November 5, 2025
Mohamud A. Ahmed – Cagaweyne
Ethiopia’s recent ruptures in the north did not stay where they began. They have been repackaged, retold, and exported toward the east – not by happenstance but by design. What the country is witnessing now is less an organic escalation of local grievances than a calculated assault on perception. The Somali Region, long a fragile sanctuary of relative stability inside a fracturing federation, is now the target of an information campaign that seeks to turn rumor into revolt and memory into munition. Those who envy the region’s calm or fear its rising potential understand perfectly well that the most efficient way to harm a polity is not always to seize its land but to seize its story.
The instruments of this campaign are modern and precise. They are not tanks and convoys but narratives, avatars, and selective quotations. A distorted sentence broadcast without context becomes a match. A misread historical aside becomes a claim of ownership. The recent noise around Jigjiga, Dire Dawa, and the Prime Minister’s parliamentary remarks is not a cascade of honest mistakes. It is a choreography of provocation, rehearsed by actors who profit when citizens mistake anxiety for evidence. The arithmetic of their strategy is bleakly simple: amplify a misunderstanding, feed it to those predisposed to fear, and wait for civic institutions to stumble under the weight of manufactured outrage.
To understand how fragile this ecosystem of truth is, one must look closely at the most explosive components. The debate over Dire Dawa began as a legal and historical observation in Parliament, but it was quickly stripped of nuance and recast as a claim. The Prime Minister’s reference to the city’s administrative past was framed as a stealthy attempt to redraw maps. This reading is both inaccurate and politically convenient. Dire Dawa’s status is codified in law as a federal chartered city, an administrative solution designed to preserve equilibrium among competing identities. That legal fact was lost in the shrillness of social media and in the appetite for sensationalism. What was intended as an example of negotiated compromise became an accusation of erasure. The result was predictable: fear sprouted where explanation could have taken root.
In the same vein, recent social-media circulations by OMN and coordinated networks of pseudo-activistshave poured gasoline on this confusion. Short, selectively edited video clips of parliamentary remarks, deliberately mistranslated headlines, and commentaries laced with innuendo have been pushed in massive volumes to make the two historic nationalities – the Oromo and the Somali – collide emotionally and politically. Their goal is not dialogue but disruption. The playbook is painfully familiar: where north burned yesterday, east must burn tomorrow. Those manufacturing these narratives understand that a spark in the Somali Region would not remain local; it would ripple through all of southeastern Ethiopia, collapsing the one area that still symbolized national endurance.
Equally alarming is the way some media outlets and political entrepreneurs have weaponized regional anxiety. A purported claim that Jigjiga belongs to Oromia, amplified without evidence, was not an error of reporting so much as an act of sabotage. The originators of that claim knew the psychological fault lines that run through eastern Ethiopia. They knew which historical images would trigger grief and which rhetorical shortcuts would ignite rumor into revolt. In civil life, there are accidents, oversights, and honest debates. This was none of those things. It was propaganda dressed up as news and argument masquerading as inquiry. The purpose is not to seek justice but to destabilize.
This moment should therefore be read on two registers. On the surface, it is a quarrel over words, precedent, and municipal status. Beneath the surface, it is a test of civic immunity against manipulation. The Somali Region is primed to be more than collateral damage. It is a proving ground. If its institutions, its elders, and its political leaders allow themselves to be pulled into reflexive ethnic counters, the East will be made to mirror the chaos of the North. If instead it answers with calm, context, and constitutional clarity, it will stand as the firewall the nation so urgently needs.
We must also be candid about the role of elites. The tragedy in this crisis is not the craftiness of external spoilers but the occasional complicity of the educated and the powerful. When respected intellectuals, public scholars, and seasoned politicians echo falsehoods or hesitate while truths are being assaulted, their silence is not neutrality. It is an endorsement by omission. The corruption of a nation’s best minds is the most dangerous form of sabotage precisely because it carries the sheen of legitimacy. When elites trade long-term stability for short-term applause, they are handing the incendiary device to opportunists who would watch a region burn for the sake of a narrative.
At the heart of the manufactured controversy is a fragile fact: words spoken by national leaders can be either bridges or combustibles depending on how they are received. The Prime Minister’s remarks in Parliament – a reflective invocation of Dire Dawa’s complex administrative past and a plea for negotiated solutions elsewhere – were seized, cropped, and recirculated as evidence of intent. This is the subtlety of modern political warfare. The speaker may have meant to offer a precedent for peaceful compromise, yet an actor with a motive can make those words a pretext for grievance. Here, the benefit of the doubt is warranted: leaders speak in public to audiences who demand brevity and clarity. A careful reading of the full parliamentary record shows a statesman trying to point to mechanisms of settlement, not to claim ownership on behalf of one community. But the speed of distortion outruns the patience of corrective explanation.
Why, then, would anyone want the East to burn? The motives are not mysterious. The Somali Region sits at the confluence of strategic resources and geography. It contains vast hydrocarbon potential, critical corridors to the sea, and nascent infrastructure projects that promise both revenue and regional leverage. Those who gain from a weakened Ethiopia prefer a mosaic of crises to a single, united advancement. In the logic of external spoilers and internal spoilers alike, a fractured federation is easier to influence, negotiate with, and, in some cases, commodify. Chaos is therefore a currency in geopolitical markets where influence is bought with disunity. Turning the east into a theater of contestation weakens the country’s bargaining position in the Horn and amplifies the voices that profit from perpetual instability.
That is why the broader strategic goal of these campaigns is regime change through regional combustion. By pitting neighboring ethnicities against each other, the architects of disorder hope to isolate the federal center, portray it as incapable of governance, and invite either external intervention or internal implosion. Yet those in the Somali Region, in Oromia’s borderlands, and throughout the South-Eastern lowlands must see this design for what it is. A weakened state is no one’s victory. It is the collective loss of all its constituent peoples – Somali, Oromo, Afar, Sidama, and beyond. Fragmentation may promise local revenge, but it delivers only continental irrelevance.
These forces do not operate in isolation. State and non-state actors, diaspora influencers chasing clicks, foreign outlets eager to sell narratives, and domestic entrepreneurs of grievance form a hybrid ecosystem. Together, they manufacture consent for agitation. Their product is not policy but panic. Their currency is not argument but outrage. And their objective is always to harvest public reaction for private gain. Against such a network, normal political defenses are insufficient. What is required is a coordinated civic response that treats truth as a strategic asset and the institutions that defend it as frontline infrastructure.
So what does a defense look like? It begins with public clarity. Federal and regional institutions must publish facts, not counter-accusations. Legal texts and historical records should be made accessible and explained in public forums. The regional administration must move from a defensive posture to a proactive education, equipping citizens with the political literacy required to see a rumor for what it is. Elders, mosques, universities, and civil society organizations must form a civic shield that can correct falsehoods with dignity rather than inflame them with emotion. Journalism must reclaim responsibility. Reporters must learn to treat provocation as a subject to be interrogated, not a story to be amplified.
Leadership must also be judged by courage rather than echo. Those elected to protect a fragile peace cannot hide behind procedural niceties while mountainous lies change the climate of trust. Neutrality in the face of assault is not wisdom. It is surrender.
Conversely, righteous indignation that sacrifices institutions for spectacle is reckless. The region needs statesmen who can say the truth plainly while tending the wounds that fear opens. That combination of clarity and compassion is the region’s only inoculation against the contagion of disinformation.
Finally, the Somali Region must recognize its strategic role in the broader national story. To resist being burned is not merely to protect local interests. It is to defend the very idea that Ethiopia can resolve disputes without resorting to violence. The East can be a model, proving that federalism need not mean fragmentation and that identity need not be weaponized. If the Somali Region retains its composure and applies law, history, and civility as its armor, it will deny the profiteers of chaos their prize. In doing so, it will offer the entire federation a lesson in political maturity: the loudest temptation is not always true, and the most destructive campaign is often the one conducted in words.
The choice ahead is stark. The region can be baited into spectacle, surrendering its future for a moment of partisan victory. Or it can respond with the disciplined wisdom that built its relative stability in the first place. The cost of failure is simple: once a city is burned in the court of public opinion, rebuilding trust is far harder than rebuilding infrastructure. The gain of success is equally simple and far greater: preserving the east as a firewall for the federation, an example that sanity can prevail even when voices clamour for havoc.
In a time when political life is measured as much by the speed of amplification as by the truth of the claim, the East must choose endurance over excitement and evidence over emotion. Let it be the place where law outlasts rumor, where history is consulted rather than weaponized, and where leadership remembers that the highest service is to keep the flame of civility alive when others would set the grass alight. The nation will judge the region not by the ferocity of its response but by the wisdom of it. Let that judgment be one of courage and clarity.
Mohamud A. Ahmed – Cagaweyne is columnist, political analyst and researcher with Greenlight Advisors Group in the Somali Region of Ethiopia. He can be reached at : 251 900 644 648
Editor’s Note : Views in the article do not necessarily reflect the views of borkena.com
