There are moments in the life of nations and political forces when silence can no longer be regarded as wisdom, and when stubborn refusal to acknowledge reality can no longer be taken as evidence of steadfastness. At such moments, acknowledging the truth itself becomes an act of national responsibility.

Perhaps we, the Eritrean political forces engaged in resisting the regime of Isaias Afwerki and striving for democratic change, are today in need of precisely such a moment: a moment in which we reconcile with ourselves and relieve our consciences of the burden of constant justification—without, however, absolving ourselves of responsibility.

And I begin with myself before anyone else, and with the political position to which I belong before looking at the positions of others.

Yes, we must acknowledge that we have, thus far, failed to manage the phase of democratic change in Eritrea.

This admission does not mean that we have failed in our struggle, that the sacrifices of thousands of Eritreans have been in vain, or that our resistance to authoritarianism has been without value. Nor does it mean that responsibility for the Eritrean tragedy lies with us rather than with the regime that produced authoritarian rule, closed the political space, and rendered institutions and the Constitution inoperative.

Rather, it means something more specific—and more painful: that we, as political forces expected to embody the project of an alternative, have not yet succeeded in managing the phase that precedes the alternative itself.

And it is precisely here that our reassessment must begin.

Yes! Our First Mistake Was in Defining the Phase Itself

Perhaps the root of many of our shortcomings lies in our failure to distinguish with sufficient clarity between the phase of change and the post-change phase.

Each phase has its own questions, instruments, priorities, institutions, and even its own form of political legitimacy.

The phase of change is not the phase of competition over governing the state. Nor is it the phase in which parties and political organizations should compete to present their detailed economic, social, and ideological programmes, or seek to prove the superiority of their respective intellectual visions over one another.

At its core, it is a transitional national phase that precedes all of that. Its fundamental mission is to end authoritarian rule, protect the state from vacuum and collapse, and open the way for the Eritrean people freely to choose the form of government, political forces, and programmes they want.

Normal political and programmatic competition properly begins when there is a state governed by law, a constitution, public freedoms, an open political space, a free media, and an Eritrean electorate capable of hearing everyone, holding everyone accountable, and choosing among them.

The paradox is that we carried the instruments of the second phase into the first. We began competing before a legitimate arena for competition even existed. We disagreed over the administration of a state that we have not yet reached the stage of rebuilding. At times, some of us behaved with the mentality of parties competing for power, while all of us remain political forces operating from outside the homeland, in the shadow of a closed state that permits no independent political activity in the first place.

In doing so, we anticipated the battle for power while falling behind in building the force for change.

Yes, Let Us Admit it! We Turned Pluralism from a Right for the Future into a Burden on the Present

Political pluralism is not, in itself, a flaw. Indeed, in the democratic Eritrea to which we aspire, it will be a fundamental right that must be defended

In the future, Eritreans must have the right to establish multiple political parties; for the right, left, and centre, fronts, organizations, movements, and parties to compete; for political, economic, and social programmes to differ; and for governments and oppositions to emerge through the ballot box.

But the question we have not confronted adequately is this:

Is everything that is legitimate in the democratic phase necessarily useful in the phase of creating democracy?

Here lies the problem.

Under the conditions of resistance and exile, our pluralism evolved from a natural expression of political diversity into a multiplicity of decision-making centres, leaderships, institutions, external relations, media platforms and political discourses, and sometimes even into competition over membership, representation, and political legitimacy.

Instead of pooling our limited capacities within a single national institution capable of managing the political struggle against the regime, we dispersed them among organizations, fronts, parties, and entities, each with its own programme, leadership, institutions, and calculations.

As a result, in many instances, we came to have more organizations than effective institutions, more programmes than the capacity to implement them, and more leaders than a unified national decision.

Yes… Why Not Admit It? We Competed overpower That Was Not Even in

Our Hands

This may be one of the most important truths we need to tell ourselves frankly.

I do not know what, exactly, we were competing over.

We are outside the country. There are no elections in which we compete. There is no free parliament for us to enter. There is no democratic government whose administration can rotate among us. Nor is there an open domestic political arena in which we can compete for the support of voters.

Why, then, did we exhaust so much of our energy in disputes over programmes, names, positions, representation, and organizational size?

At times, we behaved as though the question before us were:

Who will govern Eritrea?

Yet the question that should have united us was:

How do we, together with our people and our state, reach the moment when Eritreans themselves have the right to decide who governs them?

The difference between these two questions is the difference between a mentality of competition for power and a mentality of managing the phase of change.

Yes, Let Us Admit it! None of Us Can Accomplish Change Alone

After all these years, there is one truth that should no longer be open to dispute:

There is today no single Eritrean organization, party, or front capable, on its own, of accomplishing democratic change and managing its major national imperatives.

This is not an indictment of any organization. It is simply a description of the balance of capabilities and of reality.

If any party believes that it can, on its own, bring down the regime, fill the ensuing vacuum, secure the country, preserve state institutions, administer the transitional period, facilitate the return of refugees, reassure society, manage regional and international relations, and then build a new constitutional order, then it must demonstrate to the Eritrean people the actual capacity that would enable it to do so.

A national alternative is not built through claims, but through capacity—and reality tells us that our capacities are dispersed among us.

Each party possesses experience, cadres, relationships, social reach, and particular strengths. Yet none possesses, by itself, everything required to manage a national process of change on this scale.

Hence, our unity during the phase of change is not merely a moral virtue; it is a functional necessity imposed by the very nature of the task.

We Must Also Understand and Admit That the Nature of the Regime Makes a Collective Alternative a Necessity, not a Choice

There is another, even more serious reason.

We are not confronting a conventional party-based regime that might lose an election and transfer power naturally to another party.

We face a system of rule in which political, security, and military decision-making has, to a very significant degree, been highly centralized around the head of the regime, while constitutional institutions and mechanisms of succession, accountability, and oversight have been weakened.

For that reason, the moment of change—however it may come—may not raise only the question:

Who is the political alternative?

It may raise an even more dangerous question:

Who will protect the state on the day after? … And what do we truly understand about that “day after”?

Here, the fragmentation of the opposition or resistance becomes a danger that goes beyond weakening its ability to change the regime; it extends to weakening its capacity to prevent a vacuum after the regime is gone.

Just as no single organization can realistically accomplish change on its own, it is equally unrealistic to assume that one organization could simply replace the regime by itself. Eritrea after Afwerki does not need a new one-party or monopolistic order to replace the old one.

It needs an inclusive national arrangement capable of protecting the state, managing the transition, and then returning power to its rightful owner: the Eritrean people.

Therefore, We Must Postpone Our Programmes… Not Abandon Them

This brings me to what I consider one of the necessary ways forward:

We must agree to postpone our partisan and organizational political programmes until the phase of democratic competition.

I deliberately use the word postpone, rather than freeze.

Freezing implies suspending an organization, erasing its identity, or halting its internal political life. The postponement I am calling for, by contrast, is a conscious political decision by which every organization says:

This is my programme, this is my vision, and this is my political identity. I do not renounce any of them. But I acknowledge that this is not the appropriate historical moment to compete over them, and that the priority now belongs to a higher national project that brings us all together until we create the political space in which I, and others, can later compete democratically.

We are therefore not asking anyone to erase their history, dissolve their organization, or abandon their convictions.

We are asking everyone to postpone competition over them.

We preserve our right to differ in the future while unifying our duty in the present.

What Would We Actually Lose If We Postponed Our Programmes?

Here, we have every right to ask ourselves, with considerable frankness, a question that may already be long overdue:

What real harm would befall any Eritrean political organization or party if, at this particular stage, it decided to postpone its competitive political programme in favour of an inclusive national programme for managing the process of change?

What would it lose? Would it lose power that it currently exercises? Would it lose a government it administers? Would it have to vacate seats it holds in a parliament?

Would it be surrendering an electoral majority granted to it by the Eritrean people? We all know the answer.

At this stage, there is no democratic authority over which we are competing, no free election that we fear losing, and no institutions of government whose administration we share.

The political programmes we carry today, regardless of their intellectual value, are fundamentally programmes designed for governing the state if, in the future, they are given the opportunity to compete freely and win the confidence of the people through the ballot box.

Why, then, should we allow programmes designed for the phase of governance to become an obstacle to completing the very phase that is meant to lead us to democratic governance?

We should go even further. Every organization and party should ask itself candidly:

What qualitative achievement have we accomplished individually over the past years that we can genuinely say altered the balance of the struggle in favour of change?

What has this or that organization achieved independently that constituted a genuine

threat to the regime’s continued survival?

And what capacity has any of us demonstrated, independently of the others, that would make preserving the separate independence of our programme, instruments, and institutions during the phase of change more important than building a common national force?

These questions are not intended to diminish the sacrifices of our organizations or deny their political, media, diplomatic, human-rights, and organizational efforts. They are questions intended to measure the outcome of separate action against the scale of the national task.

Each organization may have its own partial achievements, relationships, cadres, and experience. But the question is not what we have achieved within the boundaries of our respective organizations. The question is whether the sum total of what we have achieved separately has genuinely brought Eritrea sufficiently closer to the moment of change to justify continuing in the same manner.

After so many years of experience, it is difficult to argue that each party’s continued adherence to its separate programme, institutions, and decision-making structures has created the national force capable of bringing about democratic transformation.

If that is the case, what exactly are we afraid of losing if we reorder our priorities?

There is another truth from which we should not retreat:

The areas of disagreement among most Eritrean opposition political programmes are far narrower than the multiplicity of organizations has made them appear.

In their broad outlines, most speak of the rule of law, constitutional government, citizenship, justice, political pluralism, the peaceful transfer of power, respect for rights and freedoms, balanced development, and foreign relations based on national interests.

Details, intellectual references, and methods of implementation may differ—and that is both natural and legitimate. But the proper place for those differences is the phase of democratic competition inside the homeland, when the people themselves become the arbiters among competing programmes.

Today, however, we sometimes appear to be engaged in intense competition between programmes that differ over details while agreeing on the fundamental objective:

ending authoritarian rule and establishing a democratic constitutional state.

For this reason, postponing our programmes deprives no one of a right, erases no one’s

identity, and grants no party victory over another.

On the contrary, it frees every organization from the burden of prematurely defending a project whose time for democratic testing has not yet arrived and redirects its energies towards the task that none of us can accomplish alone.

I do not believe that any genuinely national organization can regard itself as harmed when what it temporarily postpones serves a greater national interest, particularly when that postponement is mutually agreed, tied to a clearly defined phase, and automatically ends once a democratic political space is established in which everyone can return to their respective programmes and compete before the people.

A political programme does not acquire its ultimate legitimacy merely because it is written into an organizational document. It acquires that legitimacy when it is freely presented to citizens, persuades them, and receives their democratic mandate.

We are therefore not asking anyone to abandon their political project. We are simply saying:

Keep your programme for the day when the Eritrean people are free to choose and contribute today to building the road that will make that choice possible.

The real question, then, is not:

What will our organizations lose if they postpone their programmes?

Perhaps the more appropriate question is:

What has the nation lost over all these years because we did not do so?

Therefore, Let Us Revisit All These Questions and Move from Multiple Programmes to One National Charter

A question may naturally arise:

If we postpone our programmes, what will govern our collective action?

The answer should be clear:

We must move from dozens of organizational programmes to one inclusive National Charter for the phase of change.

A charter that does not determine the shape of Eritrea’s economy for decades to come; that does not privilege one ideology over another; and that does not decide, on behalf of future generations, every detail of the state they may wish to build.

Rather, it should answer the minimum set of questions without agreement on which the process of change cannot be managed:

How do we end authoritarian rule? How do we preserve Eritrea’s sovereignty and

territorial integrity? How do we protect state institutions and society from a vacuum?

How do we manage the transitional period? How do we guarantee rights and freedoms? How do we deal with the military and security establishment and with state employees?

How do we prepare for the return of refugees? How do we establish transitional justice without vengeance?

And how do we ultimately arrive at a constitution and free elections through which the Eritrean people choose their own leaders?

That is the programme we need today.

Not the programme of a party, but the programme of a phase.

Alongside This, We Undoubtedly Need One Unified Basic Statute to Govern the Process of Change

A political charter alone is not enough.

The Charter answers the question:

What have we agreed upon?

The Basic Statute must answer the more difficult question:

How do we work together?

We need one organizational framework governing institutions, powers and responsibilities, decision-making mechanisms, the relationship among political, executive, and legislative leadership structures, resource management, accountability, external relations, media affairs, and the resolution of internal disputes.

We cannot call for a state of institutions tomorrow while remaining unable to build a common national institution today.

Nor can we demand centralized state decision-making and the rule of law while managing

our resistance through dozens of independent centres of decision-making.

A democratic alternative must begin learning and practising the discipline of statehood before it assumes responsibility for the state itself.

Here We Must Reaffirm: The Objective Is Not to Abolish Pluralism… but to Put It in Its Proper Political Time

This is a fundamental point. 

I am not calling for the abolition of political parties. Nor am I calling for everyone to be forcibly dissolved into a single ideological organization. Nor am I seeking to confiscate the right to disagree.

I am calling for a reordering of political time. Today:

We are in a phase of national change, requiring the greatest possible degree of unity,

centralized decision-making, and agreement on a common national minimum.

Tomorrow,  after  the  democratic  political  space  has  been  opened: We enter a phase of pluralism, requiring the greatest possible degree of freedom, competition, and programmatic diversity.

Confusing these two phases has harmed us.

We attempted to practise the democracy of competition before building the force capable of carrying us into democracy.

What is now required is to correct that equation:

We unite around what can only be accomplished together and later disagree freely over what the people themselves are entitled to decide between us.

Let Us, Then, Move from Admission to Correction

The purpose of this article is not to issue a verdict of failure against an entire political generation, nor to distribute blame among organizations, nor to search for one party upon whom we can place the burden of everyone’s shortcomings.

I am part of this experience, and what I am criticizing here is something in which I, in one way or another, have also participated.

Therefore, when I say, “we have failed,” I do not say so from the bench of a judge, but from the seat of a partner in responsibility.

And that is precisely what makes the admission necessary.

True reconciliation with ourselves does not mean convincing ourselves that we have done everything we possibly could.

It means possessing the courage to acknowledge that some of what we did was insufficient; some of what we believed to be correct requires reassessment; and some of the instruments we inherited from the past are no longer suitable for the present.

Peace of conscience does not come from absolving ourselves. It comes from acknowledging our shortcomings and then attempting to correct them.

For many years, we have searched for the unity of the opposition. Perhaps the time has come to reformulate the question.

We do not need unity merely for the sake of unity.

What we need is to build a national instrument capable of managing the phase of democratic hange.

The difference is substantial.

We may succeed in bringing dozens of organizations under a single name and still remain incapable of effective action if decision-making centres remain multiple, institutions remain weak, trust remains incomplete, competing programmes remain active, and external relations remain fragmented.

And I believe this is precisely what existed before and what, to this day, remains before us and among us.

The unity we need is not a group photograph.

It is unity of function, decision, institution, and responsibility.

And, Finally, One Last Admission…

After all these years, perhaps the bravest political step we can take is not to establish another organization, write another programme, or add another umbrella to the many umbrellas already in existence.

Perhaps the bravest step is to stand before our own experience and say:

Yes, we have thus far failed to manage the phase of change.

We failed because we did not sufficiently distinguish between the phase of change and the phase of governance.

We failed when we carried the pluralism of the future into the struggle of the present.

We failed when we competed over programmes whose time to be presented to the people had not yet arrived.

And we failed when our centres of decision multiplied more rapidly than our collective will became unified.

But acknowledging failure does not mean declaring defeat. It may instead be the moment at which correction begins.

The question that should therefore be placed today before every Eritrean front, organization, party, and political leadership is not:

What will our place be in the coming alternative?

Rather:

What must we temporarily relinquish? What must we postpone? And what must we unify today so that the very existence of a viable national alternative becomes possible?

When we answer these questions truthfully, perhaps we will finally have moved from the phase of merely opposing or resisting the regime to the phase of genuinely preparing to change it.

History will not ask us only:

Did you resist authoritarianism?

It will also ask:

When you knew that your country needed a capable national alternative, were you able to rise above your own organizational interests and build it?

That, in my view, is the accountability for which we must prepare ourselves—before our people, before our martyrs, before future generations, and, above all… before our own consciences.