Whose Face Is on the Wall?

Author’s note: In this piece, I’m more interested in the subtle visual habits that quietly reorganize authority and erase local presence without making a spectacle of it. Sometimes the most revealing thing isn’t the portrait you find, but the absence it creates around everything else. Consider this a small observation about walls that points to a larger question about how institutions teach people where power lives.

This is one of those small thoughts I pick up like a gleaning in the field of Boaz, nothing dramatic, nothing announced, just something I notice and carry with me. And I say “gleaning” deliberately. In the Bible, gleanings were the leftovers of harvest, what was intentionally left behind so the poor could gather and eat. Minor things, almost invisible to the powerful, but they sustained life in the wider community. That’s how I mean it here: a detail that looks small, even decorative, but quietly feeds the kind of civic health a country either has or doesn’t.

Last summer, I was in Ethiopia. I had the opportunity to visit some government offices, and what I saw, in retrospect, was a bit disturbing. In many of those offices, there was the picture of the Prime Minister, Abiy Ahmed. Big frames. Prominent placement. You walk into an administrative office and there he is, sometimes with the minister after him, and even at local levels these pictures show up somewhere on the wall, like a default feature of public space.

And it got me thinking: what are these pictures doing there?

They’re not informational. They’re not helping you understand who is responsible for what. They don’t tell you where to go, who to ask, or what the process is. They don’t help the citizen navigate the institution. So if they’re not functional, what are they?

They are symbolic, obviously. But symbolic of what?

To me, it’s a gesture that says leadership is above you. Authority lives elsewhere. The office you walked into is not really the center of anything. It is a branch, a corridor, a waiting room of power. The real presence in the room is not the clerk, not the local administrator, and not the public servant whose job actually determines whether you get served or delayed. The real presence is the face on the wall.

And that’s the message I don’t like. It’s a kingship message. Even when nobody intends it that way, it teaches a certain kind of political psychology: that the state is a person, that institutions are extensions of that person, and that public service is something you receive by grace from above, not something you are owed by a system with rules.

I’m not trying to psychoanalyze anybody’s intention. I’m not saying Abiy Ahmed personally demanded those portraits or that every office that hangs them is consciously worshipping him. That’s not my point. My point is what the practice does, what it trains people to feel, what it quietly normalizes.

And the more I think about it, the more I realize the deeper issue isn’t even the presence of the Prime Minister’s portrait. The deeper issue is the absence of everyone else.

Because this isn’t just Ethiopia. In Eritrea too, you can walk into hospitals, offices, and local administrative zones, and what you’ll tend to see (if you see a face at all) is the face of President Isaias Afwerki. And here’s the strange thing: Isaias is not even marketed the way classic cult personality figures are marketed. It’s not like you see his face on every single wall the way some regimes do it. In fact, the relative scarcity of his portraits can almost create this misleading impression that the state isn’t built around personality.

But that’s exactly why it’s so revealing. Even without flooding every room with his image, he still remains the only figure in the country in a symbolic sense. He’s the only “center” that exists in public consciousness. The space is not populated by local faces, local authority, local competence, or local contribution. It’s empty of people. And in an empty landscape, the one figure who exists becomes larger than life even without trying.

So again: the problem is not merely that the President’s picture appears. The problem is that nobody else does.

Where are the pictures of the hospital administrators? Where are the pictures of the senior nurses who built that ward from nothing? Where are the doctors who served a community for twenty years? Where are the school principals who kept a school alive through scarcity? Where are the local civil servants who actually carry the daily weight of governance? Where are the names and faces that tell the public, ‘This institution is made of people, and these are the people responsible’?

If you think about it, a portrait wall can be a kind of civic map. It can teach you who built the institution, who led it, who is accountable for it, who contributed to it. It can create institutional memory. It can create pride that is not nationalistic in the abstract but local and earned: this hospital has a history, this office has a standard, and this place has people who made it function.

Instead, what we often have is the opposite. We have a system where the local office is not allowed to have a face of its own. It cannot produce local heroes. It cannot elevate local competence. It cannot say, “This is ours.” It can only borrow legitimacy from above.

And that has consequences.

Because when you remove local figures from the walls, you also remove local authority from the imagination. You train citizens to believe that the only power that matters is the power at the top. You train public servants to feel like they are not representatives of an institution with dignity but mere attendants in a hierarchy. You turn governance into a theater of distance: power is always elsewhere, and the local office is just where you go to beg.

That’s why I keep coming back to this thought experiment: if I were the leader of Eritrea, I would make it a rule that my picture does not hang in local administrative zones. Not because I’m trying to be humble for the cameras. Not because I want to perform modesty. But because it’s structurally unhealthy for a public service ecosystem to be visually and symbolically organized around one person.

If there is ever a need for a leader’s picture, fine, save it for campaigns, save it for a formal national venue, save it for contexts where symbolism is actually part of the job. But in the places where people go to solve problems (local offices, hospitals, service windows, municipal departments), those walls should not be occupied by the distant face of national power.

They should be local.

They should show the administrator, the director, and the department head. They should show the people who built the place, the people who improved it, and the people who served in it. And not in a propaganda way. In a basic, functional, civic way. Because when people walk into an office, it should be obvious who is responsible. It should be obvious who to hold accountable. It should be obvious that this institution has continuity beyond the mood of politics.

And there’s another reason this matters: it would empower local figures in a way that is deeper than motivational speeches. It would give them institutional presence. It would quietly tell them, ‘You are not invisible.’ Your work is part of the story of the state. You are not just a replaceable body under someone’s shadow. You are a named contributor to something public.

It’s easy to dismiss this as aesthetics. It’s easy to say, “It’s just pictures.” But pictures are never just pictures. They are the language of power without words. They tell you what matters, who matters, where legitimacy comes from, and what kind of relationship you’re supposed to have with the state.

And this is where my mind always goes: tomorrow’s Eritrea.

Not because I think our current system is open to reforms, big or small. We live under a structure that refuses reform in whatever form it comes, even when the suggestion is minor, practical, and almost harmless. But that’s exactly why I hold onto details like this. They help me picture a different civic atmosphere, a different relationship between the citizen and the state, and a different way institutions can feel.

So in tomorrow’s Eritrea, I imagine local walls looking local. Offices that reflect responsibility, not reverence. Hospitals that reflect care, not hierarchy. Public spaces where legitimacy comes from function, continuity, and named contribution, not from a distant face hanging above a service window.

It’s a minor thing, yes. But minor things are often where a healthier country first becomes imaginable.

Contact author  tesfai33@gmail.com