political community broad enough that Ethiopians from every background see themselves reflected in the country’s future. Those are not alternatives to infrastructure. They are the conditions that allow infrastructure to endure. Fifty years from now, few will remember how many kilometers of corridor were completed; what future generations will remember is whether this was the moment Ethiopia transformed the appearance of its capital, or transformed the capabilities of its people with equal determination — because a city is judged, in the end, not by what it builds, but by what it leaves behind. Its most enduring legacy is never the skyline. It is the society that chooses, generation after generation, to sustain it.
Tesfatsion Dominiko (PhD) is a freelance consultant whose work addresses contemporary social issues, specifically identity politics, higher education, climate change, and migration & development. He can be reached at tesfatsiondominiko@gmail.com
Editor’s Note: Views in the article do not necessarily reflect the views of borkena.com
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