Issue No. 216

The Politics of Crisis: Hunger in Tigray

Some forty years have passed since the devastating famine that killed an estimated one million Ethiopians in the mid-1980s. Like today, Tigray was among the worst-impacted regions of the country, largely driven by drought and the brutal counter-insurgency tactics of the Marxist Derg regime. With international attention trained on the diplomatic fall-out from the Ethiopia-Somaliland port deal, northern Ethiopia again teeters on the edge of famine. 

In just a single kebele in Eastern Tigray, local officials have said that dozens have died from hunger since September 2023, with the situation continuing to rapidly deteriorate. In late December, President of the Tigray Interim Administration (TIA) Getachew Reda warned that 90% of the region needed food aid, but only a "fraction" of the necessary international food aid was reaching those in need. And Gebrehiwot Gebregzabher, the Tigray's Disaster Risk Management Commissioner, has revealed that over two million people across 5 zones are facing food shortages. With the World Food Programme and USAID resuming aid distribution at just 20% of pre-suspension levels, thousands will likely die from hunger in the coming weeks.

The internal Tigrayan capacity to respond to the crisis remains deeply lacking and overwhelmingly reliant on limited federal and international assistance. The lack of reconstruction of the region is well-documented, but the growing exodus of health professionals from Tigray is also raising increasing alarm. Since the gradual resumption of domestic and international travel in late 2022, thousands have left the war-ravaged region. And with over 70% of Tigray's health infrastructure estimated to have been damaged during the war, response capacity to growing malnutrition cases is minimal. Moreover, the economic crisis and high inflation have eaten away at the limited budget of the TIA, which is already being pulled in several directions for urgent funding. Help from Addis has been marginal as well, with the Tigray administration's request for a 5 billion ETB loan for back-paying civil servant salaries going unanswered. 

Tensions between Addis and Mekelle, largely subterranean since the Pretoria agreement in November 2022, have erupted into acrimonious briefings after the federal government rejected the TIA's categorisation of the emergency. Talk of 'famine' and comparisons to the 1980s have drawn the ire of government officials who have accused Tigrayan officials of 'politicising the crisis.' Legesse Tulu, a government spokesman, dismissed the comparisons as "completely wrong," while the Disaster Risk Management Commissioner Shiferaw Teklemariam launched an extraordinary tirade against those defining the humanitarian crisis as famine and reporting starvation deaths. He claimed that those disseminating the data had "ulterior motives." Whatever these 'motives' were, however, he did not elucidate. Focusing on semantics and comparisons while hundreds die of preventable hunger is not a good look. While the scale of the unfurling tragedy has not reached the scale of those horrors of the 1980s, its current trajectory is on track to surpass it if immediate and large-scale intervention is not prioritised. 

Amidst the worsening humanitarian crisis, internal divisions within the Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF) and TIA have also rumbled on. While many of the senior TIA figures, including President Getachew Reda, are drawn from the TPLF, they largely comprise a younger and more democratic coalition than the faction epitomised by the TPLF's current Chairman, Debretsion Gebremichael. Many of the old guard TPLF fought in the Ethiopian Civil War, and remain opposed to the new division of power in post-war Tigray. Local TPLF officials in some districts are reportedly still reluctant to submit to the TIA's authority. But the war left the TPLF badly weakened, with many frustrated by its dogged prosecution of the conflict and the failures of the peace it negotiated.

In October and November 2023, the TIA decisively removed several TPLF figures from their administrative positions for failing to fulfil their responsibilities, including the Chief Cabinet Secretary, Amanuel Assefa, and the southeastern zone administrator, Liya Kassa. But the internal power struggles have lingered during the lengthy party summits, prompting the influential diaspora group Global Society of Tigray Scholars and Professionals (GSTS) to urge the TIA and TPLF to prioritise the humanitarian response to the food crisis. 

While Tigray is arguably bearing the brunt of the crisis, particularly in the central and eastern areas of the region, the ongoing armed conflict in Amhara is further compounding the humanitarian emergency there. The punishing drought in 2023 that rendered 20% of Tigray's land barren also badly impacted swathes of northern Amhara. In the region's Wag Himra and North Gondar zones, over 20 people were reported to have died in November 2023. The severing of key arterial roads by the umbrella Fano nationalist group has made the federal government's lacklustre aid delivery far more complex. And there is little suggestion of the armed conflict abating any time soon, with Fano militia still able to carry out deadly raids on the region's major cities. 

Some aid is trickling in, but nowhere near enough. Drastic and immediate upscaling of food and cash aid is needed to respond to Ethiopia's worst humanitarian crisis in decades. While international humanitarian agencies like USAID and the WFP face ever-growing competition for their limited resources, their extreme cutbacks and aid suspension in Ethiopia have allowed an alarming situation to spiral out of control. The TIA needs urgent support from all parties to help it respond to the crisis engulfing the region, not infighting and undermining from within its own camp. Addis should also heed the warning of the GSTS to leave aside their political differences with Mekelle to declare a national emergency and focus on the extreme humanitarian crisis before them.

By the Ethiopian Cable team