Behaillu Teferra, writing on 20 June 2019, asked Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed to professionalise the bureaucracy and stop filling posts along ethnic lines. His test case was the appointment of Birhanemeskel Abebe Segni as consul general in Los Angeles. Teferra argued that Ethiopians in the United States, and the diplomatic service, would be poorly served by a nominee he said had treated non-Oromo residents of Addis Ababa as settlers without a right to live in the capital. He pointed to a Facebook post of 30 June 2017 in which, he wrote, Segni set out a ten-point strategy aimed at hurting those residents.
Teferra’s wider claim was that competence and merit should decide appointments, and that swapping one set of loyalists for another would not repair the state. He said extremist ethnic politics had entered government structures, and that the people around the prime minister would shape how the public read him. He also said officials should be held to account for past conduct, and he criticised the path that took former foreign minister Workneh Gebeyehu to a United Nations post in Nairobi. He tied that complaint to a belief that the recommendation had come from Abiy’s government.
Teferra presented those points as his own opinion. Teferra still urged Ethiopians in the diaspora to keep supporting the effort to bring the country out of its political crisis. He asked for a more open confirmation process, so the public could comment before senior officials were sent abroad. The Los Angeles posting, in his telling, was the kind of choice that could cost the prime minister credibility with the very diaspora he wanted on his side.
Sources: Borkena