Ethiopia Stands Accused of Opening Its Skies to Sudan's Killer Militia

How many more Sudanese mothers must bury their children before Addis Ababa, Pretoria, and the African Union stop treating this war as someone else's problem?

This week Ethiopia expelled six Sudanese diplomats. The accusation behind the expulsions is that Ethiopian territory is being used to launch drone strikes by the Rapid Support Forces, the paramilitary group that has spent more than two years turning Sudan into a graveyard. Drones do not fall from the sky on their own. They are launched from somewhere, flown by someone, and fuelled by networks of money and weapons that somebody chose to look away from. If the allegation holds, it means a neighbouring government has allowed a militia accused of ethnic massacres in Darfur to use its territory as a launchpad against civilians across the border. Sudanese families already know what those drones do. They wake up to the sound of them over their homes.

The Sudanese war has been documented in brutal detail. Since April 2023, the RSF and the Sudanese Armed Forces have fought for control of Khartoum, Darfur, and Kordofan, and civilians have borne the cost. The United Nations has warned of mass atrocities, sexual violence on an industrial scale, and famine conditions in several regions. When the RSF overran El Fasher in late 2025, reports of mass killings and ethnically targeted violence emerged within days. Human rights monitors and UN experts have described the scale of displacement as among the largest in the world, with millions of people driven from their homes. Those are not abstractions. They are children who have not seen a school in years, women who walked for days to reach a border that may not open, and old men who died in the dust because no clinic was left standing.

Now add drones. Long-range strike capability is not something a militia builds in a garage. It requires supply chains, maintenance, targeting intelligence, and a safe place to operate. UN panels of experts on Sudan and Libya have repeatedly documented the flow of weapons and foreign-made systems into the conflict and have named external backers. The UAE has denied supplying the RSF, but the questions raised by those investigations have never been fully answered. We should ask them loudly. Who is paying for these drones? Who is servicing them? Which airstrips and which governments are making it possible? Every African government that tolerates this traffic is making a choice, and the people who pay for that choice are not the diplomats in the capitals. They are the farmers in Darfur and the nurses in Omdurman.

South Africa's municipal elections are a different story, but it is the same story underneath. This week millions of South Africans are voting for the councils that run their water, their roads, their electricity, and their basic dignity. The African National Congress, which has governed the country since 1994, lost its national majority in the 2024 general election, falling to around 40 percent of the vote. That was not a fluke. It was a verdict. Voters who once queued for hours to celebrate liberation are now queuing for water in Johannesburg, sitting in the dark because municipal grids have collapsed, and watching their councils fail to deliver the services they pay for. Liberation was never meant to be a permanent excuse for incompetence.

We must be honest about the link between the two stories. A government that cannot keep the taps running in its own cities has little credibility lecturing others about human rights, and a continent that treats the ballot box as a formality will keep producing leaders who answer to foreign patrons instead of their own citizens. Democracy in Africa is not measured only by whether people vote. It is measured by whether the people they elect can be removed when they fail, whether courts can hold them accountable, and whether the state can protect people from armed groups, whether they wear army uniforms or not.

So what must happen? Start with the African Union. The Peace and Security Council should convene an urgent session on the cross-border drone allegations and demand transparency from every government implicated. The United Nations Security Council should enforce the Darfur arms embargo as written, not as a suggestion, and should sanction any individual or company financing the flow of drones and munitions into Sudan. IGAD, the regional body Ethiopia belongs to, should set up a joint monitoring mechanism at the Sudan-Ethiopia border with independent observers, not diplomatic press releases.

Africa also has working models. Botswana has shown for decades that diamond wealth can be managed through transparent institutions, sound fiscal rules, and a professional civil service, not patronage. Mauritius has built one of the continent's most resilient economies on rule of law, property rights, and open competition. Senegal, in 2024, handed power through a peaceful democratic transition after a contested election, proving that citizens can use the ballot to replace leaders who overreach. These are the building blocks: independent courts, auditable public spending, competitive markets, and institutions that answer to voters rather than to strongmen.

For South Africa, the path is clear even if it is not easy. Municipalities need professional managers recruited on merit, not on political loyalty. The Auditor-General's findings must lead to consequences, not shelves. Metros should be allowed to bring in competent private operators under transparent, performance-based contracts for water and electricity, with citizens able to see and challenge the terms. Ward councillors should answer directly to the residents who elect them, not just to party lists drawn up in Luthuli House.

And citizens must demand more than slogans. Ask every candidate what they will do about the water in your street, the audit reports gathering dust, and the contracts that go to cousins. Ask the government in Addis Ababa what it knows about those drones and what it intends to do about them. Ask the African Union why it has so little to show for the wars at its own doorstep. Ask your own representatives whether they will support sanctions against anyone financing the killing in Sudan.

We are not spectators. The Sudanese woman sheltering from a drone strike and the South African pensioner carrying water home in buckets are both victims of the same failure: leaders who treat power as a private asset and borders as a bargaining chip. We have the right to demand better, and we have the evidence that better is possible. The only question left is whether we will use it.

Based on reporting by FRANCE24