Collaborating with cruelty: The Influencers Cashing in Ethiopian's blood money.
There’s a new pattern emerging in Ethiopia that needs to be called out loudly and clearly. Every few weeks, a smiling social media “influencer” lands in Addis Ababa, camera rolling, voice full of wonder, singing praises about “Ethiopia’s transformation.” Pretty vlogs. Aesthetic shots. Glowing commentary about development and progress.
But here’s what they’re NOT showing you.
They’re not showing you the parents, actual mothers and fathers, who have taken their own lives because they could not bear watching their children go hungry. Not a metaphor. Not a statistic. Real human beings, broken by a cost of living so catastrophic that death felt more merciful than watching your child starve. They’re not showing you the Amhara region, where the regime has unleashed a war on its OWN citizens. Tens of thousands killed. Millions cut off from hospitals, clinics, any form of healthcare. Tens of millions of children sitting at home because their schools no longer exist in any meaningful way. A generation being buried educationally, physically, spiritually.
This is not a political disagreement. This is documented, ongoing atrocity.
And into this reality walk these influencers paid, by all accounts, extraordinarily well, to film the freshly painted boulevards of Addis Ababa and tell the world that Ethiopia is “thriving.”
Let me ask the uncomfortable question nobody is asking them directly:
Do you know where that money came from?
Because a regime that has lost all genuine public support doesn’t just accidentally find hundreds of thousands of dollars to fly in foreign content creators. That money has a source. And that source is a government squeezing resources from a population already on its knees, redirecting funds that could feed children, reopen hospitals, rebuild schools, and handing it to people with ring lights and good Wi-Fi so they can manufacture legitimacy it cannot earn honestly.
That is not sponsorship. That is blood money. You are not a travel creator having an adventure. You are a prop in a propaganda campaign. You are the smiling face placed in front of a curtain that hides mass suffering. Every “wow, this country is incredible!” you post is a brick in the wall the regime builds between the world’s attention and the people it is destroying.
The cruelest part? The influencers will leave. They’ll board their flights, post their final reels, collect their payments, and go home to their comfortable lives. The Ethiopians they helped whitewash will still be there. Still hungry. Still grieving. Still dying.
History has a long memory.
Every journalist, academic, and ordinary person who smiled for authoritarian regimes while the bodies piled up history remembers them. Not as adventurers. Not as entrepreneurs. As collaborators.
This is that moment. And you are making a choice.
To every influencer being courted by this regime or already on its payroll: the suffering of Ethiopians is not your content opportunity. Their pain is not your aesthetic. And your reach does not make you powerful it makes you responsible.
Correct it. Or own what you are.
@IShowSpeedHQ@dylanpage910
@flippedgeo@JemalCountess Huh, another revelation of ignorance. Do your assignment before you comment. @JemalCountess is a respected soul related to Amhara first in humanity, then by blood and religion. When they tell you something, give it some thoughts.
The Audacity of Accusation: You call Amharas traitors?
The same people whose blood built every border you now govern. Whose emperors, soldiers, and farmers held this land together when empires far mightier than yours crumbled.
Let history speak plainly: your own political manifestos, written in your own hands, described Ethiopia as a colonial empire to be dismantled. Your founding ideology was not Ethiopian unity. It was secession. Deconstruction. Exit. Yet today, drunk on power in an ethnically partitioned state you architected, you wrap yourselves in the Ethiopian flag and call others traitors?
Amharas who rose up to defend their families, their land, and their dignity are not traitors. They are the continuation of a tradition your leaders spent decades trying to erase. You cannot rewrite history to flatter the present. The Amhara’s role in founding, defending, and sustaining Ethiopia is not mythology it is a documented, lived, and undeniable fact.
Power is temporary. The record is permanent.
When Amharas rise, they are not betraying Ethiopia. They are being Ethiopia just as they always have been. Your indignation fools no one who remembers what you wrote before the throne was yours.
History does not negotiate with convenience.
#Amhara
Oh, you really mean it? Lers's talk then:
First of all I neither wrote what I wrote for you nor for the regime that pays your talking points, funds your accounts, and tells you which posts to flood with whataboutism and deflection. I wrote it for the Amhara mother who has no grave marker yet. I wrote it for the child sitting at home for the third year in a row because his school was turned into a military installation or totally destroyed. I wrote it for the physician who climbed into an ambulance to help his patients but never came back home. I wrote it for the journalist rotting in a cell right now whose only crime was speaking the truth.
I wrote it for them. Not you. But since you’re here, let’s talk.
You want to frame this as a “deliberate attempt to deny progress.” Progress. That is the word you are using. In a country where soldiers burn children’s desks for firewood. In a country where drones hunt ambulances and bomb farmers in the fields. In a country where 29 million people are starving while 1.3 trillion birr gets spent making Addis Ababa photogenic enough for influencer content.
Shall I continue......?
In a country where South Sudanese militias have walked into it's territory and the government charged with defending that soil is too busy managing its international image to notice. You want to call that progress and call ME the problem.
The audacity is almost impressive.
Here is what I find most revealing about you, not your arguments, because you don’t have any, but your instinct. When confronted with documented atrocity, your first move is not to mourn the dead. It is not to acknowledge the suffering. It is not even to attempt to explain it. Your first move is to attack the person describing it. That tells me everything about what you actually are and who you actually serve.
You have zero, I mean zero, language for the mothers who chose death over watching their children starve. You have no tears for them. No acknowledgment. No “yes that is happening AND here is why.” Nothing. Because the moment you acknowledge them, the facade your regime spent 1.3 trillion birr constructing begins to crack and you cannot afford that crack. So instead you come here. To the comments. To the mentions. Calling truth-tellers “biased.” Calling grief “propaganda.” Calling documentation “a deliberate narrative.” As if the burned desks photographed themselves. As if the occupied hospitals filed their own reports. As if the 29 million hungry people invented their own hunger to embarrass your government.
Let me tell you something about the people you are defending.
They are not embarrassed by the suffering they caused. They are embarrassed that you can see it. There is a profound moral difference between those two things and it is the difference between a government that makes mistakes and a regime that commits atrocities and then pays people, in USD and in talking points, to make sure the atrocities stay invisible.
You are the invisibility machine. That is your function. That is what you are doing right now in this comment section.
And I want every person reading this post to see it clearly for exactly what it is.
Not debate. Not pushback. Not alternative perspective. Cover.
You are providing cover for people who are killing Ethiopians and calling it governance.
History will not be kind to you. Not because you were on the wrong side of a political argument. But because when millions of your own people were suffering and dying and screaming for the world to look you showed up in the comments to make sure the world kept scrolling. That is who you chose to be. Own it.
#Ethiopia #AmharaGenocide
Zegeye Asfaw: Architect of Amhara Dispossession
The canonization of Zegeye Asfaw upon his passing is not innocent remembrance. It is a political confession. When the communist influenced student movement toppled Haile Selassie, they branded his government an “Amhara regime”, not as analysis, but as a declaration of ethnic targeting. Zegeye Asfaw and his circle of Oromo ideologues were the architects of this framing, clothing their ethnic agenda in Marxist language and using the grievances of the poor as cover for deliberate communal destruction.
The land reform that followed was sold to the world as peasant liberation. It was Amhara dispossession by design. The seizure of Amhara land, homes, and businesses was too systematic, too consistent, and too targeted to be coincidental. The peasant was the excuse. The Amhara was the target. These men steered policy through the Derg using ideological organizations they controlled, pursuing from within what colonial powers, decisively defeated by Amhara led Ethiopia at Adwa, had failed to achieve by force of arms.
The project was never finished, it is still continuing
The Oromo led government of today, which has massacred Amhara civilians, deployed drones against Amhara resisters, and overseen ethnic cleansing on a genocidal scale, is not a departure from Zegeye Asfaw’s vision. It is its brutal completion. The economic destruction engineered during the Derg era created the vulnerability. Ethnic federalism deepened the isolation. The current administration has moved to the final and most savage stage: physical elimination.
The ideological thread running from Zegeye Asfaw to today’s killing fields is straight, deliberate, and unbroken. Those rushing to celebrate him are the same forces overseeing Amhara slaughter today. Their praise is their confession. Their canonization of him is their open endorsement of everything that was done before and everything being carried out right now.
The arc from his ideology to today’s bloodshed must be named, documented, and never forgotten.
#AmharaGenocide
Numbers Are Not Edible
Every Sunday I call my family back home. But these days the calls have become heavy. I neither feel happy nor satisfied after the calls because the voices on the other end usually carry a weight that no phone line should have to bear.
Today, I asked my sis to just tell me plainly how is life. She went quiet for a moment and said: “ Every time you ask me how is life going, I keep thinking how I would have survived without you? How would I care for this sick child? Honestly… I think I would have taken my own life by now than seeing her starve to death.” She wasn’t being dramatic. She was being precise.
I asked about her neighbors, the ones no one abroad calls or have no monthly lifeline arriving in their accounts. Her answer came without hesitation: “They are really suffering. Skipping meals and asking for old clothes which are not used by the fortunate is the new way to keep their kids warm. That’s just life now.”
This is Ethiopia today. Not the Ethiopia you’ll hear about in regime PR videos but the one where real people wake up each morning & calculate whether they can afford to eat.
And yet, every time the people dare to speak about the unbearable cost of living, Abiy Ahmed does not respond with a plan. He responds with a performance. He reaches for statistics. He summons IMF assessments & GDP trajectories as if these are loaves of bread that can be broken and shared at a table. As if a favorable growth projection has ever silenced a hungry child at midnight.
He recently announced, with apparent pride, that aid recipients had dropped from 23 million to 3 million. A stunning turnaround, except that not a single UN agency, not the WFP, not OCHA, not UNICEF, has been able to corroborate this claim. It is obvious that he did not engineer a recovery. He simply changed the number.
The people behind those numbers, their empty plates, their hollow-eyed children, their skipped meals did not change. Only the official count did. And while he performs recovery for international audiences, teachers and students across Ethiopia are lining up for school feeding programs just to get through the day. The people responsible for shaping the next generation cannot feed themselves without institutional charity.
No GDP figure, no matter how impressive, means anything in a country where teachers eat from children’s food programs.
Then came the detail that rips away every remaining pretense. Audit findings revealed in Parliament by the Auditor General exposed financial crimes totaling 98 billion birr, a vast network of theft reportedly implicating high-level government officials & public figures. 98 billion birr looted by the connected and the celebrated while ordinary Ethiopians skip meals, while teachers survive on children’s rations, while diaspora members like me wire money home every month just to keep our families alive. Albeit the architects of the country's suffering awash with luxury and unaccounted wealth.
From the mythical wheat self-sufficiency to the technological renaissance he endlessly boasts about my people received nothing. Not a full plate. Not a fair wage. Not even the dignity of being told the truth.
One of the most devastating indictment of Abiy Ahmed’s leadership besides his genocidal wars and silencing of dissent is his staggering, seemingly bottomless cruelty not to see ordinary Ethiopians as fully human. He has built an Ethiopia of pure imagination, fertile, booming, admired on the world stage and he has moved inside it permanently, while the people inhabit an entirely different country.
Numbers are not edible. IMF reports do not fill a pot. GDP does not clothe a child nor does it sit across the table from a sick child who needs medicine. A leader who answers starvation with statistics has not merely failed at economics. He has failed at the most basic obligation of anyone who holds power over other human lives.....the obligation to see them.
@HAKIMM8900 I ain't surprised that this post touched the nerve of a modern day ethnic cleanser. We know what is happening in Harar now and no surprise you want to glorify Gragn.
Rewriting Ethiopia
Last week, the Salafist preacher Yasin Nuru stood at a pulpit and, in the course of attacking Teddy Afro’s music, made two comparisons that cannot go unanswered.
He compared Ahmad ibn Ibrahim al-Ghazi (ግራኝ)to Emperor Menelik II and he compared the Sof Omar cave to the rock-hewn churches of Lalibela.
I believe this is not a difference of opinion but it is a deliberate historical falsification in service of a veiled religious/political agenda, and deserves a direct rebuttal.
On Gragn vs. Menelik:
Menelik II led a united Ethiopian army , Amhara, Oromo, Tigrinya, Somali, all of them, to victory at Adwa in 1896 against Italian colonialism. He is the only African leader in history to have defeated a European colonial army in open battle during the Scramble for Africa. He built a nation. He preserved Ethiopian sovereignty for every Ethiopian, regardless of faith.
Ahmad Gragn did the opposite. He was armed with Ottoman cannons, backed by Ottoman troops, and sent to destroy Ethiopian Christian civilization on behalf of Istanbul’s imperial ambitions. He burned churches. He destroyed manuscripts that can never be recovered. He killed and forcibly converted hundreds of thousands of Ethiopians. He was not a resistance fighter. He was a foreign-backed jihadist who served a foreign empire.
Placing these two men in the same category is not historical revisionism. It is an insult — to Ethiopia, and to every Ethiopian Muslim whose ancestors also suffered under conquest.
On Lalibela vs. Sof Omar:
The churches of Lalibela were carved downward into living volcanic rock in the 12th century by human hands, human vision, and human faith. Eleven monolithic churches. A layout designed to mirror Jerusalem. Bete Giyorgis, Saint George’s church, cut perfectly into the earth with a cruciform roof flush with the surrounding plateau. It is one of the supreme architectural achievements of the medieval world. A UNESCO World Heritage Site. A civilization’s spiritual identity carved permanently into the earth.
Sof Omar is a cave. A beautiful cave, shaped by a river over millions of years. It holds local religious meaning and that meaning is legitimate. But it was not built. It was not designed. It was not conceived. No human hand carved it.
To compare them as equivalent achievements is not to honor Islam. It is to dishonor human genius and to dishonor the Ethiopian civilization that produced Lalibela.
Why does this matter?
Because this is a pattern. Rehabilitate Gragn. Flatten Lalibela. Erase the Judeo-Christian roots of Ethiopian statehood. Deploy victimhood language to silence critics. Use the mosque and now opposition to a beloved musician as a recruitment tool for civilizational revisionism.
Ethiopia’s Christian civilization is not a myth to be deconstructed. The Solomonic dynasty is not a fairy tale. Lalibela is not equivalent to a cave. And Menelik II is not comparable to the man who nearly destroyed Ethiopia on behalf of the Ottoman Empire.
Sad to say the enemy doesn’t need to defeat us because we are doing it for them. We were expected to be much more better than this. Unity is not optional it is the core of our survival. Until we understand that, we will keep taking three steps back for every one step forward🥹