The unholy alliance between the hatemongering Ethiopian opposition at home and in the Diaspora with the hunted and haunted tyrant in Asmara is a public secret.  It is of course a natural and expected power alignment.  Though they are of domestic and foreign Variants, they both dread and maliciously hate the positive changes in Ethiopia and tirelessly work to  smother it before it is firmly established.  For different but convergent reasons they both wish to put off this one light that flickers in our beleaguered region. 

Ethiopia is irreversibly changing for the extremist opposition.  The vestiges of old Ethiopia where some people were more equal than others are fast disappearing.  There is no second-class citizen in today's Ethiopia.  Ethiopianess is no more a monopoly of the selected few.  It has become a genuinely shared identity of the more than Eighty nations and nationalities.  Their pretentious equivocation aside, the mainstream opposition's idea of Ethiopianess is exclusionary. In the eyes of the extremist opposition the rich and multiethnic nature of the emerging Ethiopian identity is repulsive and profane. That is why they unashamedly call the current form of federal system and its proponents "Anti-Ethiopia".   

It seems 'it is now or never' for the extremist opposition. And they are not mistaken.  The pace of change in this country is so fast that they will soon be irrelevant as a political force.  In the near future the new Ethiopia will not only be a legal and political fact but also a generally accepted and entrenched socio-cultural and psychological reality.  Under these circumstances these chauvinist maniacs will be left alone in the quagmire of history singing the lyric of yester years.  That is why the extremist opposition forces leave no stone unturned to undercut the system that is bringing about their political world to an end.  They can align themselves even with the devil himself to attain their perversely hate propelled politics.  And one of the readily available accomplice for such anti Ethiopia project has been the Eritrean government.  

The Eritrean government has a vested interest in the failure of the Ethiopian democratic exercises in the sense that it can use it as an excuse for continuing its despotic system in the name of purported "dangers" of pluralistic political systems.  Its intentions are of course more sinister.  The government in Asmara has by some strange calculation associated Ethiopia's weakness as a source of Eritrean revival.  On the basis of this premise Ethiopia's democratic election was taken as historical opportunity by the Eritrean government to implode the country from within.  

In the run up to the election, it campaigned in support of the opposition to full tilt that some of us wondered whether the Eritrean government had second thoughts about its sovereign existence and decided to run as an official Ethiopian opposition party.  It appeared more Ethiopian than some of the Ethiopian opposition groups in its "Woyane" bashing.  Eritrea's strange and sometimes laughable behavior in the course of the Ethiopian election can't be explained by sentimental or ideological grounds.  Some of the opposition groups don't even recognize Eritrea as an independent political entity.  It is therefore a matter of cold blooded political calculation on Eritrea's part.  Eritrea's strategy now and then is very clear and simple.   Bring down the EPRDF government and install a weak government that could not even hold the country together and emerge as a king maker macho of the region.  After the election, Shaebea's propaganda Machine, diplomatic activity and military maneuvers have all been tuned to help the insurrectionary agendas of the opposition. There are unmistakable evidences that they were coordinating their activities.  Every single Eritrean military and diplomatic posturing in the last five months have been made to coincide with the oppositions' litany of clamour for insurrection.   

The cohabitation of the Ethiopian extremist opposition with the current archenemy of our country is a glaring testimony to their parochial, short sighted and self-centred political objectives.  The good news is the opposition is now reaping the evil seeds it has sawn.  The fate of the eccentric Eritrean government will not be any different.