Телеграм канал «Tsegaye R Ararssa»

IRREECHAA: WHAT IT MEANS TO ME? (2015)
By Tsegaye Ararssa
Irreechaa, for me, is a mode of perpetual self-creation, social and personal. It is an aspect of performing Oromummaa in one’s own (varied) contexts. It’s an aspect of cultural nationalism which traces and re-enacts it as a site of resistance.
At the affective level, it is an expression of the Oromo longing for emancipation, the longing for an alternative future. In a way, it’s a going back in time and space in order to recover our pristine wholeness that will inform the aspiration for a redeemed future.
Irreechaa is also a remembrance, a remembering of loss, grief, and national suffering.
It is a storehouse of memory that fosters national and personal self-recovery.
It’s also a celebration of survival, survivance, and vitality.
It’s thanksgiving on a grand scale. It is a festivity but it is also a mode of reckoning.
As a reckoning, it is an act of thinking as thanking. It’s an act of infinite gratitude that brings wholeness by linking Uumaa (creator) and uumamaa (creation), nama (humankind) and namummaa (humanity). It’s an act of linking the natural, the human, and the divine and a celebration of the infinite interconnectedness thereof.
For the Oromo Diaspora, the Irreechaa moment is a moment of performing home in exile. It is a longing for home. As such, it’s a site of struggle, a site of the agon, a site of imagining home. it is a way of homecoming.
It’s a way of becoming what we would have been.
Irreechaa is a moment of re-enacting life in its fullness, in all its colors and brilliance, and in its infinite beauty as a treasure.
It is a celebration of vitality and life in the past, the present, and the future.
Above all, it’s thanksgiving. Even in the midst of the festivity, it is a moment of thinking (thinking as thanking), and a reminder of the need for a grateful reflection as a way of life.
That is what irreechaa means to me but it is still much more than what these words could say.
What does it mean to you?



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The Illusion of Native Leadership: Systemic Continuity in the Oromo Struggle
Tsegaye R Ararssa
3 October 2026
The fundamental nature of a colonial-imperial system does not change simply because native individuals occupy the seats of power. Imperialism is not merely defined by the ethnicity of the ruler, but by the structural relations of extraction, cultural assimilation, and political subjugation that define the state. In the context of Ethiopia’s political history and the ongoing Oromo struggle, the transition of power to leaders of native Oromo descent has vividly demonstrated that representation without structural deconstruction serves only to mask, rather than dismantle, historical imperial frameworks.
Ethiopia’s state architecture was built on an imperial model in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, characterized by the centralization of power, the erasure of distinct national identities, and the dispossession of land and economic resources, and social displacement of the natives, and economic exploitation of the (labor and resources of) southern peripheries, including Oromia. For generations, the Oromo national struggle has aimed to dismantle this asymmetric (imperial-colonial) system in pursuit of sovereignty, self-determination, cultural recognition, and genuine democracy. However, the state’s response to these demands has often been to kill, incarcerate, or co-opt native elites into the ruling apparatus—the latter being a classic mechanism of imperial survival.
When native leaders (such as Abiy Ahmed, or the likes of Nagaasoo Gidaadaa,  Girma Woldegiorgis, Mulatu Teshome, etc) ascend to the helm of an unreformed imperial-colonial state, they become hostages to the very bureaucracy and institutional culture they inherit. To maintain power within a centralized imperial-colonial system, these rulers frequently adopt the same coercive instruments as their predecessors: military occupation of regions, political detentions, securitisation of identities, and the suppression of local autonomy. The identity of the oppressor changes, but the language of the state remains genocide (in the name of nation-building or of ‘saving the nation’), looting, plunder, and insatiable extraction, and control of both the the Oromo bodies and the body politic (the Oromo persons and their territories). For the average Oromo person, a checkpoint manned by an Oromo soldier enforcing a genocidal cum extractive policy feels no different from one manned by any other imperial agent (mimicking the old system of bal-abbaat and/nafxanyaa-gabbaar).
Ultimately, true emancipation requires the decolonisation of the state's structures, not just the diversification of its personnel. The Oromo struggle highlights a universal political truth: as long as the underlying imperial-colonial logic of a state remains intact, native leadership acts merely as a cosmetic layer over a system of continuous domination. Genuine liberation is achieved only when the system itself is structurally transformed to reflect the self-determination and equality of all its peoples.
#Oromo #TheBeautifulOnesAreNotYetBorn. #Keenya_karaan_dheeraa_dha!

“The African Union must convene an emergency session on the armed conflict in northern Ethiopia.” Amnesty.

“The African Union must convene an emergency session on the armed conflict in northern Ethiopia.” Amnesty.

https://www.amnestyusa.org/press-releases/ethiopia-african-union-must-convene-emergency-session-on-ethiopia-as-new-conflict-expands/

https://oromia.today/what-irreechaa-means-to-the-oromo-people/

What Irreechaa Means to the Oromo People

https://www.counterpunch.org/2026/10/02/when-law-legitimates-the-machinery-of-authoritarianism/

https://oromia.today/mayor-adanech-abiebie-rewards-an-openly-racist-amhara-girma-seifu-with-city-cabinet-post/

Mayor Adanech Abiebie Rewards an Openly Racist Amhara, Girma Seifu, with City Cabinet Post