A Famine by Design: How Ethiopia’s Leadership Weaponizes Hunger

By Alula Frezghi

Famine in Ethiopia is not a tragedy of nature. It is a crime engineered by power.

Across Tigray today, people are dying not because the rains failed or crops withered, but because food and medicine are deliberately blocked. Humanitarian corridors remain sealed. Aid trucks are stranded. Wheat meant to save lives is exported for political theater. In towns like Hitsats and Hintsats, families bury loved ones whose only “crime” was being born on the wrong side of the ruling party’s political map.

This is not mismanagement. It is a sanction imposed by a government on its own citizens.

A State That Has Abandoned Its People

In any functioning state, leadership stands between its people and death. In Ethiopia, that protective barrier has collapsed. Instead of governance, the country is left with TikTok fundraisers, diaspora remittances, and desperate citizens doing the work of a vanished state.

The government can always find money for drones, surveillance, and war. But it cannot find the will to feed starving civilians. Hunger returns again and again not because Ethiopia lacks food, but because it lacks leadership willing to defend its people.

The Tragedy Within the Tragedy

There is another painful irony one history will not forget.

Some Tigrayans, driven by revenge against the TPLF, aligned themselves with the very leadership now starving their own communities. They believed they were punishing a political rival. Instead, they helped empower a system that punishes civilians, mothers, children, and elders who had no role in the political battles of elites.

What a travesty of inhumanity.
What a betrayal of their own people’s suffering.

History will record not only the architects of this man‑made famine, but also those who stood by, rationalized it, or enabled it.

A Nation That Feeds War and Starves Its Citizens

Amhara bleeds, Oromia burns, Tigray starves, and the government does nothing, instead is promoting the illusion that “Ethiopia AI (Mela) is getting great,” as if digital spectacle can mask human suffering.

A nation that feeds war and starves its citizens is not governing. It is abandoning them.

The deaths in Tigray now counted in the hundreds in some towns are not natural losses. They are preventable. They are political. They are the direct result of deliberate obstruction, punitive policies, and a leadership that treats hunger as a tool of control.

The World Must Not Look Away

Ethiopia once stood before the world promising peace, unity, and a new era of dignity. Today, those promises lie in ruins. The contrast between the speeches delivered in Oslo and the suffering unfolding in Tigray could not be more stark.

The world must understand this clearly: this is not famine. This is a weapon.

And every day the blockade continues, more innocent lives are lost.