Earlier this month, prominent Ethiopian politician Lencho Leta spoke to local media about his political journey. An edited video of his interview was shared with a text overlay claiming that Lencho said his former political party had always renounced Ethiopian nationalism and continued to do so. However, this is misleading: in the interview, Lencho merely said there was no consensus historically about what constituted nationalism in the multi-ethnic state of Ethiopia, but that there were signs the situation was changing.
The post was published on Facebook on November 5, 2024, and has been shared more than 220 times.
It contains a TikTok video more than six minutes in length and shows Lencho being interviewed by a journalist outdoors.
“As OLF, we have never wanted Ethiopian nationalism and we still don’t today,” reads the video’s Amharic caption.
Screenshot of the misleading post, taken on August 19, 2024
The video was viewed more than 16,500 times on TikTok (archived here).
Lencho was among the founding members of Oromo Liberation Front (OLF), established in 1973 and one of the oldest political movements in Ethiopia (archived here). OLF is a political organisation that advocates for the right to self-determination of Oromo people – Ethiopia’s largest ethnic group.
Lencho co-founded the Oromo Democratic Front (ODF) in 2013 after a fallout with OLF leadership (archived here). The ODF, which merged with the ruling party of the Oromia region in 2018, now wants to democratise what Lencho calls the “Ethiopian federation” rather than create a separate Oromian republic.
“At that time [when the OLF was founded], we were highly motivated by what constituted Ethiopian nationalism. Yet, we have not agreed on what really constitutes Ethiopian nationalism,” Lencho says at the beginning of the clip.
“We did not agree on the unity of Ethiopia or Ethiopian nationalism. We did not find our identity in Ethiopian nationalism. We were not part of it.”
He then talks about the Gojjam uprising, which took place in late 1960, and the Ethiopian feudal system (archived here).
At 3’40”, the journalist asks Lencho what motivated him and his colleagues to establish the OLF and whether their political goals have been achieved.
In response, he mentions two “successes”, those being “the land reform policy that was implemented during the Derg regime and the multi-ethnic federalism that was formulated by the Ethiopian transitional government in 1991”.
Ethiopian nationalism
There are contending views on Ethiopian nationalism (here and here). For some, Ethiopian nationalism helped form a unified, sovereign nation-state regardless of ethnicity (archived here and here).
But opponents see it as an instrument of manipulation by which a single ethnic group, the Amharas, historically imposed their identity on Ethiopia’s other ethnic groups (archived here).
Lencho has called on several occasions for Ethiopian nationalism to be negotiated so that it can lead to equality between the country’s ethnic groups (archived here).
However, the clip does not show Lencho renouncing Ethiopian nationalism outright.
Edited video
AFP Fact Check used the video verification tool InVID-WeVerify to conduct reverse image searches on keyframes from the video.
The search led to a longer version of the video published on YouTube by Addis Maleda, a digital news organisation on November 2, 2024 (archived here). The original video is more than 27 minutes long.
In the first 25 minutes, Lencho discusses historical trends in Ethiopian politics from the 1960s in the feudal context and the rise of political movements, including the OLF and the Gojjam uprising.
AFP Fact Check established that the TikTok clip comprised sections from the original video.
From 22’40”, Lencho responds to the journalist’s question about whether OLF’s political objectives have been achieved.
“Most of the objectives have not been met. There were only two important things achieved. The land reform policy that was implemented during the Derg regime and the multi-ethnic federalism that was formulated by the Ethiopian transitional government in 1991,” he says.
“At that time we were highly motivated by what constituted Ethiopian nationalism. Yet, we have not agreed on what really constitutes Ethiopian nationalism. We did not agree on the unity of Ethiopia nor Ethiopian nationalism. We did not find our identity in Ethiopian nationalism. We were not part of it.”
The journalist asks Lencho: “What were your criterias to measure that?”.
Lencho responds: “Ethiopian nationalism did not incorporate any elements of our culture, language, and history. Multi-ethnic values have been disregarded by Ethiopian nationalism, which promotes the identity of a single ethnic group.”
“I believe this is being corrected in the current Ethiopian political context. Ethiopian laws and policies can help improve Ethiopian nationalism challenges.”
Contrary to the claim, Lencho never mentions renouncing Ethiopian nationalism either in the original video or in the Facebook clip.
