[By Tigray Media Watch and digital intelligence monitoring groups]
Introduction
The Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) has been a dominant force in Ethiopia’s modern political history. Founded in the 1970s as a revolutionary movement advocating self-determination for Tigray, the TPLF evolved into a centralised and hierarchical governing body for three decades of rule in Ethiopia.
Nevertheless, the TPLF’s political decay, corrupt governance, and human rights violations have left the party resistant to reform and became out of touch with contemporary political demands. As a result, the EPRDF rule ended in 2018, and the TPLF lost its dominant power in the federal government. The TPLF leadership fled to their home base in Tigray, started the political antagonism and rhetoric against the governing Prosperity Party and federal government. This led to the eruption of a genocidal war in Tigray on November 3, 2020, against the people of Tigray.
The Case Against the TPLF Leadership Political, Economic, and Social Strategic Failures
ኣብ ሥራሕ የለኹምን ሥልጣን ልቐቑ
Why must the TPLF leadership be removed from power in connection with their political mistakes and unethical responsibility, unaccountability, and strategic failures?
This document will highlight the root causes and outlines the urgent needs for reforms, and the pathways and actions to be taken for sustainable political, economic, and societal transformations in Tigray.
What were the factors that led to the TPLF’s downfall? To begin with, let’s start with the TPLF’s core ideology and its political policies.
First and foremost, the TPLF’s downfall is its core policy on Eritrea’s independence, which it has gone a long way in protecting Eritrea’s sovereignty more than protecting Tigray’s and Ethiopia’s national interests. It still believes firmly that it contributed to the struggle for Eritrea’s independence and wants to protect it, no matter what the regime of Isaias Afewerki commits atrocities in Tigray.
Secondly, the TPLF’s downfall is that it turned to authoritarian rule and human rights abuses by not implementing the Ethiopian constitution properly.
These distorted political beliefs and policies underpin its political ideology, which has been contributing to its institutional stagnation, Ethiopians’ hatred against Tegaru, generational divides and indifference, cognitive barriers, nepotism, and corrupt political and economic practices.
Even after the regime of Eritrea committed genocide and is still continuing to commit genocide against the people of Tigray in the occupied territories stretching from Humera to Irob, the TPLF leadership wants to pursue an alliance with the genocidal regime of Isaias Afewerki. It seems that the TPLF is unable to learn from its dreadful political mistakes yet and is carrying on with its unforgivable and rotten political beliefs.
Evidently, the TPLF leadership has clearly shown their systemic political missteps and strategic failures. These are compelling arguments and reasons why the TPLF leadership ought to be removed from power and why these irresponsible leaders should be held accountable for their actions. They have exposed the people of Tigray to genocide and economic and societal ruin, leaving over 1 million to perish and over 120,000 women and young girls to be raped and experience horrific sexual violence in the genocidal war. They are still trying to expose the people of Tigray to unforeseen dangerous problems by eroding the unity and stability in their power struggle by blackmailing each other.
The Root Causes to the TPLF’s Political and Strategic Failures
1. Repeated Betrayals and Failures to Protect Tigray’s Security and National Interests:
- Prioritised Eritrea’s interests, sovereignty, and independence over Tigray’s national interests.
- Failed to form alliances with external forces, compromising Tigray’s security and sovereignty.
- Established authoritarian rule and committed human rights abuses with impunity.
- Betrayed the people of Tigray in its promise of struggle for independence.
2. Failure to Prevent Genocide
- Ignored early warnings of war and external threats, exposing Tigray to genocide.
- Miscalculated diplomatic and military strategies, leaving Tigray vulnerable to devastating attacks.
- Failed to mobilise resources for defense and neglected the people of Tigray protection.
- Abandoned their moral and legal obligations to shield Tigray from ethnic cleansing.
3. Diplomatic and Geopolitical Isolation
- Alienated international allies, resulting in Tigray’s diplomatic and humanitarian isolation during the war.
- Failed to secure humanitarian aid and international intervention to halt genocide.
- Rejected peaceful negotiations, opting instead for military solutions that backfired catastrophically.
4. Political Suppression and Intolerance
- Suppressed dissent, marginalised opposition parties, and undermined democratic processes.
- Alienated younger generations and intellectuals by failing to establish equitable, just and fair political system and good governance.
- Ignored calls for reform, entrenching authoritarianism and political stagnation, which contributed to systemic and institutional failures.
5. Corruption and Nepotism
- Fostering institutionalised corruption, enriching elites while impoverishing ordinary Tigrayans.
- Built nepotistic networks that prioritised loyalty over competence.
- Diverted public resources for personal and political gain, deepening inequality.
6. Economic Mismanagement
- Failed to establish sustainable political, economic, and social policies, leaving Tigray vulnerable to poverty and famine.
- Mismanaged infrastructure development, leading to economic stagnation.
- Neglected agriculture, energy, water and food security, exacerbating dependency on safety net food aid.
7. Media and Judiciary Failure
- Totally manipulated media to suppress criticism and control narratives.
- Undermined judicial independence, enabling corruption and human rights abuses.
- Blocked accountability mechanisms and fostering a culture of impunity.
8. Neglect of Young Generation Prospects and Betrayal of Tigrayan War Heroes and Veterans
- Disregarded the sacrifices of veterans and failed to honour their legacy.
- Marginalised war heroes and denied them adequate support.
- Betrayed younger generations by failing to secure a prosperous and secure future.
9. Undermining Tigray’s Historical and Cultural Heritage
- Failed to protect Tigray’s 3,000-year-old Aksumite heritage.
- Allowed destruction of cultural and religious heritages during the genocidal war without sufficient international advocacy.
- Neglected efforts to promote Tigray’s rich history and heritage globally.
10. Strategic Security and Military Miscalculations
- Failed to anticipate Eritrean and Ethiopian aggression, leaving Tigray defenseless.
- Mismanaged military resources, leading to catastrophic losses in the war.
- Overestimated falsehood internal strength, resulting in ill-prepared confrontations with well equipped and superior forces.
11. Strategic Intelligence Failures
- Ignored credible warnings of attacks and massacres.
- Failed to establish intelligence networks to preempt threats and secure alliances.
12. Food, Water, and Energy Security Failures
- Failed to secure food supplies, leaving millions vulnerable to starvation during blockades.
- Neglected sustainable water and energy development, increasing dependency on external resources.
13. Humanitarian Disaster Management Failures
- Mishandled humanitarian crises, leading to mass displacements and famine.
- Failed to secure aid channels, resulting in preventable deaths.
- Stealing humanitarian aid, which led to aid suspension, resulting in starvation and death of many people.
14. Post-Genocide Political, Economic, and Social Recovery Failures
- Failed to outline a clear roadmap for Tigray’s reconstruction post Tigray genocide.
- Neglected transitional justice for victims of atrocity crimes.
- Rejected meaningful reforms, perpetuating the same corrupt political systems.
15. Failure to Reform the Political System and Transition of Power Peacefully
- Refused to transfer leadership to younger reform-minded generations.
- Clung to power despite catastrophic failures, undermining hopes for renewal.
- Confused the public by spreading misinformation, disinformation, falsehood, and blackmailing propaganda.
- Undermined the interim administration in which the TPLF established itself.
16. Failure to Uphold Justice, Moral and Legal Accountability
- Over 1 million Tigrayans lost their lives under TPLF’s leadership.
- Leaders must face domestic and international legal systems for crimes of negligence and betrayal and human rights abuses.
- Immediate removal and prosecution of top TPLF officials are essential to restore justice, accountability, and the rule of law.
- Failure to protect women being raped and killed in towns and cities.
- Failure to reinforce law and order resulting for the public to be terrorised by criminals.
17. Institutional Reform
- Unable to dismantle corrupt networks and establish transparent and good governance in Tigray.
- Complicit in reforming and replacing he corrupt political system and immoral TPLF leadership with visionary leadership committed to serving and leading Tigray in upholding its national interests.
The Urgent Needs and Pathways for Reform
The TPLF has governed Tigray for decades, claiming to champion the interests of its people. While it played a pivotal role in ending the oppressive Derg regime, the TPLF has been transformed into an authoritarian, self-serving, and corrupt political party, resulting in catastrophic political, economic, and social consequences. The TPLF’s political ideology and policies have been harming the people of Tigray economically, politically, and socially.
Moreover, the TPLF political ideology and its corrupt networks are highly kleptomaniac tools of repression, which are the roots of the problems for Tigray. If we take, for example, EFFORT, it was never meant to be a public ownership organisation for the benefit of the public development. Looking at EFFORT’s activities since its establishment in 1995, it seems that EFFORT was established to acquire assets for the TPLF leadership and their close network. The whole thing has been a grand theft of Tigray’s monumental wealth while the majority of Tigrayans are impoverished by poverty.
Most Tigrayans live in abject poverty, and many are migrating, driven by poverty and oppression, making up most of the “beggars in Addis Ababa.” Due to the corrupt business network created by Debretsion, Alem, and Fetlework and their close associates, the corrupt few are giving Tigray a bad image that humiliates the people of Tigray.
Tegaru must acknowledge the reality that corruption and thefts have damaged Tigray and that political corruption may lead to the extinction of Tigray if it is not addressed urgently. Let’s take one example: the humanitarian aid theft led to a complete suspension of aid. As a result, Tigray’s reputation has been damaged beyond repair; many people are dying of starvation, and Tigrayans’ patriotism has been turned into a national humiliation and shame by corruption, theft, repression, human rights abuses and bad governance.
The 2020–2022 genocidal war in Tigray claimed over 1 million Tigrayan lives and is still claiming many Tigrayan lives in the continuing systematic genocide perpetuated after the Pretoria peace agreement by the federal government, Amhara, and Eritrean forces. This exposes the TPLF’s strategic incompetence, political miscalculations, immoral responsibility, unaccountability, and strategic failures, as the TPLF leadership admitted itself on multiple occasions that it has encountered a strategic leadership failure.
The influences of the TPLF’s corrupt economic practices and criminal networks play major roles in undermining the political and economic reforms, democracy, transparency, accountability, and good governance. Tigray’s gold mining is being exploited using dangerous chemicals, which can affect human health and cause ecological calamity. Land is being sold illegally by displacing farmers to the cronies of the TPLF network in the name of investment. The TPLF’s political ideological rigidity and institutional inefficiencies pose existential threats to Tigray’s societal stability, making political adaptation inevitable.
The TPLF leadership has neglected its fundamental responsibility to protect Tigray, ensure stability, and safeguard the dignity, peace, security, and survival of the people of Tigray. Instead, it is still following its failed political ideology and strategy but carrying on its business as usual without reforming its strategy and political system and still keeping the incoherent and failed leadership at the helm of responsibility to lead Tigray to the unknown.
The TPLF is becoming instrumental in opening an internal power struggle and fracturing the unity, which is creating a vacuum for the genocidaires and enemies of Tigray to intervene in widening the division and diverting Tegaru’s focus from the implementation of the Pretoria peace agreement.
The disconnect between older TPLF leadership and younger generations is creating significant barriers to political reforms. We are witnessing the cognitive rigidity within TPLF leadership, which is identified as a core impediment to reform, fostering resistance to adaptation and perpetuating out-of-dated political systems, corrupt policies, and bad governance models (i.e., rule by fear, intimidation, blackmailing, and human rights abuses).
The splitter TPLF group led by Debretsion Gebremichael has been trying to make an alliance with the genocidal regime of Eritrea. While the other TPLF group led by the TIRA President, Getachew Reda, wants to align with the genocidal regime of the Federal Government of Ethiopia to implement the Pretoria peace agreement.
The power struggle between the two TPLF groups has now entered into political division and chaos, forgetting the implementation of the Pretoria peace agreement and harming the peace, security, and unity of the Tigrayan people. The TPLF leadership once again has proved its incapability, and so it has no moral ground to lead the people of Tigray by any measure.
The democratic voices that have been arguing relentlessly for reform, accountability, transparency, good governance, and genuine democracy but have been ignored and rejected by the TPLF leadership are now realising their long struggle for the people of Tigray to see the TPLF’s fault lines, which brought the disastrous outcomes in their lives.
The TPLF’s rigid and undemocratic political ideology, resistant to reform, and refusal to accept an all-inclusive council that unites Tigrayans and its backward understanding of the regional and international geopolitics are posing significant threats to Tigray’s security in the region, necessitating urgent reforms to prepare the strategic defence for what may come from the unknown threats to Tigray.
The people are waiting for the TPLF leaders to reconcile, resolve their differences, and work together with full hope, which will not happen. It is not their nature to listen to each other. As we have been seeing, they have wanted to rescue the party first before rescuing people, betraying their primary duty to the people. They have totally put the Pretoria peace agreement on hold, forgotten the IDPs, and the restoration of Tigray’s territorial integrity.
The TPLF leaders were bowing to the genocidaire Abiy Ahmed reconciliation, but they could not stand to look at each other and resolve their differences and make peace between them to show their unity. They have abdicated (i.e. their power, responsibility and accountability) to Abiy Ahmed, who committed the Tigray genocide. Abiy Ahmed is taking advantage of the TPLF’s irreconcilable quarrels, and he is conspiring to encourage the Gondar elites to reorganise in reclaiming Western Tigray.
The people of Tigray are suffering at the hands of the opportunistic, traitorous, and visionless TPLF leaders who want to cling onto power forever. They are destroying not only the harmonious unity of the people of Tigray but also betraying the Tigrayan people’s security, territorial integrity, and sovereignty of Tigray. As long as the TPLF power-hungry and corrupt individuals remain in power, Tigray may face extreme extraterritorial threats driven by the genocidal regimes of Eritrea and Ethiopia backed by internal and external destructive powers.
The TPLF splinter group led by Debretsion deftly strategised struggle for power to frame the TIRA’s President Getachew Reda and Vice-President General Tsadkan using the terms “dependent on PP (ፅግዕተኛ ፣ ምስሌኔ)” has shown their callous disregard for the common good but is designed to cause chaos and disunity of the public, hoping that the people of Tigray will support them.
Debretsion and his cahoots have demonstrated their strategic failures again in their campaign to undermine the TIRA, aiming to seize power. Well, their ill-thought-out and blinded blackmail and scapegoating strategy against TIRA will backfire. The people of Tigray may come out to protest against Debretsion’s and his cahoots’ treacherous acts to overthrow the interim government.
We all agree the interim government is weak and not functioning well, but we must support TIRA in strengthening it by establishing an all-inclusive council to oversee and scrutinise the work of TIRA. Tigray’s only viable connection with the international community is through the Pretoria peace agreement, as Tigray is out of the constitutional order of Ethiopia. Tigray can’t carry on without government. The people of Tigray must say no to the destructive campaign waged by Debretsion and his cahoots against TIRA .
We, the Tegaru, must remind ourselves that the incapable and inept TPLF leadership can’t and will not defend Tigray at this critical time. As we have learnt since the Pretoria peace agreement, the TPLF leadership is only focusing on power struggles and totally forgetting everything.
Tegaru unity is our strength, and we have to secure our people’s welfare and territorial integrity before anything else, which are the two most important elements we ought to do to ensure the Tigrayan race and identity to continue and the young generation to prosper, shielding Tigray from genocide by any means necessary.
To prevent the unknown calamities that may come to Tigray, the time of reckoning for actions is now to reject the visionless TPLF leadership once and for all. The people of Tigray should say enough is enough for the TPLF’s authoritarian rule so that they can breathe freedom, realise their liberty, and bring about a visionary and nationalist leadership to lead in the implementation of the Peoria peace agreement.
Conclusion
Debretsion, Alem, and Fetlework are the most dangerous individuals who threaten the very existence of Tigray. They have proved themselves unfit to lead Tigray due to their long record of corruption, strategic blunders, and unaccountability to the people of Tigray. They have betrayed the trust of the people, failed to prevent genocide, and inflicted irreversible damage to Tigray’s social fabric, cultural heritage, and economy. The TPLF leadership do not seem to feel they are accountable to the people of Tigray.They must step down immediately or be removed from public office if the Tigrayan race is to survive this genocidal war and continue to have Tigray’s generation a bright future.
Key Demands:
- Immediate resignation of the TPLF leadership.
- Legal prosecution for failure to prevent genocide.
- Formation of a transitional government led by reformist leaders.
- Implementation of institutional reforms to dismantle corruption and rebuild Tigray.
We can save Tigray from the self-destructive “Revolutionary Democracy” political ideology, corruption, and bad governance if we rebuild an independent justice system and mechanisms that enforce accountability and transparency. We must have a tendency of zero tolerance towards human rights violations in all spheres of governance.
Besides, it is time to be responsive to the demands of the people instead of using political blackmail, disinformation, misleading statements, and prohibiting the right to protest to hang on to power by degrading, suppressing, and denying the people’s basic rights and freedoms. Tigray needs strong and visionary leadership that is inclusive, transparent, and accountable for the people.
Political repression must end, as it has brought genocide into every household in Tigray. If we are unwilling to see the enemy within that is deeply involved in theft, corruption, illegal gold mining exploitations, and misappropriation of public assets, and if no radical change is made to the repressive political system, the entrenched corruption within the TPLF may lead to the complete collapse of Tigray and its people’s extinction.
Hence, this document presents many reasons why the TPLF leadership must step down from power, face accountability, and make way for a new visionary leadership that is committed to leading Tigray for self-determination, freedom, liberty, and economic development.
No leadership that presides over the death of 1 million people can claim the moral authority to rule for even one more day.
The TPLF leadership must go, and freedom, liberty, good governance, justice, and accountability must prevail in Tigray.