r/Ethiopia

After my last post a few people basically asked the same thing: if Sweden works so much better, why the hell do I still choose Ethiopia? 😂

And honestly it's a fair question. I was born and raised in Stockholm. Sweden has better infrastructure, public services, salaries, transport, healthcare and internet. On paper this shouldn't even be a competition.

But living somewhere and comparing countries on paper are two completely different things.

Sweden always felt very safe and predictable to me. You get a job, go to work, come home, buy groceries, maybe hit the gym, sleep and do it again. Nothing is necessarily wrong with that, but after a while I felt like I was maintaining my life more than actually building one.

The social part is probably what I notice most. You can have plenty of friends and somehow still barely see anyone because everybody is busy with work, commuting, errands and their own routines. You ask somebody if they want to grab coffee and suddenly you're comparing calendars like two CEOs.

"How about the 24th?"

Bro it's the 8th 😭

Here I can call somebody at 5 and be sitting with them at 6. Then somebody else joins, someone knows somebody, and somehow a 30 minute coffee turns into dinner and I've met three new people, and drank 8 jambos.

Career-wise I feel something similar. Sweden is a rich country, but it's also a very mature and saturated market. Whatever idea you have, somebody probably started doing it 15 years ago and already has funding, employees and a polished website 😂

Ethiopia is almost the opposite. You constantly come across things and think, "How does nobody do this properly yet?" Obviously that's because Ethiopia has a LOT of problems, but problems also create gaps. If you have skills, connections, some capital and you're willing to take risks, those gaps can become opportunities.

This probably sounds backwards considering the difference in average income, but I genuinely know more people here making crazy money through business than I ever did in Sweden.

I'm not saying the average Ethiopian should reject Sweden because "bro Ethiopia has potential" 😂 I'm talking about my own situation and what fits me.

There's also another side of Sweden that's harder to separate from this. I grew up there as a black guy, and I've experienced enough racism to know that being born somewhere doesn't automatically mean everybody sees you the same way they see everyone else. That affects how you think about belonging and opportunity too.

Ethiopia obviously has its own problems. I'm not pretending it's some utopia. But here I feel like I'm participating in something that's still being built.

Sweden gives me a more comfortable and predictable life. Ethiopia gives me a life where I feel like there's still room to move.

Maybe when I'm 55 I'll be sitting in Stockholm enjoying functioning public transport and wondering why younger me voluntarily spent years arguing with electricity 😂

But right now, I still prefer this.

what y'all really think about Jawar? he seems reasonable and logical and the way he explains politics, do predictions are all accurate.

I feel like ethiopia is wasting an Elite. I just couldn't find someone who's clear and more stable than political stand and consistency than Jawar.

let's hear y'all opinion

There is a frustrating, pervasive trend on social media to collapse Habeshas and Ethiopians in general into the Black racial identity. Whenever Habeshas point out that the global label "Black" does not align with our history, culture, or self-identity, we are routinely accused of internalizing anti-Blackness. In reality, accepting a 250-year-old Eurocentric classification system invented during the Enlightenment to place white people at the top and Black people at the bottom, originally designed to justify the subjugation and transatlantic trade of West and Central Africans, is what actually erases our identity. Forcing this external framework onto the Horn of Africa ignores both regional history and self-determination; if we passively adopt it, we will dilute and erase our own distinct identity.

Historically, Ethiopia had virtually no connection to 80% of the rest of the continent. Core Ethiopian cultures, such as Habesha and Oromo culture, are vastly different from Western, Central, or Southern Africa. Genetically, core Ethiopians fall into an entirely distinct cluster from the majority of Africans; genetically, HELL EVEN INDIANS are genetically closer to Europeans than Habeshas are to Central Africans. Scientifically, forcing the label makes zero sense: core Ethiopian languages belong to the Afroasiatic language family (Semitic and Cushitic branches), sharing not a single word or phrase with Niger-Congo language families. Phenotypically, we are also completely distinct - I can easily tell a Habesha apart from a Congolese or South African person.

Anticipating the standard pushback in the comments:

• "White people/police in the West still see you as Black": External perception by uninformed outsiders in Western countries does not dictate your heritage or global reality. A Western cop or random bystander miscategorizing us based on local racial(white-black) binaries doesn't rewrite thousands of years of habesha history and distinct population genetics.
• "We are all African / Pan-Africanism": Africa is a giant geographic continent with over 1.4 billion people, thousands of distinct ethnic groups, and completely separate linguistic families, not a monolith. Ethiopians are distinct in the continent culturally, genetically, historically, lingustically, and phenotypically - what more do you need. Geographic continentality is not a racial identity, just as Asians are not a single monolithic race.
• "You're just denying reality for us diaspora Ethiopians living in the west": Tying identity strictly to skin shade or a 20th-century U.S. census form is social construction, not biological truth. You are literally enabling it by accepting and forcing that identity onto yourself, i.e, you're socially being constructed to fit their model.

Telling a population what they "are" based on a Western census model created thousands of miles away is not anti-racist - it is cultural flattening. Our ancestors defined themselves by their region, lineage, faith, and specific ethnic heritage, not by broad racial frameworks imposed from the outside. I know who I am, and I know my history. It is time we stop adopting labels that have no historical, genetic, or linguistic meaning to us, or else we risk letting external systems overwrite who we truly are.

AND I want this to be perfectly clear: I have nothing against people who are actually Black and identify as such - mostly people from West and Central Africa whose identity is tied to that specific history. Many of them are great people! But this masquerade has to stop. There is absolutely no reason to lump yourself into an identity you have no connection to just because some external system tells you to.

Hey, I’m based in Ethiopia and trying to enroll as an individual so I can publish an iPhone app. When i try to enroll my passport and id keeps failing.

I’ve been having trouble with enrollment and ID verification, and I’m getting conflicting information about whether Ethiopian residents can enroll.

Has anyone here actually completed it while living in Ethiopia? What country/region did you use, what ID did Apple accept, and did you enroll through the Developer app or the website?

Would appreciate hearing from someone who’s been through it, especially recently.

So the war has roughly been goin on for 3 weeks now and ive noticed the killing butchering looting of churchs and amharas have completly stopped since the so called government's attention is on war, makes u think who actually was responsible for all tje atrocities

[removed]

I just spent a whole night in fucking custody for no reason.

Disclaimer I'm not even from Tigray, I was born in Eritrea and I'm Eritrean by origin, and have never been to Tigray. on Saturday night, I was out with my friends on the outside chairs of a coffee shop and we were talking to each other (in Tigrinya), and there were three police officers staring at us a few meters away, then they suddenly walked up to us and started harassing us demanding our identification, then told us we were being detained. We asked for what reason and they said that because we were in a group it was 'suspicious activity'. I spent the night in custody and they interrogated me non-stop, searched my entire clothes, phone, wallet, even opened up my fucking shoes to see if I was hiding shit in there, asked me if I was with Shabia/Tibibir (I haven't been back to Eritrea in over 2 decades), and the next day I couldn't stay longer as I could risk losing my job, I paid them 10,000 birr and they let me go but not until they investigated me again for another 5 hours.

I'm not the only one that this happened to, I even had to pay to bail out my cousin last week who they arrested for the same stupid reason, this reminds me when they were mass arresting Tigrayans here during the war, it's fucking ludicrous, the government has an intelligence system, I understand there's a war going on but they can't be that paranoid to just mass arrest people they see on the streets for no reason. Complete bullshit, fuck this government.

Is this a sign of discrimination? Or the government is using police corruption to build up their funds for this stupid war?

A bunch of explosions rang out in Addis, people there said. They seem to be caused by drones that have targeted the military base and airport.

If these reports are true, this is pretty significant isn’t it? Addis hasn’t ever been struck by drones in modern warfare. It pretty much strips the image of Addis as the safe haven of the country free from this war bullshit.

What’s the go here for ENDF? Invest in Addis-stationed anti-drone technology if these reports are true? I know the federal government is in partnership with Turkey, the UAE and Israel for such equipment.

And can anyone in AA report if these explosions are actually drone related?

Sometimes Ethiopia feels like a book stuck on repeat.

We keep returning to familiar conflicts, familiar arguments, and familiar consequences, while somehow expecting a different outcome.

If the old hypothesis keeps producing the same result, why not test a new one?

Maybe the next chapter deserves dialogue, peace, and development instead.

♾️🇪🇹

So basically Tigres and Amharas don’t want to be ruled by Oromos. And the Oromos are supporting these groups just to punish Aby’s past mistakes on them. I am just confused what each side wants. Peaceful Ethopia is what we all need in the horn.