Ethiopian federalism after Tigray — what survives, what needs rebuilding

<p>The 1995 Ethiopian constitution organised the federation along ethno-linguistic lines: nine regional states and two chartered cities, each region nominally dominated by one or more &#x27;nations, nationalities, and peoples,&#x27; each with a constitutional right to secession under Article 39. For most of the EPRDF&#x27;s 27 years in power, that architecture papered over a more centralised reality. The 2020-2022 Tigray war ripped the paper.</p> <p>The casualty figures — Ghent University&#x27;s 2023 estimate of 380,000 to 600,000 excess deaths from violence, famine, and lack of medical access — are an accounting that Ethiopian historians will be working through for a generation. What concerns me here is the institutional question: after the November 2022 Pretoria Agreement and the subsequent Amhara conflict and the unresolved Oromo insurgency, what part of the federal architecture still works?</p> <p>Three answers, none of them clean. First, the House of Federation, the upper chamber designed to adjudicate constitutional disputes between regions and the federal centre, has effectively collapsed as an arbiter. Its rulings on the Tigray election dispute in 2020 (cancelling regional elections) and on the Western Tigray administrative status have been treated as political instruments by every party, not as constitutional law. Rebuilding the House as a credible institution requires either fundamental reform of its appointment process or a constitutional convention. Neither is on the agenda.</p> <p>Second, the regional state institutions themselves have proved more resilient than the federal centre. Tigray&#x27;s regional administration, despite war damage, retained administrative continuity. Oromia&#x27;s regional state has continued to operate even where OLA insurgency controls rural districts. Amhara regional structures fragmented under Fano pressure but did not vanish. Federalism, in other words, survives — but as a set of regional capacities, not as a coherent federation.</p> <p>Third, the Article 39 secession clause is now a dead letter. Nobody, in any region, wants to test it after Tigray. The constitutional right exists; the political cost of invoking it has become prohibitive. That is functionally important: secessionist claims, which were always more rhetorical than operational, have less political purchase than they did in 2018.</p> <p>What does a usable federal future look like? Most credible Ethiopian constitutional scholars — Adem Kassie Abebe, Tsegaye Regassa — argue that the next constitution will need to keep ethno-linguistic recognition but unbundle it from territorial sovereignty. That&#x27;s the South African move: cultural and linguistic rights protected nationally, with provinces drawn on functional rather than ethnic lines. Whether the political constituencies for such a reform can be assembled is the open question of the next five years.</p>