Inventing a Coastline: Ethiopia’s Red Sea claims and the politics of manufactured grievance

by Ghidewon Abay Asmerom

Ethiopia’s claim to a Red Sea “right” is not about trade or access, which international law already provides, but about reviving a dangerous politics of entitlement. In a continent built on the fragile consensus of fixed borders, this rhetoric risks reopening questions Africa long ago decided it could not survive.

Africa’s borders were not preserved because they were just, natural, or historically pristine. They were preserved because reopening them would be catastrophic. That lesson, learned through the wars and dislocations of the first post-independence decades, produced one of the continent’s few enduring political consensuses: sovereignty is inviolable, borders are fixed, and grievances must be managed through law rather than territorial revisionism. Ethiopia’s recent claims to a Red Sea “right” rupture that consensus. They are not arguments for access, cooperation, or trade—all of which international law already permits—but an attempt to recast landlockedness as historical injustice and to elevate entitlement into moral claim. In doing so, they challenge not only Eritrea’s sovereignty, but the foundational logic of post-colonial Africa itself.

Maps are never innocent. When borders are erased on paper, the intent is rarely cartographic; it is political. In recent months, Ethiopia’s governing rhetoric has shifted from economic cooperation to something far more destabilizing: the suggestion that portlessness is an injustice to be corrected and that access to the Red Sea is a right unjustly denied. This is not a debate about ports or development strategy. It is the manufacture of grievance as policy, with implications that extend well beyond Ethiopia’s immediate neighbors.

With the sole exception of South Sudan, every African state is a product of decolonization, not ancient geography or uninterrupted civilizational continuity. Borders across the continent cut through ethnic groups, trade routes, and historical polities. Nigeria did not inherit “natural” boundaries. Mali did not choose landlockedness. Kenya did not design its coastline. Yet African states collectively chose stability over historical redress, recognizing that reopening territorial claims would turn the continent into a permanent battlefield. That choice was formalized in the 1964 Cairo Declaration and later enshrined in the Constitutive Act of the African Union. Ethiopia was not a passive beneficiary of this settlement; it was one of its architects.

This is what makes the current rhetoric emanating from Addis Ababa especially dangerous. When a state that hosts the African Union implies that borders are negotiable when they produce inconvenience, it undermines the very charter it is sworn to uphold. African history offers no ambiguity about where this path leads. Somalia’s irredentism in the 1960s, Morocco’s claims over Western Sahara, and Libya’s interventions in Chad all began as assertions of historical entitlement and ended in prolonged instability. The continent learned, at immense cost, that grievance politics dressed up as justice corrodes sovereignty far beyond the original claim.

Diplomacy in English, War Mobilization in Amharic, Inciting Ethnic Hate in Oromiffa.

The current Ethiopian regime speaks with many tongues—and none of them true. One message is delivered in Amharic to stir the wider public toward confrontation, another in Afaan Oromo to deepen resentment between Oromo communities and their Abyssinian neighbors, and a third, carefully laundered in English, for international consumption. This is not political pluralism; it is deliberate duplicity. Different audiences are fed different false messages, each calibrated to inflame, divide, or mislead. Dishonesty here is not incidental—it is systematic, elevated to the level of statecraft. Ethiopians have a proverb for such conduct: “በኣንድ ራስ፡ ብዙ ምላስ”—one head, many tongues. In plain terms: one mouth, many lies. It is an apt summary of a regime whose rhetoric shifts with the listener, but whose intent remains the same.

Nowhere is this hypocrisy clearer than in its maritime rhetoric. On the one hand, the government insists, especially in English, that it is pursuing access to the sea “through diplomacy rather than coercion,” fully aligned with global norms of fairness and mutual benefit. On the other, it openly calls on Ethiopians to prepare for war, declaring that “every Ethiopian is called upon to contribute to this defining moment in national history” and urging them to be remembered as the generation that “restored Ethiopia’s gateway to the sea.” This is not diplomacy. It is mobilization for conflict dressed up as destiny.

The central lie is neither complex nor accidental: Ethiopia is not denied access to the sea. It never has been. If it is willing to respect sovereignty and pay market rates, Ethiopia already has access to a wide range of ports—Port Sudan, Massawa, Assab, Obock, Djibouti, Tadjourah, Zeila (Saylac), Berbera, Bosaso, Mogadishu, Kismayo, Lamu, Mombasa, and others that could be commercially developed. What the regime refuses to do is pay. As if it exports its coffee, gold, and minerals for free, it demands instead to acquire ports by political pressure or territorial ambition. Access is available. Entitlement is not.

To justify this demand, the regime feeds its population a fabricated history. It claims that Ethiopia was “systematically deprived” of maritime territory through conspiracies dating back to the nineteenth century. This is total fiction. Abyssinia had no sovereign control of a sea port after the seventh century—if one even accepts the questionable claim that it was the legitimate successor of the Aksumite Empire. During the scramble for the Horn of Africa, Abyssinian rulers did not go for ports; they were asking Europeans to occupy them so that the Muslims (infidels), the Egyptians or the Turkish wouldn’t own them. What they bargained for was land. They explicitly chose territorial expansion inland—quadrupling the size of Abyssinia—over access to the coast, capturing the lands of non-Abyssinian peoples rather than negotiating maritime outlets. Slaves and land were prioritized over ports. That was a choice, not a theft.

Equally false is the claim that maritime access would have transformed Ethiopia into a “strong and independent power beyond external domination.” Ethiopia occupied Eritrea’s ports for nearly forty years. During that entire period, it did not become strong, independent, or self-sufficient. Instead it became a chronically dependent state, unable to feed its population, reliant on foreign aid, and politically brittle. Ports did not produce sovereignty then, and they will not do so now.

What is being sold today is not a national cause, but a dangerous illusion. A myth designed to distract from internal failure, mobilize resentment, and normalize expansionism. It is easier to invent a stolen sea than to confront the realities of governance, equity, and economic reform. But no amount of repetition can turn fiction into history, or grievance into law.

Manufactured Grievance and Africa’s Hard Lessons

Africa has seen this pattern before: historical grievance repackaged as political fuel. The result is never catharsis; it is combustion. Irredentism hardens into militarization, militarization invites regional war, and the state that lights the match often burns first. Ethiopia is no exception. The country is already fractured. Tigray hangs by a thread, Oromia strains against the centre, and even the Amhara heartland shows signs of exhaustion with the Ethiopian project itself. Looming above all of this is the unresolved Western Somalia question, a century-old wound that has never closed and still hangs over Ethiopia like a sword. Somalia’s descent into prolonged chaos began when borders were rejected in the name of historical entitlement. Ethiopia would not escape a similar fate.

Even where territorial claims remain largely diplomatic, the damage endures. Morocco’s assertion of sovereignty over Western Sahara, framed as historical continuity, has frozen the Maghreb for decades. Regional integration has stalled, self-determination remains unresolved, and the conflict persists as a permanent fault line rather than a solved problem.

These cases differ in context, but they converge on a single lesson Africa learned at immense cost: when grievance becomes doctrine and borders become negotiable, instability becomes structural. This is why the Organization of African Unity, and later the African Union, enshrined the inviolability of borders as a foundational principle. It was not an endorsement of colonial injustice; it was an act of continental self-preservation.

Access is Lawful; Ownership is Not

Ethiopia’s current rhetoric collapses a crucial distinction between access and sovereignty. International law is unambiguous. Landlocked states have the right to access the sea through peaceful, negotiated, and cooperative arrangements. They do not possess a right to another state’s coastline.

Across Africa, landlocked states have pursued access without contesting borders. Uganda trades through Kenya and Tanzania. Rwanda relies on Dar es Salaam and Mombasa. Mali and Niger depend on coastal neighbors without asserting ownership over ports. These arrangements are often costly and imperfect, but they are governed by treaties, not entitlement narratives.

What makes Ethiopia’s position alarming is not the articulation of economic need, but the moral language used to justify it. By framing having no sea access as an imposed injustice and maritime access as a “restoration,” the discourse drifts from negotiation into revisionism. When senior officials and military figures endorse maps that erase internationally recognized borders, the message ceases to be about cooperation. It becomes a signal of territorial ambition.

That this rhetoric emanates from the host state of the African Union compounds the danger. Addis Ababa is not merely another capital; it is the institutional custodian of Africa’s post-colonial settlement. When it suggests that borders are conditional and sovereignty contingent on power or population size, it weakens the very norms that protect smaller and more vulnerable states across the continent.

The Precedent Africa Can‘t Afford

Being landlocked is not an injury to be cured through territorial revision. It is a structural condition managed through diplomacy, cooperation, and restraint. Converting grievance into entitlement and myth into sovereignty is not visionary leadership; it is political recklessness.

Eritrea’s coastline is not Ethiopia’s inheritance. Aspiration does not become law through repetition, and desire does not confer legitimacy. Borders are not erased by slogans, nor is sovereignty granted by insistence. The Horn of Africa stands at a fragile juncture, and its future depends on rejecting the illusion that history can be rewritten to soothe present anxieties.

Peace will not be secured by indulging fantasies of lost seas. It will be preserved by accepting a harder truth: strength lies in respecting limits, honoring law, and choosing cooperation over coercion. Africa’s stability has never depended on the perfection of its borders, but on the collective refusal to reopen them. That refusal is now being tested.

This is not about denying Ethiopia trade, development, or dignity. International law already provides pathways for access, transit, and cooperation. The question is whether grievance will be allowed to masquerade as right, and inconvenience as justification. Challenging Eritrea’s sovereignty does not resolve Ethiopia’s economic constraints; it revives a politics Africa has spent decades trying to bury.

The warning signs are unmistakable. When maps become instruments of claim and history is repackaged as entitlement, escalation follows silence. The African Union, custodian of the continent’s post-colonial settlement, knows where this road leads. If it fails to speak now, it risks presiding over the erosion of its own charter.

Africa cannot afford invented coastlines. It cannot survive a return to manufactured grievance. And it cannot allow the principles that spared the continent from endless territorial war to be undone from within.