The Limits of Rupture, the Promise of Reform: Rethinking Eritrea’s Transition
When a nation emerges from prolonged authoritarian rule, it eventually confronts a foundational question: do we discard everything associated with the old order and begin again from scratch, or do we recover what was valuable, repair what was broken, and build forward from there? In Eritrea’s case, that dilemma can be framed as Total Reset versus Total Upgrade.
Analogies are always imperfect. Someone more technically savvy can always challenge the comparison and drag the conversation into semantics rather than substance. Still, analogies can be useful when they widen our field of vision and help us see an issue from a fresh angle.
In the world of devices, software, and systems, a total reset returns a system to its original state. It wipes away accumulated distortions, corrupted settings, and later modifications. A total upgrade does something different: it accepts that the world has moved on and installs a newer framework with better performance, stronger protections, and greater compatibility with present realities. Both approaches have their place. A reset may be necessary when a system is deeply corrupted or too damaged to function reliably. An upgrade may be wiser when the core system still contains usable foundations but requires modernization, redesign, and safeguards fit for a new era.
That is where Eritrea stands today.
More than three decades after liberation in 1991 and formal independence in 1993, Eritrea remains trapped in a political condition that has frozen the country in place. The 1997 Constitution was ratified but never implemented. National elections have never been held. The PFDJ remains the sole political front (not a party), and the state has been defined by militarization, indefinite national service, arbitrary detention, and the suppression of independent media and civil society.
So the real question is not whether the last 35 years were a failure. That is painfully evident. The real question is what should come next once the current order finally cracks—whether by biology, internal fracture, or political transition. Do we gather the broken but still usable pieces of Eritrea’s founding framework and try, at last, to implement them in good faith? Or do we reject the entire inheritance of the EPLF/PFDJ era and begin from square one with a wholly new constitutional and political settlement?
In other words: should Eritrea pursue a Total Reset or a Total Upgrade?
The Case for Total Reset
There is a serious argument for Total Reset.
The case begins with a moral and political truth: the old order has thoroughly exhausted its legitimacy. Many Eritreans do not merely object to how the country was governed; they object to the logic upon which it was governed. The founding documents and institutional designs of the EPLF/PFDJ era were built around a commandist understanding of the state—one that privileged discipline, unity, secrecy, and central control over pluralism, accountability, and limits on power. Even where those documents contained progressive language, they were embedded in a political culture that treated the state as the tutor of society rather than its servant.
A Total Reset would therefore say: the problem was not only non‑implementation, but the underlying architecture itself. This is the structural‑problem argument advanced by Amanuel Hidrat and, to some extent, Filmon Tesfai, who call for total dismantlement. Reset would allow Eritreans to establish an entirely new social contract, one not psychologically or institutionally tied to the liberation front’s governing DNA. It could open space for a new constitutional convention, new national symbols of legitimacy, and a new beginning grounded in broad-based consent rather than inherited revolutionary authority.
In a country marked by deep mistrust, trauma, exclusion, and political silencing, a reset could also have cathartic value. It would signal clearly that the old era is over—not cosmetically rebranded. The fear of recidivism is real and palpable. As Filmon Tesfai strongly argued, “I still see the limits of a top‑down political imagination that wants to manage diversity rather than trust the public under enforceable democratic rules.”
This approach has real advantages. It creates symbolic rupture with dictatorship. It may rebuild legitimacy among citizens who reject anything carrying the PFDJ imprint. It allows for full redesign rather than piecemeal repair. And it gives historically marginalized voices a greater chance to shape the next political order from the ground up.
But Total Reset carries serious risks, especially in a poor, fragile, conflict‑prone country.
Countries emerging from conflict or authoritarian rule often need inclusion, participation, and transparency in constitution‑making, but they also need institutional continuity and a process that prevents a dangerous vacuum. International IDEA and the United Nations both stress that constitution‑building in fragile settings is fundamentally about renegotiating access to power and resources—and that poorly designed or exclusionary processes can intensify discord rather than reduce it. The OECD likewise emphasizes that fragility is not just about violence; it is also about weak resilience across political, societal, and institutional dimensions.
That matters for Eritrea. A Total Reset sounds clean in theory, but in practice it could produce a legitimacy war over who gets to write the new rules, who represents whom, which communities are authentic stakeholders, whether the diaspora should have equal voice with those inside the country, what to do with the army and security apparatus, and whether federalism, decentralization, or another arrangement should define the state. As Ismail AA warned, the issue is not simply authorship but the feasibility of a genuine marketplace of ideas.
In a polarized environment, “starting from zero” can become a struggle over zero itself. It can delay stabilization, create elite bargaining crises, and tempt the strongest organized actors—usually the armed ones—to dominate the reset process.
A reset is therefore most attractive morally, but most dangerous institutionally.
The Case for Total Upgrade
The case for Total Upgrade is more sober—and more suitable for Eritrea.
It begins by recognizing that not everything in Eritrea’s founding period was worthless. The country did not emerge from liberation without any roadmap at all. The provisional period and the constitution‑making process of the 1990s produced texts, principles, and institutional outlines that, while imperfect and marked by the political assumptions of their time, nevertheless contained real commitments to constitutionalism, rights, citizenship, and the rule of law. The 1997 Constitution itself declares Eritrea a sovereign state founded on democracy, social justice, and the rule of law, and includes protections for equality and fundamental rights. The perfect should never be allowed to become the enemy of the good.
The tragedy is not that the documents were imperfect. No founding document is born perfect. Constitutions evolve; charters mature; national compacts deepen through debate, amendment, and lived experience. Flaws are not fatal. They are invitations to refine, correct, and strengthen. A nation grows by wrestling with its imperfections, not by pretending perfection exists.
The greater tragedy—the one Eritreans feel in their bones—is that these documents were never allowed to breathe. They were never permitted to enter the bloodstream of national life. They were drafted, celebrated, and then entombed. Their flaws were never tested because their promises were never tried.
As long as a document can be improved, its shortcomings are not a death sentence. They are not “final and binding,” to borrow one of Eritreans’ favorite phrases when confronting Ethiopia’s doublespeak. The irony is painful: we used that phrase to defend our sovereignty, yet we never applied the same principle to defend our own constitutional future.
A living document can be amended. A dead document can only be mourned.
And that is the heart of the Eritrean tragedy:
We did not fail because our documents were weak. We failed because our rulers feared what those documents would unleash—accountability, participation, limits on power, and a nation governed by laws rather than by the whims of a single man.
That distinction is crucial. A document can be imperfect yet still provide a better starting point than a vacuum. Comparative experience shows that even participatory constitutional processes can fail if implementation never follows. Eritrea is often cited precisely as an example of a constitution‑making process that produced a text but not a living constitutional order.
A Total Upgrade would therefore not mean blind loyalty to old texts. It would mean salvaging what is usable, discarding what is dangerous, and modernizing the entire founding framework through an inclusive national review process. It would preserve continuity where continuity is stabilizing, while introducing deep reform where reform is necessary. Instead of pretending Eritrea has no constitutional history, it would acknowledge that history, learn from it, and correct it.
Its advantages are substantial:
- First, it reduces the risk of total institutional collapse. A country like Eritrea—already burdened by militarization, poverty, outmigration, and social exhaustion—cannot afford a prolonged founding vacuum.
- Second, it avoids wasting the limited political consensus that may still exist around certain national principles: sovereignty, territorial unity, citizenship, equality, and constitutional government.
- Third, it is administratively more feasible. Amendments, transitional charters, restoration of judicial independence, release of political prisoners, reactivation or replacement of dormant institutions, and staged elections are difficult enough; writing and legitimizing an entirely new order from zero is even harder.
- Fourth, an upgrade approach is more compatible with peacebuilding logic in fragile states, where sequencing and inclusion matter as much as ideals.
But Upgrade Also Has Disadvantages
Its greatest weakness is that it may be viewed as insufficiently transformative. Many Eritreans may hear “upgrade” and fear that it means preserving too much of the liberation‑front state, laundering the past, or merely putting democratic lipstick on the old authoritarian pig. That concern is legitimate. If upgrade becomes a euphemism for elite continuity, it will fail. If it restores old documents without revisiting the concentration of executive power, the militarization of citizenship, the absence of term limits, weak separation of powers, and the lack of enforceable protections against arbitrary rule, it will reproduce the same disease under new management.
So the issue is not just reset versus upgrade in the abstract. It is what kind of upgrade, and on whose terms.
My own conclusion is that Eritrea should choose Total Upgrade, but only if by upgrade we mean a deep, principled, and inclusive overhaul—not a cosmetic repair job.
For a developing, conflict‑ridden country like Eritrea, Total Reset is too risky as a governing strategy, even if it is emotionally appealing as a moral statement. States in fragile settings need legitimacy, yes, but they also need continuity, sequencing, and mechanisms that lower the chance of renewed conflict. Eritrea does not need a romantic ground‑zero moment. It needs an orderly transition to constitutional government, with enough continuity to prevent collapse and enough reform to prevent recurrence.
That means the better path is neither naïve restoration nor reckless erasure. It is structured reconstruction.
In practical terms, that would mean treating the 1997 Constitution and related founding documents not as sacred texts, and not as untouchable garbage, but as raw material. They should serve as a starting base for national recovery, subject to revision through a broad transitional process that includes legal experts, political actors, civil society, religious communities, regional voices, women, youth, and the diaspora—while ensuring that those inside the country are not politically erased by those outside it. The process must be transparent, time‑bound, and anchored in a few immediate non‑negotiables: implementation of rule of law, demilitarization of politics, limits on executive power, judicial independence, basic liberties, release of prisoners, and a roadmap to legitimate elections.
In short, Eritrea should not do a Total Reset. It should do a Total Upgrade with surgical removal of authoritarian DNA.
That is the wiser course because it balances legitimacy with stability, reform with continuity, and justice with governability. A reset may satisfy the desire to bury the past. An upgrade, if done honestly, gives the country a better chance to survive it.
What Eritrea needs is not to return to the beginning, and not to pretend the beginning was enough. It needs to take what was unfinished, cleanse what was corrupted, replace what was defective, and build a constitutional order that finally makes the state fear the people—not the people fear the state.
To contact the author: weriz@yahoo.com
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