The Arithmetic of Oppression: When Truth Becomes a Crime in the Somali Region of Ethiopia

“There always comes a time in history when anyone who dares to say that two and two make four is punished by death. The teacher knows it well.”

— Albert Camus

I. The Forbidden Equation of Truth

In a world where truth is chained, where history is twisted into a blade wielded by the powerful, the simple act of declaring reality becomes a revolutionary crime. In the Somali Region of Ethiopia, for nearly a century, the truth – that a people exist with an identity, with a land, with a soul – has been a perilous utterance.

For over eighty years, a mathematical impossibility has been forced upon its people. They were told: "You are here, but you are not. You belong, yet you do not. You exist, yet you must not."

When the arithmetic of justice is manipulated, when two plus two must never equal four, those who insist on logic become enemies of the state. The teacher – history itself – knows it well.

II. The Vanishing Ink of a People: Eighty Years of Expulsion and Subjugation

A traveler wandering through the cracked landscapes of the Somali Region will find that its soil is not merely dust and rock – it is manuscript and memory, written in blood, erased in silence.

For nearly a century, the region has been the theater of orchestrated tragedies:

• Killings that became routine, as governments turned bullets into policies.
• Displacements that turned citizens into shadows, pushing families across borders, never to return.
• Expulsions that emptied homes, so that history itself would forget their occupants.
• Subjugation that bent the spine of a proud people but never broke their will.

The architects of oppression attempted to erase an entire people, to rewrite their identity into a footnote of history. Yet, like ink that refuses to fade, their truth persists.

III. The Land of the Silenced: A Timeline of Betrayals

• 1948: As colonial lines were drawn in ink and blood, the Somali people found themselves partitioned not by choice, but by the calculations of foreign cartographers. Ethiopia absorbed the region, and with it, an enduring resistance was born.
• 1960s – 1970s: A time of armed defiance. The people, unwilling to be statistics in someone else’s census, fought for recognition. The price was steep: executions, exile, and the branding of "traitor" for those who spoke the truth.
• 1980s – 1990s: Under the iron fist of the Derg regime, entire villages were burned, elders slain, and children orphaned. The script was simple – speak, and you die.
• 1994 Onward: In an age where democracy was whispered but never realized, the region saw new masters but the same chains. “Citizenship” was granted in name yet denied in practice. The state's hand extended in governance but clenched in subjugation.

IV. The Geometry of Injustice: How Systems Are Built to Lie

If two plus two makes four, then a people with a land should have sovereignty. If two plus two makes four, then a history of suffering should lead to justice. However, in the Somali Region, the equation is different. Here, the sum is always distorted.

The instruments of erasure are precise:

• Bureaucratic Arithmetic: ID cards are issued selectively. Citizenship is contingent, not a birthright.
• Political Geometry: District lines are drawn and redrawn to dilute representation, ensuring that voices that should be equal are systematically reduced.
• Economic Subtraction: Resources extracted, wealth redirected, development halted, ensuring dependency rather than self-sufficiency.

The numbers never add up – not because they don’t exist, but because the powerful rewrite them.

V. The Unbreakable Equation of Resistance

Yet, even in the darkest calculus of oppression, some truths refuse to be rewritten. The people of the Somali Region have not only survived; they have persisted. Like the unyielding sun over the Ogaden plains, their existence defies erasure.

• Poets became historians when official records lied.
• Elders became fortresses when governments betrayed them.
• Youth became the torchbearers when hope was outlawed.

When a system demands that two plus two must equal five, it is not only a mathematical lie but a moral abyss. But the Somali Region, with its scars and its spirit, refuses to surrender to false equations.

VI. The Distortion of Governance: When Authority Becomes a Variable

If governance is meant to be a structured equation, then recent developments in the Somali Region introduce irrational numbers – terms that do not fit the logical sequence of constitutional authority. The emergence of the Presidium Committee, where the elected president of the region holds merely a single vote, raises profound questions about legitimacy. The ruling party appears to have usurped the role of governance, treating the government as its subsidiary rather than a constitutionally mandated institution. The Somali people, who have endured decades of systemic exclusions and miscalculations, now watch a peculiar contradiction unfold: a president reduced to a ceremonial figurehead while a party apparatus dictates executive functions.

Such structural mishaps are not mere political adjustments; they signal a dangerous precedent. If the region’s leadership structure is reduced to an appendage of the ruling party, then the very arithmetic of democracy – where governance must be separate from party control – is fundamentally disrupted. This may undo the confidence Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed has carefully built over the past six years in the Somali Region. Scholars, legal minds, and even astute political observers are left wondering: Is this an oversight, a miscalculation, or a deliberate restructuring of power outside constitutional bounds? And if the Prime Minister himself is unaware or misinformed about these worrisome developments, the equation of governance may soon collapse under the weight of its own contradictions.

VI. The Federal Equation: No Region is Peripheral, No Ethnicity Owns Ethiopia

Ethiopia’s federation is not a monolithic structure nor a singular equation where one ethnicity dictates the sum. Each region holds a unique status, an irreplaceable variable in the grand calculus of nation-building. The Oromo bring their depth of political dynamism, the Amhara their historical influence, the Tigray their strategic resilience, and the Somali Region – often misperceived as peripheral – its unmatched geopolitical leverage, economic potential, and the untamed spirit of a frontier that has never bowed to external will. The Somali Region is not an appendage to be contested nor a pie to be divided at the convenience of others – it is a sovereign entity in Ethiopia’s grand theorem, a region whose contribution to the shared future is non-negotiable.

If Ethiopia is ever to achieve stability, then it must be owned by all or by none. No ethnicity, regardless of size or past dominance, can lay sole claim to its identity. If some wish to own Ethiopia over others, let them speak it under the sun – let them declare it openly so the world may bear witness. But let them also know: the Somali Region is not a province to be claimed, not a territory to be consumed, and not a silent participant in a federation dictated by others. Any illusion that it can be taken, politically or otherwise, is a miscalculation. And in the blink of an eye, if history demands it, the people of the Somali Region will define their own formula, their own path, their own destiny. Because sovereignty is not granted – it is asserted.

VII. The Algorithm of Hope and Imperfection

A true mathematician knows that perfection does not exist, only approximation. The Somali Region has not achieved a utopian balance, but neither is it trapped in the perpetual subtraction of the past. The past six and a half years have introduced new coefficients: a degree of autonomy, an evolving voice in federal politics, and a cautious recognition that governance must be more than just an instrument of survival. The sum of these changes is not yet prosperity, but it is motion – an upward trajectory in an equation that once only spiraled downward.

But equations can be rewritten, and the risk remains: will this progress be exponential growth, or will it plateau under the weight of old mistakes? Will the balance tip toward true representation, or will hidden variables – external pressures, internal fractures, political myopia – shift the numbers against the people once again? The answer is not yet clear, but the Somali Region, now armed with experience, must remain the authors of its own formula, ensuring that the sum of their struggle equals more than just survival – it must be justice, dignity, and unshakable existence.

VIII. The Final Calculation

One cannot solve an equation without acknowledging all its variables. For Ethiopia to move forward, it must recognize that suppressing a people does not erase them. That denying history does not change its reality. That two plus two, no matter how many times rewritten, will always make four.

The Somali Region has been the margin, the afterthought, the inconvenient truth. But margins have a way of becoming headlines.

A reckoning is not coming – it is here. And when the final sum is written, let it be truth, not silence, that stands unchallenged.

Because the teacher knows it well: "The truth, no matter how buried, will one day rise."

Mohamud A. Ahmed – Cagaweyne

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