Ethiopia-Eritrea Tensions Trigger Fears of a Fresh Regional Conflict

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Highlights of this week: Ethiopia’s efforts to reach the sea are renewed Tensions with EritreaThe army launches a coup Guinea Bissaufacing Nigerians of all faiths Violence escalates.

Escalation between Ethiopia and Eritrea

Ethiopian and Eritrean leaders have exchanged hostile statements in recent weeks, raising international fears of a new regional conflict. The latest round of tensions was largely driven by landlocked Ethiopia’s demand for direct access to the Red Sea, which it described as an “existential issue.”

Last month, Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed called for international “mediation” with Eritrea to restore that access, which he insisted was “inevitable.” Abiy and his officials also raised the idea of ​​seizing the port of Assab in southern Eritrea by force. Ethiopia became a landlocked country in 1993, when Eritrea gained independence after a 30-year war.

Eritrean Information Minister Yemane Gebremeskel said that Ethiopian officials are trying to “ignite an unjustified war” with this speech.

Meanwhile, Ethiopian officials have accused Eritrea of ​​colluding with a “militant faction” of the Tigray People’s Liberation Front — the dominant political group in Ethiopia’s Tigray region for three decades — to renew the deadly civil war in northern Ethiopia, which raged from 2020 to 2022 and stretched from Tigray to the Afar and Amhara regions.

In an October 2 letter to UN Secretary-General António Guterres, Ethiopian Foreign Minister Gideon Timotheus accused Eritrea and TPLF rebel factions of “financing, mobilizing and directing armed groups” in Amhara.

Eritrea has rejected these allegations, writing on X that Ethiopia’s letter to the UN is a “deceptive charade.”

Ethiopian-Eritrean relations have long been fraught. Eritrean President Isaias Afwerki and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front were once allies when they fought against Ethiopia’s communist government in the 1980s, but after Eritrea gained independence and a TPLF-led government came to power in Ethiopia, the two countries fought a brutal border war that lasted for years, with enduring mutual hostility.

The two countries signed a peace deal in 2018 – a move that earned Abiy Ahmed the Nobel Peace Prize – and Eritrea fought alongside the Ethiopian army during the civil war in Tigray.

However, Isaias was dissatisfied with the 2022 peace agreement signed with the TPLF in Pretoria, South Africa, as were some TPLF factions, who felt they were marginalized and forced to disarm, while TPLF officials who negotiated the deal were given roles in the interim regional administration of Tigray.

Since then, Eritrea has reportedly mended its relations with splinter factions of the Tigray People’s Liberation Front. “The strongest arm of the TPLF factions has begun to form a relationship with their former enemies during the two-year war: Eritrea,” said Johannes Woldemariam, an analyst specializing in the Horn of Africa. Foreign policy.

The latest war of words came with renewed clashes along the Tigray-Afar border. In recent weeks, Abiy accused the TPLF of diverting its regional budget to armed activities. In contrast, TPLF officials have claimed that Abiy’s government is limiting access to basic goods in order to “starve the people of Tigray into rebellion.” Afar officials accused Tigray forces of crossing into their territory and seizing several villages.

Meanwhile, Eritrean forces continue to occupy areas on the Ethiopian border that they captured during the 2020-2022 Tigray War, despite US and UN calls for Eritrea to withdraw all its forces.

“Whatever the formula for de-escalation, the bottom line is that the Horn of Africa, and the world, cannot afford another war between Eritrea and Ethiopia,” Michael Woldemariam and Abel Abate Demissie recently wrote in their op-ed. Foreign policy.

Security experts are calling for renewed diplomacy by the African Union, South Africa and the United States to stop the collapse of the Pretoria Agreement. “The risk of renewed cycles of atrocities is very real,” Human Rights Watch warned last week.

next week

Wednesday 26 November: Conducting local and regional elections in Namibia.

Thursday 27 November: The OECD hosts the International Economic Forum on Africa in Paris.

What we watch

Guinea-Bissau coup. The military in Guinea-Bissau said it arrested President Umaru Sissoko Embalo and took control of the country for an “indefinite” period on Wednesday following disputed elections on Sunday.

Embalo, a former army general who took office in 2020, and opposition candidate Fernando Dias, declared victory on Monday, ahead of the official results. On Wednesday, a group of army officers said on state television that they had stopped the electoral process, and residents in the capital, Bissau, reported hearing gunfire and said the army had set up checkpoints across the city.

The elections had raised tensions even before this week. The main opposition party – the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC), which led the country’s independence from Portugal – was barred from running after the Supreme Court said it had submitted its documents late. Some factions of the army supported the APIG, and without its own candidate, the APIG supported the opposition’s main rival Dias.

Guinea Bissau has witnessed a number of coups and coup attempts. The country’s opposition-dominated parliament has not convened since 2023, when it was dissolved by Embalo after an attempted coup.

Violence in Nigeria. As US President Donald Trump threatens military action to combat what he calls the persecution of Nigerian Christians, Nigerians of all faiths face increasing violence amid a Nigerian military ill-equipped to deal with a toxic mix of attacks by Islamists, commercial gangs and separatists.

On Saturday, the Nigerian state of Niger ordered the closure of all schools indefinitely after the kidnapping of 303 children and 12 teachers from a Catholic school, a few days after the kidnapping of about 25 Muslim schoolgirls in neighboring Kebbi state.

On that day, the federal government separately announced the closure of 41 schools under its control and increased patrols around forests in northern Nigeria, which are considered strongholds of terrorist networks.

Meanwhile, earlier this month, a senior Nigerian officer, Brig. General Musa Uba, a Muslim, was executed by ISIS-WAP militants, along with four other Nigerian soldiers in the northeastern state of Borno. Gangs also attacked a church in Kwara State, killing at least two people, and a Muslim-majority village in Zamfara State, killing three people and kidnapping 64 others.

Between July 2024 and June 2025, nearly 5,000 people were kidnapped across Nigeria, with criminal gangs collecting more than $1.6 million in ransom, according to SBM Intelligence, a Nigerian risk management firm. The United Nations World Food Program on Tuesday predicted that about 35 million Nigerians will face severe famine by the middle of next year due to insecurity affecting agriculture.

G20 results. Amid the US boycott, the G20 declaration adopted in South Africa last weekend focused largely on issues that US officials opposed, including climate change, gender equality, and global wealth disparity.

South African President Cyril Ramaphosa took the unconventional step of issuing the statement at the opening of the summit, rather than at its end. This initiative was supported by all members of the G20 except the United States and Argentina, whose president, Javier Miley, is an ally of Trump.

Pretoria officials said Bloomberg They expect Trump to exclude South Africa from the bloc’s meetings next year when the United States assumes the presidency of the G20.

What we read

African visual language. In It’s Nice, Ugonna-Ora Owoh explores the intricacies of Nigerian typography, from the latitude inspired by traditional Yoruba wrestling to the lettering used at Festac ’77, the largest African festival ever.

“Contrary to what may be known, type design has always had a quiet but constant presence in Nigeria’s visual culture,” he writes. This tradition is in danger of being lost amid the widespread use of Western typefaces, but “an increasing number of Nigerian designers are returning to the craft… [and] This is finding its way into global design conversations.

The Rand Club declined. A Johannesburg institution, once known as a hub for some of the world’s richest white men, has seen its fortunes dwindle along with South Africa’s economy, Alexandra Wexler reports in The Guardian. Wall Street Journal.

The Rand Club, which was founded in 1887 and once hosted novelist Rudyard Kipling, is now struggling to stay afloat. “Her experiences, what she experienced as an institution, reflects what the city has gone through, what the country has gone through,” one club member told Wexler.