Issue No. 294

The Fallout of Agjar's Controversial Restructuring
 

One has to hand it to the Somali Regional State (SRS) President, Mustafa Omer Agjar; in a country not without unpopular politicians, he has a striking ability to aggravate so many in a single stroke. Without warning, on 27 July, the Somali Regional State Council announced that 14 new woredas, four zonal administrations, and 25 municipal leadership offices were to be established. The outcry has been furious and immediate, with senior Oromo and Afar politicians voicing their displeasure at what they perceive as irredentism by the SRS in their regions. Overhauling administrative units along the Oromia-SRS boundary was always likely to prove highly contentious, but the host of changes has triggered major protests in several towns within the SRS as well. With a year out from elections, the much-loathed Agjar appears to be continuing to consolidate his position as regional president.

The Somali Regional Council has argued that any such changes are internal in nature and intended to improve both service delivery and mitigate inter-ethnic tensions. It remains unclear whether the new borders extend into what has been delineated as Oromia's territory, but the decision overlays a decades-old dispute over the location of the internal boundary. And in reality, they are absent from any common sense about genuinely improving service delivery or stamping out the widespread corruption in Jigjiga. Instead, the new administrative units appear part of Agjar's broader attempts to further gerrymander and bend the electoral outlook to his will. 

Senior figures within the Prosperity Party at both federal and regional levels have been implicated in the scheme, including the deputy PM Adam Farah, Prosperity Party Head in the SRS, Mohamed Shale, and Ahmed Shide, federal finance minister. Areas in which Farah and Shide exercise authority have both been suddenly upgraded to zones, with the latter coming from a remote rural area-- making it a bizarre choice for a larger unit. Both are influential in Addis and present a possible threat to Agjar's position as regional president, which he holds solely on the good graces of PM Abiy Ahmed. Once a close ally of the prime minister, it appears their relations have soured somewhat of late. Alongside jailing dozens of journalists and undermining legitimate political parties in recent months, the restructuring looks to sweeten the deal for any possible contenders to Agjar's throne with elections nominally scheduled for mid-2026.

With insurgencies raging in Oromia and Amhara, and Tigray still consumed with the aftermath of the destructive 2020-2022 war, it is little surprise that Ethiopia's federal system is creaking at the seams. Nominally intended to decentralise power and authority, successive PMs and particularly the incumbent have ridden roughshod over its principles. Since PM Abiy Ahmed came to power in 2018, there has been a flurry of new woredas, zones, and even regions created at the whims of both genuinely marginalised communities and hijacking, self-interested elite. However, lagging behind this has been the administrative and economic capacity to manage and run these new units, particularly since the financial crunch following the Tigray war. Rampant inflation and the devaluation of the Ethiopian Birr have contributed to the decline of service delivery in much of the country. Leaving aside conflict-riddled regions, perhaps nowhere is this more evident than in the SRS, where education, healthcare, and infrastructure have all deteriorated significantly in recent years. Meanwhile, the restructuring of new woredas and zones has created fresh flashpoints for inter-communal violence and resource competition.

Agjar's district inflation is another entirely top-down engineered process, one that has seen no public consultation and is devoid of the realities of the SRS's strained capacities. Designating a new city just a handful of kilometres from Jigjiga-- and two others within 50 kilometres of the regional capital makes no sense at all, with residents of the regional capital already complaining of problems delivering water and other services. And in several of the new districts, the population numbers only a few thousand — far below what was envisioned when Ethiopia's political system was established. 

None of this has gone unnoticed in the SRS, with protests erupting at the end of July in Gabagao, Hargelle and others within the Afder zone. One community has even suggested that they come under the administration of the federal government, such is the widespread dislike of the current SRS management. Hopes were high when Agjar came to power after Abdi Iley in the late 2010s, but the corruption and increasing despotism of the leader have badly soured Somali communities' opinions of him. And in particular, relations between the Ogaden National Liberation Front (ONLF) and the SRS administration have plummeted, with the former insurgent group repeatedly warning of a potential return to armed conflict amid continued attempts to sabotage the party and its senior leadership. The now-opposition group has attacked the restructuring, deeming it to be an attempt at "gerrymandering and disempowering entire Somali communities."

However, so is the restructuring threatening to explode the simmering tensions on the boundary between Oromia and the SRS —Ethiopia's longest internal border. Sporadic conflict has long plagued these neighbouring communities, with regional officials playing off ethnic identities as a means to boost their own support. This has partly resulted from the incompletion of a major referendum in 2004 to decide the boundary, where, while over 400 kebeles participated in the vote, several of the most contentious did not, and the frontier has never been formalised. With an Oromia-Somali border commission underway, it may be that the SRS administration has spied an opportunity to pre-empt their decision-making by claiming contested lands. In turn, disagreements between the Oromo Federalist Congress (OFC) and the ONLF, as well as several other Somali opposition parties, have flared again this week over the restructuring and the 2004 referendum. Though the ONLF and other groups harbour distrust of the SRS administration, in a joint statement, they argued that towns including Dire Dawa, parts of Harar, and Moyale have been "unjustly ceded" to Oromia and criticised the OFC. 

Another Oromo nationalist group, meanwhile, the Oromo Liberation Front (OLF), have also seized on the restructuring, calling it a "declaration of war" and a "blatant attempt to claim Oromo land." The Oromia regional government is further castigated in the OLF's statement, attacking its "silence and inaction in the face of repeated border incursions and displacement show your complicity." Protests have erupted in several towns in Oromia, particularly in the Borana and East Borana zones. And to the SRS's north, the Afar People's Party has also accused the Somali administration of violating Afar's territorial integrity through the creation of the new 'Western Gelbeedk Zone.' Fears of Somali irredentism run deep in Afar, with violence repeatedly flaring over three contested kebeles on the Ethiopia-Djibouti highway between Afar and Somali forces in recent years. And for the past two centuries, Somali Issa communities have been increasingly settling northwards out of Dire Dawa and uprooting Afar from the eastern Alighedi plains.

With tensions so high, a senior delegation from Addis was dispatched last week to Jigjiga to meet with Agjar, including Temesgen Tiruneh and Redwan Hussein. The SRS president accompanied the officials upon their return to Addis, but no official statement has been released, and it remains unclear whether Agjar will be compelled to reverse the restructuring. Interestingly, the federal delegation that arrived in Jigjiga last week was reported to have accused Agjar of both corruption and mismanagement of the SRS. But with war still looming in Eritrea, the Fano insurgency escalating in Amhara, and Tigray teetering on the edge of renewed conflict, it may be that Addis chooses to circle its wagons and let the tensions between Oromia, the SRS, and Afar play out on their own terms. What is clear, though, is that the highly corrupt and increasingly autocratic SRS leadership is more invested in securing its own future than in actually delivering services for its population. And simply redrawing some lines and restructuring some administrative units cannot reverse engineer the SRS's slow decline.

The Ethiopian Cable Team