They Built Towers, Recycled Elites, and Sold Illusions. Eritrea Built a People.

By David Yeh

Ethiopia’s Potemkin Party’s propaganda apparatus appointment coincided with the harvesting of Semanta Power wheat, and that coincidence matters because it captures, in a single moment, the divergence between two political cultures that have been moving in opposite directions for decades. While some measure progress by appointments, announcements, and optics, Eritrea has continued to measure it by something far less visible and far more demanding: the shaping of people and the cultivation of a national consciousness rooted in self reliance, discipline, and collective responsibility. This was not a seasonal event or a public relations gesture; it was part of a long process of building Eritreanism while others were busy rearranging symbols of power.

While the Woyane and its successors were obsessed with towers, skylines, and spectacles designed to impress donors and observers, the Eritrean government focused on people. While Ethiopian political elites invested enormous energy in fragmenting society along ethnic and political lines, Eritrea invested its time in encouraging unity, patience, and endurance. One side chose visibility over substance, immediacy over permanence, and applause over accountability. The other chose a slower, harsher, and far less flattering path, one that demanded sacrifice instead of promises and contribution instead of entitlement.

The consequences of these choices are no longer theoretical. They are visible across borders, across generations, and across diaspora communities. A person eats what he grows up with, and societies reproduce themselves through the habits they normalize and the incentives they reward. Political systems raise citizens the same way households raise children: by what they praise, what they excuse, and what they punish. Systems built on division inevitably produce opportunism, dependency, and perpetual grievance. Systems built on cohesion, even under pressure, produce resilience and a sense of collective obligation.

This reality becomes impossible to ignore when examining the spectacle surrounding the so called brigade n’Hamedu and the excitement now being generated about investors in Chichi. What is presented as momentum and progress collapses under even minimal scrutiny. The flow of bonuses and capital is not reaching those who are invoked rhetorically in speeches and slogans. It is circulating within the same familiar networks that benefited under the TPLF system. Former beneficiaries have not disappeared; they have simply rebranded. They are now homeowners, landlords, and business owners, shielded by connections that survived regime changes and ideological shifts without interruption.

This is not reform. It is continuity disguised as renewal.

Those who arrive later, drawn in by urgency, anger, and carefully curated narratives, will discover what previous generations already learned. They will supply the labor, absorb the risk, and shoulder the losses, while ownership and protection remain fixed at the top. When the arrangement inevitably fails, responsibility will be displaced downward, onto those who were encouraged to believe that participation alone constituted empowerment. This outcome is not accidental; it is structural. The same political culture produces the same results because it was never designed to do otherwise.

In that sense, there is an unintentional service being provided. By repeating the pattern so openly, the illusion is stripped away faster. History does not repeat itself because people forget; it repeats because certain elites refuse to abandon systems that serve them, even when exposed repeatedly. New slogans do not change old incentives, and cosmetic changes do not alter power relations.

What is being defended in these arrangements is not investment but extraction. What is being celebrated is not empowerment but upward redistribution masked as opportunity. What is being marketed as resistance is, in reality, a managed performance that feeds on resentment while insulating privilege. Anger is mobilized, hope is consumed, and responsibility is deflected, all while the structure remains intact.

Eritrea chose a different road, and it was neither easy nor popular. It rejected ethnic fragmentation, donor dependency, and elite recycling, not because these options were unavailable, but because they were corrosive. It chose to demand endurance rather than excitement, contribution rather than entitlement, and cohesion rather than convenience. That choice came at a severe cost: economic pressure, political isolation, and relentless external hostility. But it also produced something that cannot be imported, purchased, or improvised under pressure of a people shaped by restraint, responsibility, and collective memory.

This is why Eritrean communities, wherever they exist, exhibit a distinct political and social character. Not perfection, but coherence. Not spectacle, but durability. Not endless grievance, but an internalized sense of obligation to something larger than the self. These traits were not inherited by chance; they were cultivated deliberately, often painfully, over time.

You can mock that model, misrepresent it, or resent it for refusing to flatter external expectations. You can reduce it to caricature or dismiss it because it does not align with fashionable narratives. But you cannot erase its effects, because they are carried by people, not structures. Towers can be demolished. Slogans expire. Donors move on. But political cultures embedded in people travel with them.

In the end, systems are judged not by the speeches they give or the investments they announce, but by the humans they consistently produce. Some systems mass produce intermediaries of resentment who chase the next sponsor, the next crisis, and the next rebranding. Others produce people capable of withstanding pressure without disintegrating, even when resources are scarce and recognition is withheld.
Choose towers if you must. Choose investors, slogans, and recycled elites.

Choose speed over substance and performance over principle. But do not pretend surprise when the outcomes match the design.

People do not rise above what they are fed, and nations do not escape the consequences of what they choose to build.