Sidama Crisis Monitor

By Sidama Crisis Monitor

Since achieving regional statehood on 20 June 2020 through referendum, the newly formed Sidama Regional State has encountered unprecedented sociopolitical and economic challenges orchestrated by Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed of Ethiopia. Despite over five decades of struggle and sacrifices for social, political, and economic justice, the Sidama nation has never faced an oppression at the scale they have over the past four to five years under the so-called Prosperity Party led by dictator Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed who is increasingly desperate to hold on to his ever-diminishing power.

Soon after his ascension to power in 2018, Abiy Ahmed made his top priority to suppress Sidama people’s demand for recognition, self-governance, and political participation granted by the current Ethiopian constitution. He used various nefarious tactics at his disposal to frustrate the Sidama people and stifle their campaign for statehood. On 18 July 2019 (more famously known as “11/11/11”) alone, over 153 innocent Sidama nationals were murdered in broad daylight with hundreds more severely injured by security forces who received their marching orders directly from Ably Ahmed. Despite this and other similar extrajudicial killings and many twists and turns along the journey, the Sidama nation ultimately prevailed – achieving the long-awaited quest for regional statehood on 20 June 2020, albeit after paying a heavy price in the form of its children’s blood.

Since then, the Prime Minister has vowed to exact revenge on the Sidama nation for securing regional statehood by defying his repeated warnings and intimidation tactics. First, Abiy Ahmed worked relentlessly to weaken the unity among the Sidama people. To ensure this, Abiy Ahmed directly appointed new leaders of the Sidama Regional State. As clearly stated in both the federal and regional constitutions, what the Prime Minister has done by appointing his loyalist cadres as leaders of the new Sidama state is a blatant political interference in regional affairs. He deliberately hand-picked corrupt and incompetent cadres as administrators of the new Sidama Regional State. Those cadres are rejected by 99.9% of the Sidama people for being not only the least capable to govern the new state but also for conspiring with the now defunct South Ethiopia Peoples Democratic Movement (SEPDM) to stifle the people’s campaign for statehood. Despite near unanimous rejection by the people, the dictator Prime Minister has kept his die-hard loyalist cadres in power, while the Sidama Regional State remained a failed regional state to date.   

Secondly, Prime Miniter Abiy Ahmed singled out the Sidama Liberation Movement (SLM) – one of the prominent ethno-nationalist political parties in Ethiopia that played a key role in transforming the country from Marxist-Leninist military dictatorship into a multi-national federation – as the main rival and existential threat to his widely unpopular prosperity party in the south. Abiy Ahmed, along with his loyalist cadres that he personally appointed to govern the new Sidama Regional State, participated in a criminal conspiracy with the leadership of SLM to suspend their political program and form a merger with his newly created prosperity party. Many of the SLM governing elite abused and misused their positions to amass vast personal fortunes at the expense of dissolving SLM without the consent of the party’s general assembly and its broader supporters. Dukalle Lamisso (ex-chairman of SLM party), Desta Ledamo (president of the new Sidama Regional State), and Alemayehu Timotwos (head of the Sidama state security office) had profited from corruption schemes involving SLM’s illegal merger with Abiy Ahmed’s prosperity party.

In particular, Dukalle Lamisso is rewarded for his treasonous action with a huge parcel of land on which he currently operates a highly-sophisticated large-scale dairy farm that supplies milk to over two-thirds of the cafeterias and restaurants in Hawassa City.

It should be noted here that the Prime Minster who is also the chairman of his Prosperity Party has never shied from expressing his utter disgust for the current Ethiopian constitution – which for the first time gives proper recognition to multi-cultural federalism – and his desire to dismantle it.

Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed has repeatedly mentioned that his ultimate goal is to replace the current constitution with a new one that promotes unitarist Ethiopian nationalism. It is a well-known fact that supporters of ethno-nationalism including the SLM are fiercely against the idea of a unitarist Pan-Ethiopian nationalism. As such, there is no common ground between the SLM and Abiy Ahmed’s Prosperity Party that could remotely justify the merger of the two parties as they are clearly on the opposite end of the political spectrum when it comes to the question of how the Ethiopian state needs to be constructed. The real reason behind the merger of SLM with Prosperity Party is, therefore, to ensure Abiy Ahmed’s complete control over the entire Sidama nation.    

Even after dismantling SLM, Abiy Ahmed has not stopped there. He keeps a close eye on the Sidama nation. Whenever a new political party emerges bearing a name tag that says Sidama, Abiy Ahmed suffocates them out of the political picture. A case in point is the Sidama Federalist Party (SFP) whose leaders and their supporters alike face mass arrests including constant death threats, forcing the part’s founding chairman to flee the country.  

Ably Ahmed is also hell-bent to instigate conflict between the Sidama nation and the Oromos, two nations that have a long history of alliance in their struggle against the oppressive unitarist Ethiopian regimes. To create tension between the two neighbouring nations, Abiy Ahmed uses the naïve Oromia Regional State president Shemelis Abdissa who is believed to be the de facto ruler of the Sidama Regional State as well. The robot Desta Ledamo who is appointed by Abiy Ahmed as a rubber-stamp president of the new Sidama state also publicly acknowledged Shemelis Abdissa as his boss. Another Prosperity Party cadre that Abiy Ahmed uses to humiliate the Sidama nation is the current mayor of the city of Addis Ababa (Ms. Adanech Abbebbe). To mention just one example of Ms. Adanech Abbebbe’s crime against the Sidama nation, the mayor is said to have given orders for the removal of about 150 to 200 homeless Sidama nationals from the streets of Addis Ababa. According to eyewitness accounts and other sources, all 150 to 200 homeless individuals have been sent back to the Sidama Regional State for an unknown reason. Sidama Crisis Monitor is gathering more information on this sensitive issue and will provide a follow-up update in the future.   

The corrupt and incompetent Prosperity Party cadres, especially Shimelis Abdissa and Desta Ledamo, have planned and executed to confiscate fertile agricultural land worth tens of thousands of hectares from Sidama peasants and sold it to the highest bidders including foreigners by the name of investment. It is worth mentioning here that in 2023 a Montreal Canada resident called Ms. Winta Mehari Tekeste who falsely claimed to be a medical doctor was given a huge parcel of land in the suburb of Hawassa City by Desta Ledamo. Ms. Tekeste’s claimed investment was to build a $250 million factory that assembles medical equipment in Ethiopia. Investigations conducted since then by various media outlets and concerned citizens in both Canada and elsewhere confirmed that Ms. Winta Mehari Teskete has not attended any accredited medical school nor is she a medical professional. According to those investigations, Ms. Teskete at the time was employed by a small company in Canada that pays a tiny minimum wage that is barely enough to cover the cost of living. Nonetheless, Desta Ledam and Hawassa City administration officials evicted many Sidama peasants from the land they have owned for generations to make way for Ms. Tekeste’s yet-to-be built medical facility.

Desta Ledamo and other corrupt Prosperity Party cadres need to be reminded that evicting hundred (if not thousands) of Sidama peasants from their ancestral land using investment as pretext is a crime. People in this world are watching closely. What is happening in the Sidama Regional State and in Ethiopia is unbearable. When the time comes, people will act and those participated in this crime will pay a huge price for it.

Both Shemelis Abdissa and Desta Ledamo also participated in a corruption scheme involving transfer of government owned hotels built near lake Hawassa and the surrounding area to Shemelis Abdissa’s brother who has become an overnight multi-billionaire in Ethiopia. According to insider sources, the president of Oromia region Mr. Shemelis Abdissa and corrupt Sidama cadres are involved in several mega projects. One of those projects is the ongoing construction of an expansive beachfront hotel plus resort nearby lake Hawassa, which is being built in collaboration with corrupt businessmen from the Oromia region. The hotel plus resort is said to be built in such a way that water from lake Hawassa flows constantly into a designated artificial beachfront area by the hotel. Also, the entire sewer system of the hotel plus resort as well as other nearby hotels owned by Shemelis Abdissa’s brother and other corrupt businessmen feed all their liquid and solid wastes into the lake. This is dangerously short-sighted at best and criminal conspiracy at worst. The lake has already been exposed to floodwater from the surrounding area. It is being filled with sediments and gradually drying up. It is only the matter of time before it eventually dries up completely, destroying all the aquatic life that depends on the lake’s ecosystem. Shemelis Abdissa and Desta Ledamo, including other corrupt Abiy Ahmed cadres should be held responsible for committing not only social, economic, and political crimes, but also environmental crime to one of the iconic rift valley lakes in Ethiopia: that is, for destroying lake Hawassa.