In April 2019, Thomson Reuters Foundation’s Tom Gardner reported from Sululta and other satellite towns where residents said local officials were marking informal homes for demolition, with people muttering it would be better to kill them than erase their neighborhoods.
Anxiety ran especially hot in Oromia fringes of Addis Ababa, where informal housing, job migration, and ethnic federal politics collide. Families who built without perfect paperwork faced bulldozers dressed up as urban order.
Abiy Ahmed’s early years sold modernization and corridor aesthetics. For people on the peri-urban edge, reform looked like eviction notices and silence about compensation.
As land-rights archive, the Sululta file still bites. Ethiopia’s housing fights are not side stories. They are how the Ethiopian government decides who belongs in the capital’s expanding map.
Sources: Thomson Reuters Foundation, Reuters
