Yes, “Fano is Coming!” But what happens when it arrives?

The chants for Fano at the Great Ethiopian Run, I suspect, sent a nice shock wave through the smug ranks of the Abiy government—it certainly did with the creative typists and cheerleaders for Abiy online (and gosh, that was fun). But of course, Fano hasn’t arrived yet. I’ve spent more than one evening talking to friends and allies or sharing a meal, all of us giddy with the expectation that okay, this is the breakthrough week, this is when the vehicles roll into the capital to the cheers of a grateful liberated crowd.

And then there’s a setback. And Fano units regroup. And then government forces do something for kicks or out of spite and shell the Gishen Debre-Kerbe Mariam Church, “where there is located no single combatant of Fano.” Because hey, from their perspective, it looks like you’re doing something, plus you get to destroy another priceless heritage site of Ethiopian history as well as a precious site of Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity. Two birds—many stones scattered.

And so, we wait. We need patience just as we all need to trust in the fortitude of Fano volunteers. But I have confidence that Fano will eventually prevail because what some may not understand yet or refuse to see is very simple:

This is not a war of ethnicities, it’s a war of ideas.

As I write this, there’s a clip of Abiy Ahmed online (I presume the translation is correct) hoping to sell his great scheme to plunge Ethiopia into decades of ridiculous debt. “There are some that say we are adding more debt to the country's already high debt. But borrowing from the IMF and the World Bank is like borrowing from one's mother.”

Well, I don’t know about your mother, but I’ve never known any who charge interest, and I think it’s both comical and pathetic that Abiy thinks this will fly when there have been so many African “children” crushed under Western debt who could have told him about big bad “helicopter Mom” and how fast the rules can change on her watch and how that interest piles up.

But Abiy’s idea is to clearly wage ethnic wars while distracting folks with shiny glass and concrete boxes in urban settings and the occasional planting of a few trees. As much as his party is named “Prosperity” and his style is evangelical, at the heart of it is a Soviet-style approach to economics and development. Look! Projects! Stuff! If we surround our new outrageously expensive Disneyland Palace with stuff, maybe no one will notice they’ll be stuck with the tab for Abiyland decades.

Only Abiy is going to lose. Big time. Because you can sucker folks for a while with shiny stuff, but the bill will come due, and if it only benefits an urbanized middle class, especially a middle and upper class of a specific ethnic group, you have a real problem. No one will buy “Green Legacy” BS while thugs deny Amhara farmers seeds and fertilizer—and then try to kill the farmers on their next pass. No one will buy your BS about food security while you post tourism commercial footage of wheat fields while Tigrayans are starving (which they really are this time, unlike the debunked myth of Tigray famine during the TPLF war).

And it’s not a good sign when security officers come around to beat up staff of the African Development Bank, which is apparently minding projects worth $308 million. It’ll be a hell of a show when these goons do that to representatives of the IMF or World Bank in Addis, and you know that’s coming.

Vacuous spectacle. “Development” that depends on loaned funds. Intimidation. There’s not much deep thought going on here.

So, what is on the other side? What ideas will Fano bring when it finally wins and takes over?

For more read in Jeff Propulsion site:

Yes, “Fano is Coming!” But what happens when it arrives? (substack.com)

https://jeffpropulsion.substack.com?utm_source=navbar&utm_medium=web