In preparing for this column, I did something I rarely do unless duty demands it: I visited Shabait, the Ministry of Information’s digital shrine to mediocrity. I wanted to take the pulse of the regime’s messaging after the president’s 35th‑anniversary speech—a rambling, incoherent monologue that managed to touch on everything except the country he has ruled into ruin for three and a half decades.
What I found on Shabait was predictably hollow. Two “news” items—one announcing Isaias Afwerki’s departure from Asmera, the other his arrival in Cairo—offered the same empty phrases about “bilateral issues” and “regional developments.” No details, no substance, no purpose. It was bureaucratic noise, the informational equivalent of static.
Then a headline caught my eye: “Eritrea at 35: Progress, Resilience, and Pride.” After the president’s fiasco of a speech, I wondered whether someone at the ministry had finally decided to salvage the moment—to offer the sober, grounded assessment the el loco presidente failed to deliver. Perhaps, I thought, this was the long-overdue attempt to articulate what 35 years of independence had actually produced. And I couldn’t help recalling that Ecuador once removed another el loco presidente, Abdala Bucaram, after Congress declared him mentally unfit to rule. Eritrea has no such safeguard. There is no legislature empowered to check, restrain, or remove a head of state. The unhinged Isaias is the state, and the state is nothing more than the unhinged Isaias.
The author, Bana Negusse, is not an incompetent writer. His prose is clean, his structure disciplined, his rhetorical instincts sound. But like so many writers trapped under authoritarian systems, he has been reduced to a mouthpiece—an articulate courier of empty slogans. Talent under tyranny becomes a tool of the state, not a voice for truth. The tragedy is not that Bana cannot write; it is that he cannot write honestly.
What follows in his article is a masterclass in political emptiness.
It is not a report. It is not even propaganda in the sophisticated sense. It is a hollow incantation—an attempt to conjure legitimacy through repetition. It offers no data, no timelines, no sectoral achievements, no institutional milestones. It collapses 35 years of national experience into a single, shapeless narrative of “resilience,” as if Eritrea’s history were a smooth arc of noble struggle rather than a jagged sequence of wars, purges, repression, isolation, and economic decay.
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The absence of detail is not accidental. It is the regime’s governing philosophy: never say anything that can be measured, verified, or challenged. They do not avoid accountability; they fear it. Transparency is the sunlight that disinfects their habitat, and like political parasites, they survive only in the dark, feeding on secrecy and thriving in the rot it produces.
Instead of facts, the article offers adjectives. “Progress.” “Steadfastness.” “Self‑reliance.” These words appear like ritual offerings—repeated with the hope that repetition might substitute for reality. But where are the indicators of economic growth? Where are the improvements in education, health, infrastructure, or governance? Where is the national budget? Where is the institutional development?
A government that has anything to show, shows it. A government that has nothing to show hides behind vocabulary.
Concealing information during the armed struggle was a strategic necessity. Concealing information in an independent state is a recipe for disaster. And disaster is precisely what we have.
Eritrea today is governed by an extractive elite that mistakes the Sahel experience for the pinnacle of sophistication. It is no surprise, then, that they have transformed Asmera into a replica of the Sahel—barren, arid, rugged mountains suited for warfare and concealment, not for commerce, art, science, technology, or industrialization. The capital is trapped in the 1930s, its buildings crumbling, its infrastructure decayed, its municipality unable to provide even the most basic services.
The degradation is not abstract. According to World Population Review, Eritrea currently ranks first in the world for the highest rate of open defecation: 67% of the population practices it, and in some rural areas the rate reaches 90%. This is not the profile of a state marching toward progress; it is the profile of a state abandoned by its rulers.
During the 1950s and 60s, Africans who visited Ethiopia were stunned by the level of “underdevelopment” in a country that prided itself on being “independent and uncolonized.” Their verdict was blunt: the so‑called “colonized” African states were far better off. True to the adage ባርያ ዝነበረ ኣይግዛእካ, the extractive elite of the Sahel have not failed to render Asmera the poster child of everything that has gone wrong in Africa.
But Asmera, under the leadership of its native son, once knew better days. Kentiba Haregot is turning in his grave. A legendary mayor who championed the revitalization and growth of the city, he embodied a standard of civic leadership Asmera has not seen since. In his time, residents honored him not with slogans but with song—an expression of genuine appreciation for a man who treated the city as a living trust, not a personal fiefdom.
Today, the memory of that song—ከንቲባ ሓረጎት መምበርኩም ሓፍ ትበል ኣበራቢርኩማ ደቂሳ ዝነበረት—has become a lament, a mourning chant for a city that once had standards, pride, and competent stewardship. The line, which once meant “May your seat rise higher; you have awakened a city that had been asleep,” now echoes with painful irony. What was once praise has become elegy.
The most damning part of the anniversary article, however, is what it refuses to acknowledge. A 35‑year national assessment that does not mention the constitution, the absence of elections, the indefinite national service, the mass exodus of youth, the collapse of institutions, the lack of judicial independence, the disappearance of political prisoners, or the country’s diplomatic isolation is not an assessment. It is an indictment—of the regime’s failures and of its fear of the truth.
The claims the article does make are laughable on their face. A “self‑reliant economy” in a country sustained by remittances and mining contracts negotiated in the dark. National service as a “source of unity” in a nation hemorrhaging its youth. Eritrea as a “stabilizing force” in a region where it has been entangled in every major conflict for a quarter century. These are not exaggerations. They are deliberate inversions of reality—propaganda that insults the intelligence of the very people it seeks to pacify.
What emerges from this anniversary essay is not a portrait of a nation at 35, but a portrait of a regime that has run out of language, out of imagination, and out of excuses. When a government cannot articulate its achievements, it cannot justify its existence. When it cannot describe a future, it cannot lead a nation into one. Eritrea deserves better than a political order that confuses endurance with progress and suffering with virtue.
Eritrea is ruled by an extractive elite—elite only in the narrow sense that they monopolize power, not because they possess the education, sophistication, or vision required to lead a modern nation. They contribute nothing to the intellectual, cultural, or economic life of the country. They have turned the people’s resilience into a shield for their own failures. The cultural and intellectual desertification they have engineered must be halted before it becomes irreversible.
I shudder when I think of the good EPLF tegadelti who devoted their youth, their health, and in many cases their lives to liberating Eritrea, only to see the country reduced to a fiefdom of an extractive clique that has shown, over 35 long years, neither love nor care for the Eritrean people. Their sacrifice deserved a republic; what emerged instead was a private estate.
The truth is no longer controversial: the regime has failed Eritrea. It has no vision, no legitimacy, no institutional capacity, and no moral authority left. But the alternative cannot be the tired formulas of the diaspora opposition, whose fragmentation and ineffectiveness have become part of the problem. Eritrea’s future will not be built by nostalgia or slogans. It requires a new political imagination—one rooted in dignity, accountability, and the reconstruction of a state hollowed out by decades of authoritarian neglect. ወርቂ እንተጠፈአስ ሚዛን ወርቂ ነይጠፍእ. Gold may go missing, but its value never does.
Eritrea at 35 is not a story of progress. It is the story of a nation waiting—patiently, painfully—for a political horizon worthy of its people. The next 35 years must begin with the end of Isaias Afwerki, the equally mediocre front that sustains him, and the ineffectual diaspora opposition that has spent decades lost in commentary, never-ending congresses, mergers and counter-mergers, and never-ending fragmentations. What Eritrea needs now is revitalization, rebirth, and renewal—an awakening equal to the dignity and endurance of its people.
To contact the author: weriz@yahoo.com
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