Abiy's Government and the TPLF Are Dragging Tigray Back Toward War

Ask a mother in Mekelle what war sounds like, and she will not describe the shelling first. She will describe the queue. The line outside a bank that has no cash. The phone in her hand that is the only thing still connecting her family to its own money. In Ethiopia's Tigray region, that is what the return of fighting looks like: ordinary people counting what they have left while armed men decide whether they will have anything at all.

On Wednesday, fighting broke out between Ethiopian federal troops and the Tigray People's Liberation Front, the party that has controlled the region. A resident of Mekelle, the regional capital, told the BBC that the streets were calm for now, but that people were badly frightened. Many banks have been short of cash for months. Families are relying on mobile banking, and they fear even that lifeline could be switched off. Ethiopia's government says the TPLF has launched an all-out offensive, including into the neighbouring regions of Afar and Amhara. The TPLF says it is defending itself. Both claims are being made while the people who will pay for them have no bread money.

We have heard this before, and we must stop pretending we have not. The Tigray war that ended with the Pretoria Cessation of Hostilities Agreement in November 2022, signed under African Union auspices, killed hundreds of thousands of people by most credible estimates. Civilians were starved through blockades of food, fuel, and medicine. Forces from Eritrea fought inside Ethiopian territory alongside federal troops, and the joint Ethiopian Human Rights Commission and UN report documented massacres, sexual violence on a systematic scale, and the deliberate use of hunger as a weapon. Those findings were not propaganda from the West. They came from Ethiopia's own investigators and from the UN's human rights office. Yet the accountability that should have followed has been thin, and the people of Tigray have watched their suffering become a bargaining chip.

Let us be precise, because precision is what separates a demand for justice from a shouting match. Ethiopia's federal government under Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed bears heavy responsibility for keeping Tigray in a state of siege, for using its control of the banking and telecommunications system as leverage, and for failing to deliver the political settlement that Pretoria promised. Its prime minister's adviser is now pointing fingers at the TPLF, but Addis Ababa has spent years making a unified Tigray impossible: splitting its leadership, cutting services, and treating an entire population as a suspect. The TPLF, for its part, carries its own record. Its leaders launched the 2020 attack that set this war in motion, its fighters committed atrocities, and its refusal to accept a legitimate transitional process has cost its own people dearly. Pointing at each other is not an analysis. It is how two armed camps keep their grip while the public pays the bill.

Consider the mechanics of what is happening. A region of several million people depends on cash, salaries, and public services that flow through institutions in Addis Ababa. When those flows are choked, civil servants go unpaid, shopkeepers cannot restock, and hospitals run short of supplies. Mobile money becomes the last thread, and if the thread is cut, a population is pushed to the edge of survival in days. A government that controls the financial system and then allows that system to decay has chosen a weapon, whatever its spokesmen call it. Economic strangulation has never been a neutral tool of statecraft. It is a tool that starves the weakest first.

This is also not a story that stays inside Ethiopia's borders. Fighting that reaches Afar and Amhara threatens the wider Horn, a region already strained by Sudan's catastrophic war, Somalia's fragile state, and Eritrea's closed authoritarianism. Every regional power with ambitions in the Horn, from the Gulf states pouring money into ports and arms to the external patrons who prefer a weak Ethiopia they can bargain with, has an interest in the chaos. The real question for African governments is whether they will let outside powers shape the Horn's future, or whether they will insist on African solutions built on African law. Who benefits from a divided Ethiopia? Not the mother in Mekelle. Not the herder in Afar. Not the student in Gondar. They bleed while the men with the guns and the contracts negotiate their fate.

There is a better path, and Africa has already shown us what it looks like. Botswana built decades of stability on a foundation of constitutional rule, transparent public finance, and institutions that outlived any single leader. Mauritius turned itself into one of the continent's most open economies by protecting property rights and independent courts. Ghana, for all its debt struggles, has repeatedly handed power over through competitive elections and a free press that does not disappear when the government is embarrassed. Senegal's peaceful transitions show that a political order can change hands without a single tank on the street. None of these models is perfect. All of them prove that Africans can govern themselves without starving their own people to win arguments.

So what must Ethiopia do? First, restore full and unconditional access to banking, electricity, fuel, food, and telecommunications for the people of Tigray, and treat that access as a legal obligation, not a bargaining chip. Second, the African Union must immediately reconvene the Pretoria process, with independent monitors on the ground and a public timeline for the disarmament, demobilisation, and reintegration of combatants that was promised and never delivered. Third, the foreign forces that fought in Tigray must be withdrawn in full, and any state that supplies arms or troops to either side must be named and held to account. Fourth, Ethiopia's own institutions must be given the independence to investigate the atrocities of 2020 to 2022 and to prosecute the people responsible, regardless of uniform or party. A cheque from Addis Ababa will never buy the peace that a courtroom can deliver.

To the civil society groups, religious leaders, journalists, and business associations across Ethiopia, the time for quiet diplomacy has passed. Organise the cash-strapped traders and the unpaid teachers into a voice that cannot be ignored. Demand that every ceasefire be published, every blockade be lifted, and every abuse be documented and prosecuted. To the African Union and its member states, stop treating Ethiopia's crisis as an internal affair when its consequences are already crossing borders. And to every Ethiopian who is tired of being told that unity means silence, understand this: the strongest weapon you have is the demand for the rule of law, applied equally to every armed actor who claims to speak for you.

Mekelle is calm today. That word should frighten us, because calm in a city without cash is only the quiet before the next queue grows longer. We do not have to accept this. We can insist that Tigray's people are citizens with rights, not hostages in a contest between two men who would rather fight than govern. The question is not whether Ethiopia can escape this trap. The question is whether the rest of Africa will stand with the mothers in those bank lines, or whether we will look away one more time.

Based on reporting by BBC