We Were Never Lazy. We Were Left.
By Sidoc Haytu.
You've heard it your whole life. From uncles. From ministers on television. From your own tired parents on a bad night: this generation doesn't want to work.
I want to say something to you plainly, before anything else: they are lying to you. Not about everything. About this.
Seventy percent of the people in this country are under thirty. You are not a minority group needing special mention in someone else's plan. You are the country. And yet urban youth unemployment is sitting near 27 percent while GDP headlines celebrate growth you'll never feel in your pocket — economists have a name for it now, "jobless growth," which is a polite way of saying the money is moving and you are not invited. Every year, roughly a quarter of a million Ethiopians leave, not because they stopped loving this country, but because staying stopped being survivable.
That is not laziness. That is a system that grew, and grew, and never once made room for you inside it.
The degree that was supposed to save you
Someone told you to study. You did. Someone told you a diploma was the door. You walked through it and found nothing on the other side but another line, another waiting room, another "we'll call you." Across this country right now there are graduates who did everything asked of them — years of school, fees their families sacrificed for — standing in the same unemployment line as the kid who dropped out at fifteen. The credential didn't fail because you didn't try hard enough. It failed because the promise was never really built for you. It was built to keep you patient.
And patience has a cost. Every young person forced into the informal economy, every one of you selling something on a corner that has nothing to do with what you trained for, every one of you sitting on a bus toward a border you're not sure will let you through — that's not individual failure repeated a million times. That's a generation being quietly written off by people who will never have to explain it to your face.
They need you divided more than they need you unemployed
Here's the part almost nobody says to you directly, so I will.
The same system that can't find you a job has no trouble at all finding you a militia, a flag, an enemy who speaks a different language than you. It is easier — cheaper, safer for the people at the top — to hand a nineteen-year-old a grievance about his neighbor's ethnicity than to hand him a wage he can live on. An armed, divided, exhausted youth doesn't ask hard questions about who actually holds the land, the contracts, the foreign currency accounts. A youth united across every line this country has drawn absolutely does.
So they give you identity instead of opportunity. They give you a war instead of a wage. And they count on you being too tired, too scattered, too busy surviving today to notice that Oromo youth and Amhara youth and Tigrayan youth and Somali youth are all standing in the exact same unemployment line, just in different regional capitals, being told a different story about why.
You were never each other's enemy. You were each other's evidence — proof that this isn't a you problem, in any region, under any government. It's the same problem, wearing different flags to keep you from comparing notes.
What you actually are
You are not a "youth bulge" to be managed, a demographic risk to be contained, a line item in a donor report about jobless growth. You are the labor this country runs on and will keep running on for the next fifty years, whether anyone in power admits it now or not. That gives you something they don't want you to notice you have: leverage. A country cannot be built, farmed, taught, nursed, coded, or defended without you. That was never in question. What's in question is whether you keep spending that power on each other, or start spending it on the people who've been banking it for themselves.
You didn't choose to inherit a jobless economy, a fractured federation, and a war-hungry political class all at once. But you get to choose what you do with the fact that you're the majority now, in every region, of every nationality, standing in the same line. That is not a small thing. That is, historically, the exact condition every generation that ever actually changed anything started from.
You are not lazy. You were never lazy. You were left — deliberately, by people who benefit from you believing it was your own fault. Stop believing it. Start asking, out loud, together, across every regional line they've drawn to keep you apart: whose plan was this supposed to be, and why wasn't it yours?
Sidoc Haytu is an Ethiopian writer and researcher focused on political economy, class dynamics, and anti-imperialist movements in the Horn of Africa. If you are ready to build, not just read, join the movement at https://t.me/SiraPress.