Assab and Prosperity Party’s Delusion

by Ghidewon Abay Asmerom

“Assab remains Eritrean, by right, by history, and by the will of its people.”

In the Prosperity Party’s Ethiopia, delusion has replaced doctrine, and obsession has replaced vision. The tragedy is not merely that the regime dreams of an empire, but that it can no longer distinguish between dreaming and doing.

With Ethiopia’s Prosperity Party, delusion has ceased to be a symptom and had become a system of rule. It originates not in the mind of one narcissistic leader, but in the collective psyche of a regime that has mistaken fantasy for destiny. The Prosperity Party’s obsession with the Red Sea and ownership of a sea port, its imagined entitlement to other nations’ coasts, and its insistence that Ethiopia’s landlocked status is an “existential injustice” are not policies, they are symptoms of a political delusion.

This delusion is deeply lodged in the mind of Abiy Ahmed and his circle of obedient enablers. No historical record, no principle of international law, and no sound argument can shake it loose. Like a patient convinced that the world conspires to deny him what he imagines to be his birthright, the regime projects its own failures outward. It insists that Ethiopia’s poverty and misery stem not from decades of misrule, systemic corruption driven by the “it is our time to eat” mindset, or the toxic “kan keenya” (it’s ours) mentality, but from geography itself. In their narrative, Ethiopia’s decline is not self-inflicted but imposed by history, and its salvation lies not in reform or governance, but in war and conquest.

The Prosperity Party’s leadership exhibits the full pathology of state delusion: paranoid mistrust of neighbors, messianic self-image, and an unshakable belief in divine or historical entitlement. In this fevered mindset, the regime imagines itself both victim and savior, wronged by the world yet chosen to redeem it through expansion and domination.

Like untreated psychosis, this political delusion is eroding the regime’s grasp on reality. Diplomacy is giving way to hallucination, strategy to fantasy, governance to paranoia. The result is a state that no longer leads its people; it only endangers them.

A Dangerous Fantasy in Uniform

Ethiopia’s Oromo Prosperity Party military commanders, led by Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, are marching deeper into a delusion that imperils not only the Horn of Africa but the entire continent. From Field Marshal Berhanu Jula to the latest Commodore Tegegn Leta, the same fiction is recited ad nauseam: that Ethiopia’s lack of direct sea access is an “existential threat”, that the Port of Assab somehow “belongs” to Ethiopia, “it is unjust to be landlocked”. Only weeks earlier, Major General Teshome Gemechu had claimed the same fantasy was “legitimate” on grounds of history, geography, necessity, and security.

Such arguments merely recycle the delusions of empire. They are as lawless as they are laughable. No principle of international law grants a landlocked nation the right to another’s coast. Ethiopia’s provocation the past two years is not policy; it is delusional pathology. It is a reckless attempt to rewrite history, to erode international law, and to rekindle imperial ambitions long discredited and defeated.

Ethiopia’s generals are mistaking fantasy for strategy. Their rhetoric, reckless, repetitive, and revisionist, betrays not strength but insecurity. The attempt to cloak expansionism in the robes of “national necessity” reveals the political decay of Addis Ababa’s current order.

The Historical Record Is Clear

The Port of Assab and the entire Red Sea coastline are integral to Eritrea’s sovereign territory, legally, historically, and in every practical sense. Indeed, Assab was the seed from which Eritrea itself grew: Italy’s first colonial possession in the Horn of Africa, acquired in 1869 by the Rubattino Shipping Company and formally transferred to the Italian state in 1882. Ethiopia’s attempt to distort the record is both dishonest and desperate. Ethiopia’s open talk of “reclaiming” Assab is naked aggression. It violates the principle of inviolable borders that sustains peace in Africa, and it exposes Addis Ababa’s growing appetite for territorial revisionism.

Ethiopia’s current generals would do well to read their own archives. The 1908 Italo-Ethiopian Treaty, signed by Emperor Menelik II, fixed Ethiopia’s northern frontier roughly sixty kilometers from the Red Sea, at Menelik’s explicit request after the Battle of Adwa. This treaty along with the 1900 and 1902 treaties underpin the OAU principle of uti possidetis juris, preserving inherited colonial borders at independence.

Furthermore, the Eritrea–Ethiopia Boundary Commission (EEBC), established under the Algiers Agreement of 12 December 2000, reaffirmed this legal truth in its final and binding decision of 13 April 2002. The Commission delimited and demarcated the boundary on the basis of those colonial treaties and applicable international law. Both countries accepted the decision as final and binding under Article 4(15) of the Algiers Agreement. For Ethiopia now to reassert claims over Assab is to repudiate a treaty it voluntarily signed and a judgment it once pledged to honor. It is a violation of pacta sunt servanda—the fundamental rule that agreements must be kept.

To now claim that Assab “was never Eritrea’s” is to deny colonial treaties that made the Ethiopia of today, to trample on the legal bedrock of African statehood, and to insult the collective wisdom of the OAU founders. For Ethiopia to reopen this settled question is to repudiate its own signature and defy the United Nations. It is to desecrate the very sacrifices that defined Africa’s modern order. The Port of Assab is Eritrean soil, integral, inviolable, and non-negotiable. It is not a bargaining chip nor a shared utility. Any talk of “joint use” or “federal arrangement” are hallucinations of a deranged, 7th King wannabe, Prime Minister suffering from delusions of grandeur.

Equally preposterous is Ethiopia’s assertion that Assab “belongs” to it on ethnic grounds, simply because Afar-speaking communities exist within its borders. Ethnographic arguments hold no legitimacy in international law; sovereignty is determined by treaties, not by shared ancestry or linguistic kinship. If borders were to be redrawn according to Ethiopia’s logic, then the Afar homeland could just as easily belong to Eritrea or Djibouti, since it was never part of historical Abyssinia. By the same measure, the Somali region would rightfully return to Somalia, Gambela to South Sudan, Benishangul to Sudan, and much of Oromia, Sidama, and Wolayta, lands absorbed through imperial conquest, would lie beyond Ethiopia’s legal reach. The historical record is clear: there is not a shred of credible evidence linking modern Ethiopia to the Axumite Empire it so proudly claims as its ancestor. Ethiopia, as it exists today, is not the heir of Axum but the product of conquest, colonial boundary-making, and political expediency, not of divine lineage or historical entitlement.

The Port of Assab is not an economic bargaining chip or a shared utility; it is Eritrean soil, part of the nation’s identity, patrimony, and security. Treating it as a negotiable asset is a flagrant insult to the sacrifices made for Eritrea’s independence and a violation of the UN and AU charters. This means Eritrea has no obligation to cede, lease, or share even a square inch of its coastline. Its sovereignty is anchored in law, cemented in history, and defended by unbroken will.

Built on Blood, Sustained by Silence: The Empire That Never Ended

For over a century, Ethiopia has changed its rulers but never its nature. From Menelik to Abiy, desire to build an empire survives.

When Commodore Tegegn Leta stood at Samara University in October 18, 2025 lamenting Ethiopia’s “injustice” at being landlocked, he either forgot, or chose to ignore, the far greater injustice upon which modern Ethiopia was built. The very empire whose expansion he now seeks to extend to the Red Sea was itself founded on conquest, enslavement, and mutilation of the Oromo, Somali, Sidama, Wolayta, Gambela, and other peoples and nationalities.

The irony could not be more profound. As an Oromo, Commodore Tegegn represents a people once massacred and mutilated by the very empire he now seeks to expand. Under Emperor Menelik II, entire Oromo communities were wiped out—not through war, but through a calculated campaign of ethnic destruction. Menelik’s armies, armed with Italian and French weapons, turned the highlands into killing fields. Yet he is still glorified as a unifier, while his victims lie buried beneath Ethiopia’s national mythology. During the scramble for Africa, Menelik was not resisting colonization; he was participating in it; scrambling not for a sea coast, but for slaves, land, and dominion over his southern, eastern and western neighbors.

Every regime that has ruled from Addis Ababa: imperial, socialist under the Derg, ethno-fascist under the TPLF, and now the so-called Prosperity Party cloaked in Oromo names—has shared the same insatiable appetite for wars of expansion.

Ethiopia’s tragedy lies in the fact that its intellectuals and historians have colluded to bury the evidence of conquest, whitewashing emperors who cut tongues, severed limbs, gouged eyes, and mutilated breasts, recasting them as national heroes. The colonizers were rebranded as liberators, their crimes erased from memory. The massacres of the eastern, central, southern, and western Ethiopia remains unwritten chapters, missing from classrooms, museums, and the nation’s conscience. The same Prosperity Party that cries for justice over “unjust” colonial borders refuses to confront the colonial terror upon which Ethiopia was built and without those colonial borders there wouldn’t be an Ethiopia to rule over.

The truth, however long suppressed, is simple: Ethiopia is not the victim of colonialism, it is one of its perpetrators. Menelik’s march southward, eastward, and westward was not state-building; it was Africa’s unacknowledged colonialism. Its victims: be they Oromo, Sidama, Wolayta, Afar, Somali, and countless others, were enslaved, dispossessed, and erased, denied even the recognition that European colonial victims have received. Is there any greater injustice than this? We don’t think so.

“Ethiopia is not the victim of colonialism—it is one of its perpetrators.”

In short, PP’s problem is not lack of a port. Its problem is the refusal to confront the blood and bondage upon which Ethiopia’s borders stand. Until PP reckons with that truth, no coastline, no aid package, and no rhetoric of “development” will wash away the stain of its current transgressions.

The Empire of Smoke: Oromia’s Rulers and the Illusion of Power

In the name of the peace-loving Oromo, the Oromia wing of the Prosperity Party has tragically turned its guns and drones on its own people. Across Oromia, as in Amhara, villages burn, farmers are driven from their land, and whole communities live under siege by forces that claim to represent them. The veneer of Oromo power, personified by figures such as Colonel Abiy Ahmed, Field Marshal Berhanu Jula, Lieutenant General Yilma Merdasa, Commodore Tegegn Leta, Major General Teshome Gemechu, President Shimelis Abdisa, and Mayor Adanech Abiebie, conceals a far darker ambition. According to leaked policy document, that insane ambition reaches beyond domestic control: it envisages a restored “Kush” empire built on the dispossession of Horn of Africa’s Semitic Speaking peoples and the subjugation or assimilation of all Kushitic, Omotic, Nilotic and Bantu communities across the region, from the Red Sea to the Indian Ocean and beyond. The plan also seeks to weaken the Orthodox Tewahdo Church and other pillars of regional identity. Whatever the rhetoric at home, the result is unmistakable: power consolidated at the cost of the very people the party claims to serve.

The Prosperity Party’s Oromo elites, recycled from the old OPDO, remain captives of the same ethno-fascist psychology forged by their former masters, the TPLF. They inherited the Ethiopian state not to reform it, but to replace it with an empire of their own. And now PP lunatics, haunted by their own betrayal, are seeking redemption through external distraction, crying Assab, Djibouti, Berbera, Mogdishu, Lamu, Mombassa, the Red Sea, and the Indian Ocean, chasing imperial fantasies while their own homeland bleeds. They believe that by invoking Eritrea, Somalia, and Egypt, they can revive the ghosts of a bygone empire. But no amount of war rhetoric can drown the truth: Ethiopia’s deepest war is not with its neighbors. It is with itself.

“The PP’s greatest violence is not its war drums; it is its refusal to remember.”

Occupation does not create ownership, and necessity does not erase sovereignty

Everyone recognizes that Ethiopia is a country trapped in poverty, unable to feed its own population, not because it is landlocked, but because of decades of corruption, misrule, and failed governance. For nearly eighty years, Ethiopia enjoyed unrestricted access to the ports of Eritrea, Djibouti, and Somalia, yet it squandered every opportunity because of short-sighted leadership. Instead of becoming Africa’s breadbasket, Ethiopia has remained its basket case. Economic hardship, however severe, confers no territorial rights. To argue that Ethiopia’s past “investments” in modernizing the Port of Assab somehow justify a present-day claim is as absurd as suggesting that Italy has a right to reclaim Ethiopia because it had built roads and telecommunication lines during its colonial occupation of Ethiopia 1936-1941.

Economic need does not confer territorial entitlement, and historical investment does not translate to ownership. Ethiopia’s military presence in Eritrea from 1952 to 1991 was an occupation; nothing less. If “necessity” could nullify sovereignty, global order would collapse. Ethiopia’s logic is the same one once used by European colonizers, disguised now in the language of “integration” and “stability.”

Eritrea’s position is resolute. The Port of Assab and the Red Sea coastline are, by history and by law, Eritrean. Ethiopia’s revisionist fantasies have no place in modern diplomacy and no standing in international law. They reveal a dangerous hubris—a willingness to gamble regional peace for nationalist distraction. Eritrea will never compromise its sovereignty, and it will never cede or “share” a single inch of its coast. The principle of finality in boundary delimitation is not negotiable; it is the cornerstone of Africa’s postcolonial order.

Conclusion: Eritrea’s Line Is Clear

The international community, especially the African Union and the United Nations, and all peace-minded nations must take heed of the reckless rhetoric coming out from Addis Ababa. Ethiopia’s dangerous rhetoric violates the UN and AU charters; it is a threat to regional and global peace and risks unraveling the continental consensus that ended the colonial era. Ethiopia must be reminded to respect the UN and AU charters and of its treaty obligations under the Algiers Agreement and the EEBC’s final and binding verdict.

In the clearest terms possible: the Port of Assab is Eritrean. Ethiopia’s claim to it is not merely false; it is outrageous, unlawful, and perilous. To pursue it is to provoke instability, invite conflict, and erode the very foundations of international law in the Horn of Africa. Eritrea will defend its sovereignty with the same resolve that won its independence, and history will not look kindly on those who toy with peace for the sake of delusion. Eritrea’s patience is rooted in principle, not weakness. Its sovereignty is not for debate; its borders are not for revision. The Port of Assab remains Eritrean, by right, by history, and by the will of its people.

Ethiopia’s obsession with the Red Sea is not about geography; it is about denial, denial of defeat, denial of law, denial of reality. Above all denial of how Ethiopia itself came about. But denial cannot change maps, and delusion cannot alter truth.

“Assab is Eritrean. Always has been. Always will be!”