Sovereignty by Appropriation: Ethiopia’s Recurrent Illusion and the Power It Cannot See

By David Yeh

Introduction

When a state begins shouting about sovereignty, it is usually because it no longer possesses it.

The Potemkin Party’s recent frenzy of press releases, diplomatic theatrics, and maritime bravado is not a sign of rising power. It is a distress signal. Beneath the slogans about ports, seas, and regional destiny lies a far more uncomfortable reality: a state whose economic sovereignty has collapsed is attempting to manufacture political sovereignty through noise, coercion, and fantasy.

This obsession with “sovereign access to the sea” is not grounded in law, necessity, or strategy. It rests on a historically discredited premise, that sovereignty can be seized through appropriation, intimidation, and rhetorical excess rather than built through legitimacy, consent, and economic autonomy. The louder the claim, the hollower the substance.

To sustain this illusion, familiar myths are recycled: selective history dressed up as entitlement, exaggerated security threats framed as inevitability, and self-appointed indispensability to Red Sea stability proclaimed as fact. But these narratives do not reveal strength. They expose weakness. They are the language of a political imagination that mistakes volume for authority and entitlement for legitimacy.

The facts, however, are stubborn. Ethiopia already has lawful access to the sea. The Red Sea is governed by international law, not demographic swagger. And no amount of saber-rattling can substitute for the one thing sovereignty actually requires: control over one’s own economic destiny.

What is unfolding is not a strategy for sovereignty, but compensation politics—external posturing designed to distract from internal dependency. History has seen this play before. It has never ended well.

Imperial and DERG Ethiopia: Ambition Without Legitimacy

Ethiopia already enjoys extensive and legally grounded access to the sea through multiple ports in the Horn of Africa. These arrangements conform fully to international law governing landlocked states. They require neither territorial revisionism nor coercive diplomacy. Access exists. The crisis being manufactured does not.

Similarly, the security of the Red Sea maritime corridor falls under the collective legal authority of its littoral states. No country—by population size, historical myth, or self-proclaimed indispensability—can unilaterally claim custodianship over an international waterway. In legal terms, the issue is settled. Yet when law provides clarity, political illusion often provides temptation.

This temptation has a long pedigree in Ethiopia’s modern history. Under the imperial regime, especially after World War II, maritime ambition became fused with territorial entitlement. Eritrea’s UN-imposed federation with Ethiopia in 1950 was a profound injustice—making Eritrea the only African colony denied full decolonization to satisfy the strategic interests of the postwar victors. Even that flawed arrangement was dismantled piece by piece, culminating in unilateral annexation in 1962 through force and selective historical claims.

The consequences were disastrous. Rather than securing maritime access or regional leadership, Ethiopia inherited three decades of determined Eritrean armed resistance. The attempt to hold territory that was never legitimately its own drained resources, hollowed out state legitimacy, and contributed directly to the empire’s collapse in 1974.

The DERG inherited both the territory and the illusion. It doubled down on militarization, recast territorial control as existential, and poured staggering resources into wars of retention. Revolutionary rhetoric replaced imperial language, but the logic remained unchanged: sovereignty equated with possession, power with force.

Between 1975 and 1991, Ethiopia accumulated massive military liabilities through Soviet arms purchases, incurring between $2.5 and $4 billion in military debt. During the same period, the Soviet Union delivered more than $11 billion in military aid, making Ethiopia one of Moscow’s largest arms clients in Africa. By the regime’s collapse in 1991, outstanding military debt stood at approximately 3.5 billion roubles—an albatross inherited by a state already in political and economic freefall.

The outcome was predictable. War, famine, repression, and economic collapse followed. By 1991, the Ethiopian state imploded under the weight of its own overreach. Once again, appropriation disguised as sovereignty ended in disintegration. History had already issued its judgment—twice.

2018 and the Illusion of Popular Power

When Abiy Ahmed rose to power in 2018, a seductive narrative quickly took hold. His ascent was credited to irresistible popular pressure—Oromo youth mobilization (Qeerroo), Amhara Fano activism, and a groundswell that finally dislodged the TPLF-dominated EPRDF. It was an appealing story. It was also incomplete.

If the TPLF truly retained the overwhelming military, intelligence, and economic dominance it exercised for nearly three decades, why did it surrender federal power without dragging the country into full-scale civil war? Ethiopia at the time was fragile. Inflation was rising. The post–Meles growth model was faltering. A movement as survival-oriented as the TPLF had both the means and the incentive to burn the house down on its way out. It did not.

The more plausible explanation lies beyond Addis Ababa. By 2017, Ethiopia was approaching the outer limits of its economic sovereignty. Foreign currency reserves were exhausted. Infrastructure projects stalled. Public debt ballooned. Wages lagged far behind inflation. The state was drifting toward a balance-of-payments crisis.

At that point, pressure from international financial institutions intensified. Reform became the price of survival—not reform as a domestically debated policy choice, but reform as externally imposed adjustment: currency devaluation, subsidy removal, privatization of state assets, austerity, and fiscal tightening. This was not conspiracy. It was leverage.

In 2019, Ethiopia entered an IMF-backed program worth nearly $3 billion, followed by debt restructuring. The conditions were explicit: devalue the birr, slash fuel and electricity subsidies, restrain public spending, prioritize debt repayment, and open state enterprises to privatization.

For decades, Ethiopia’s currency had been stable, hovering around 2.5 birr per U.S. dollar through the 1970s. By 2006, it was still below 9 birr per dollar. By 2009, it had slipped past 11. Devaluation accelerated in the 2010s, with the average exchange rate moving from 14.23 birr per dollar in 2010 to over 27 by 2018, clear signs of mounting structural strain.

After 2020, the collapse became dramatic. Between 2020 and 2024, the birr plunged from an average of 34.95 per dollar to well over 130. By early 2026, it had reached historic lows: more than 156 birr per U.S. dollar officially, and closer to 190 on the black market—one of the steepest currency depreciations in Ethiopia’s modern history.

In July 2024, a new four-year, $3.4 billion IMF Extended Credit Facility locked this trajectory in place. Subsidies were abruptly removed. The birr fell again. Living costs exploded. Public servants could no longer sustain their families. The middle class evaporated. Healthcare and education deteriorated. Yet policy did not change—because it could not.

This is what Abiy Ahmed meant, perhaps more honestly than he intended, when he said in 2018: “A poor country has no sovereignty.” It was not a slogan. It was a confession.

Maritime Posturing as Compensation Politics

It is against this backdrop that the Potemkin Party’s obsession with “maritime sovereignty” must be read. When economic sovereignty collapses, symbolic sovereignty grows louder. When creditors dictate policy, territorial bravado becomes a substitute for governance. Ports are invoked not as strategy, but as spectacle.

This is compensation politics, and it follows a familiar and fatal pattern: external assertion used to mask internal dependency. But sovereignty cannot be recovered by threatening neighbors. Red Sea theatrics do not erase IMF conditionalities. Maritime fantasies do not restore fiscal autonomy. And appropriation has never cured dependence; it has only hastened collapse.

Real sovereignty begins at home. It is built through production, not posturing. A collapsing currency cannot be redeemed by rhetoric. Ethiopia must process what it grows, manufacture what it consumes, and expand productive capacity beyond raw exports. These are not ideological preferences; they are material necessities.

Power, as the old saying goes, resides where people believe it does. In Ethiopia today, many still imagine power rests with the state or with men carrying weapons. In reality, it resides elsewhere: in creditor committees, financial institutions, and policy frameworks drafted far from Ethiopian soil. Until that truth is confronted, sovereignty will remain performative—loudly declared, quietly surrendered.

History has already delivered this lesson through empire, through revolution, and through collapse. To repeat the cycle now, under new slogans and recycled illusions, would not merely be tragic. It would be willful amnesia.

Conclusion:

Sovereignty is not declared. It is constructed.

Ethiopia’s current predicament is not the result of hostile neighbors or missed opportunities at sea. It is the predictable outcome of a political tradition that repeatedly confuses possession with legitimacy, coercion with authority, and ambition with power. From imperial annexation to revolutionary militarism to today’s maritime theatrics, the pattern has remained intact: when internal capacity weakens, external assertion grows louder.

But history has already delivered its verdict. Territory seized without consent produces resistance, not security. Power borrowed through debt produces dependency, not autonomy. And sovereignty proclaimed without economic control is performance, not reality.

Ports will not cancel IMF conditionalities. Naval rhetoric will not stabilize a collapsing currency. And threatening neighbors will not restore policy space surrendered to creditors. Appropriation has never cured dependence; it has only accelerated collapse.

True sovereignty begins at home. It is built through production, not posturing. Through manufacturing, not mythmaking. Through feeding a population without external diktat, stabilizing a currency through real output, and treating citizens as participants rather than buffers against austerity.

Until that reckoning occurs, sovereignty will remain theatrical—loudly proclaimed, quietly compromised. And history, indifferent to slogans and merciless toward illusion, will record this moment not as a resurgence, but as another warning ignored.

The sea is not the problem. The illusion is.