It was a cold Thursday morning sometime in late 1983 of the Ethiopian calendar. For reasons I no longer remember, my two siblings and I went to visit my uncle's house. What we found there was unlike anything I had ever seen before.
The house was overflowing with energy.
Some people were writing political slogans on pieces of cloth and cardboard. Others were carefully painting the Oromo Liberation Front (OLF) flag by hand. Loud music blasted from oversized speakers. Songs I had never heard before filled the air. My twelve-year-old soul was electrified.
One song echoed louder than the rest:
"Har'a guyyaan, har'a guyyaan kan Oromooti."
"Today is Oromo's day."
Nuho Gobana's revolutionary voice transformed the atmosphere into something unforgettable. Until that day, politics had been distant to me — adult conversations floating somewhere above my understanding. But that morning changed everything.
That was the day I was introduced to Oromo politics in particular, and Ethiopian politics in general.
From that moment on, I slowly developed the idea of being Oromo — and only Oromo. Like many young boys exposed to emotionally charged political environments, I began seeing people through the framework of "us" and "them."
A few hours later, my siblings and I — along with what felt, in my childish exaggeration, like the entire city — left my uncle's house to welcome the incoming Oromo Liberation Army (OLA), known in Afaan Oromo as Waraana Bilisummaa Oromoo (WBO).
Before going further, however, I have to say a few words about my uncle: Gash Husa.
Gash Husa was different from the other father figures around us. He gave all his children Oromo names. Yet ironically, Amharic was the language spoken inside his home — something uncommon in Robe at the time. Even as a child, I sensed there was something layered and complicated about him.
He constantly said things we did not fully understand back then. Things like: "Why do you buy shoes with shoe-ties like them?" At the time, it sounded strange, almost amusing. But looking back now, I realize he was trying to plant something deeper — a seed of struggle, identity, resistance, and separation — in everyone he met.
To this day, I believe he was part of an underground OLF cell operating in Robe town during the Derg regime. Later, he officially joined the OLF and participated in what locals still remember as Lola Robe — the fighting in Robe town.
Sometimes he would come to our house late at night accompanied by his bodyguard, Aman Ciriiri. My mother — Ayyee — would immediately boil water and throw all their clothes into it to kill lice from the bush. They would stay only a few hours before disappearing again into the darkness.
I still remember Aman Ciriiri standing quietly behind Gash Husa, holding his AK-47 and its ammunition. May Allah grant him Jannah.
For readers unfamiliar with the term, "Gash" is a respectful title in Amharic similar to "Mr." or "Sir."
Eventually, Gash Husa left Robe. Then he left Ethiopia altogether. He settled in Australia, where he still lives today. I have not seen him since.
That Saturday afternoon, we marched nearly 14 kilometres from Robe town to the Shaya River to welcome the OLA. We went on foot, filled with excitement and expectation.
To be honest, the number of fighters was smaller than we had imagined. Only a few armed men stood on top of each Ural — the large Russian military trucks rolling slowly toward the crowd. Most carried AK-47s slung across their shoulders. Yet to us, they looked larger than life.
Then something happened that made the moment unforgettable for me. One of the fighters standing on the truck turned out to be my other uncle's son — Jamal Abda. May Allah grant him Jannah.
The moment he recognised me in the crowd, he reached down and pulled me onto the back of the truck beside him. I cannot fully describe the feeling even today. At that age, it felt like I had gone from merely discovering who I was to instantly becoming part of a liberation movement. I was not holding a gun. I was not a fighter. But in my twelve-year-old mind, I felt like a superhero riding with freedom fighters who were about to change history.
Even now, decades later, I can still feel that emotion living somewhere deep inside my memory. That was the day politics hooked me.
That was the day men like Lencho Leta, Gutama Hawas, Galaasa Dilbo, and others became larger than ordinary political leaders in my imagination. To us, they were not simply politicians or rebels. They were heroes. Untouchable figures who, in our minds, could do no wrong.
Reading the Man on Paper
Years later, I would encounter Lencho Leta again — not on the back of a Ural truck, but through political papers, position documents, and the kind of careful analytical prose that liberation movements produce when they are trying to convince the world, and themselves, that they know what they are doing.
The transition was jarring. The mythological figure of my childhood gave way to a writer of measured, sometimes frustratingly cautious, arguments. He writes as a man who has spent decades thinking about the Oromo question — and, it becomes clear on close reading, at least as many decades thinking about how to present himself within it.
His sustained political contributions appear not in a single landmark book but across an archive that spans five decades: OLF position papers from the 1970s and 1980s, essays on Ethiopian federalism written during his long years of exile in Washington, interviews with academic journals on Oromo nationalism, contributions to edited volumes on the Ethiopian crisis, and eventually the founding documents of the Oromo Democratic Front (ODF), which he co-established in 2013. Reading these texts in sequence is an education in ideological drift — or evolution, depending entirely on where you stand when you open the first page.
In the OLF's founding political programme, the goal was stated without ambiguity: the establishment of an independent Democratic Republic of Oromia. Not enhanced autonomy. Not a better deal within a reformed Ethiopia. Independence. The OLF charter, shaped in significant part by Lencho and the founding generation, was built on the premise that the Oromo people — the largest single ethnic group in the Horn of Africa, comprising roughly 35 to 40 percent of Ethiopia's population — constituted a colonised nation with the right of self-determination up to and including full separation.
This was not a moderate position. It was not designed to be. The Ethiopia of Haile Selassie and the Derg had offered the Oromo no meaningful political space. Language was suppressed. Land was redistributed away from Oromo peasants in the name of reform that benefited others. Independence was not a fantasy — it was the logical endpoint of accumulated dispossession. The men riding on those Urals into Robe had not taken to the bush for an improved federalism arrangement. They had taken to the bush for a country of their own.
That is the Lencho Leta who electrified my uncle's house. That is the man whose name made twelve-year-olds feel invincible on the back of a military truck.
The Transformation Question
At some point between that Ural truck and today, something fundamental shifted. The question is not whether it shifted — it clearly did. The question is how, and why, and whether Lencho has ever offered a full accounting of the shift to the people whose political imaginations he once shaped.
The shift was not sudden. After the Derg's collapse in 1991, the OLF participated in Ethiopia's Transitional Government alongside the EPRDF, only to withdraw in 1992, alleging systematic fraud in regional elections and the deliberate militarisation of Oromo political space by Tigrayan-led federal forces. That experience — a moment of institutional hope that ended badly, as Oromo political participation within Ethiopia has ended so many times before — planted seeds of pragmatic doubt, at least in Lencho's mind, about the viability of any path that required confronting the Ethiopian state head-on.
By the 2000s, he was increasingly writing about "self-determination within Ethiopia" — a formulation that, in the vocabulary of Oromo nationalism, represented a significant retreat from the founding position. By 2013, he made the retreat official. The Oromo Democratic Front, launched from Washington with Lencho as a central figure, explicitly abandoned the demand for independence. It called instead for a genuine democratic federation — an Ethiopia in which Oromo would govern themselves within a shared constitutional framework, not outside it.
The arguments Lencho has offered for this transformation are not without logic. An independent Oromia faces hard geographic reality: landlocked, its economy deeply interwoven with the Ethiopian state's infrastructure, its borders shared with nations whose cooperation could not be assumed. Four decades of armed struggle had not produced independence, and there was no credible path by which it would. After 2018, Abiy Ahmed's government — the first in Ethiopian history led by an Oromo prime minister, built substantially on the Qeerroo uprising in which Oromo youth had risked and lost their lives — offered what looked, briefly, like meaningful representation within Ethiopia's structure.
But the logic of the transformation, however defensible on geopolitical grounds, does not fully answer the political and moral question it raises. The Oromo youth who drove the 2014–2018 protests that brought Abiy to power were not demanding a better federation. They were demanding an end to land dispossession, military occupation of Oromia, and the structural subordination of Oromo interests to those of a Tigrayan-led state. Some of them had grown up hearing about the independent Oromia that men like Lencho had promised. When the most prominent surviving voice of that founding generation quietly stopped promising it, not many of them were asked.
The question I cannot dismiss is simpler than the geopolitical calculus: did Lencho change his mind, or did he change his position? These are not the same thing. A man who genuinely changes his mind offers a reckoning — an honest account of what he once believed, why he believed it, and what evidence or experience led him somewhere different. What Lencho has offered is closer to a repositioning: a gradual reframing of the goal in terms that accommodate the possible, without ever fully confronting the gap between what was promised to the people who believed in Robe and Harar and Bale, and what was eventually delivered.
The Muslim Gap
Here the critique becomes personal for me in a way the ideological debate does not.
I grew up in Robe, in Bale. The Oromo of Bale, of Hararghe, of Arsi, of the eastern highlands, are predominantly Muslim. We have been Muslim for centuries — long before Menelik's armies arrived, long before the borders of the Ethiopian state were drawn around us by conquest and cartography. Islam is not incidental to our identity as Oromo. For millions of us, it is inseparable from it. The mosque is where we buried our dead, resolved our disputes, and sang the same revolutionary songs — just, sometimes, after Jumu'ah.
Lencho Leta himself is from Hararghe. He comes from one of the heartlands of Muslim Oromo life. This makes his near-total silence on the religious dimension of Oromo experience not an outsider's blind spot but something more difficult to explain.
Read through his body of political writing — the OLF position papers, the ODF founding documents, the published interviews, the analytical essays — and the Oromo Muslim is conspicuously absent. Not opposed. Not dismissed. Absent. The Oromo he writes about is a political and cultural category: a people defined by language, by land, by the historical experience of dispossession. The spiritual and communal dimensions of Muslim Oromo life — the role of Islamic institutions in organising resistance, the way Islamic law governed land and inheritance in ways the imperial state sought to override, the specific texture of Muslim Oromo experience under a Christian-dominated state — do not appear.
One could argue that a secular nationalist project must bracket religious identity. That is true as far as it goes. But the OLF did not emerge from a blank secular space. It emerged from communities in which religion was woven into social organisation, mourning practice, the rhythms of the agricultural year. To write about the Oromo liberation struggle without engaging meaningfully with Muslim Oromo experience is not neutrality. It produces a distorted map of the movement's own history.
There is also a harder version of this critique. The OLF, during the years when Lencho was among its most prominent voices, drew significant early mass mobilisation from Muslim Oromo communities in the east and southeast. These communities provided fighters, material support, and political shelter. The question of whether their specific concerns — religious freedom under a Christian-dominated administrative state, the integrity of Islamic institutions, the particular way Muslim Oromo experienced cultural suppression as both ethnic and religious subjugation — were incorporated into the movement's politics in any serious way is one I have never seen Lencho address at length, in any forum, in any language.
The Gullelle Claim — Unverified, but Worth Asking About
There is a story that circulates in certain Oromo diaspora and activist circles. I have heard it from enough different people, across enough years, that silence feels dishonest.
The story goes like this. In the early 1990s, when the OLF had offices in Addis Ababa during the transitional period, large numbers of Muslim Oromo would gather at these offices — partly for political meetings, partly, as Muslims do wherever they gather in sufficient numbers, for prayer. The OLF spaces in the Gullelle area of Addis Ababa became, for a time, a de facto gathering point for Muslim Oromo community life. According to accounts I have heard from people who were present — accounts attributed, as an informal remark, to Lencho — he is said to have expressed displeasure that the OLF's headquarters had effectively "turned into Anwar mosque."
The Anwar Grand Mosque in Merkato is one of the most important Islamic institutions in Ethiopia and one of the most important centres of Oromo Muslim identity in the capital. For those who gathered there and in spaces like it, it represented everything the OLF was supposed to be fighting for: Oromo people, in their own community, practising their faith without suppression. That Lencho, if the accounts are accurate, experienced this not as a manifestation of the liberation he preached but as a problem to be remarked upon — that is a telling detail about how Muslim Oromo life registered, or failed to register, in his political imagination.
I do not know if he said this. I am raising it publicly because the people who say he did are not fringe voices. They are former OLF members, Muslim Oromo activists, and individuals with direct knowledge of that period. The allegation has circulated for over thirty years. Its persistence without a public rebuttal is itself a data point — though not, I want to be clear, a verdict.
What is not in dispute is the structural reality the story points toward. The OLF leadership in its formative and most active years was disproportionately drawn from Christian Oromo communities in Wollega, and the movement's internal culture reflected that demographic weight. The Oromo Muslim experience was incorporated into the liberation framework as one instance of a general pattern of ethnic subjugation — which it was — but rarely as a distinct political and spiritual experience with its own voice, its own particular relationship to the Ethiopian state, and its own claim on the movement's attention.
The Names He Does Not Say
Read Lencho Leta's political writing carefully, across the full arc of his career, and you will notice something: certain names do not appear.
Gutamaa Hawaas — Gutama Hawas — was the first chairman of the Oromo Liberation Front. He is not a peripheral figure. He was present at the founding, shaped the OLF's early ideological and organisational direction, and paid serious personal costs for his commitment to the Oromo cause over decades. By any fair accounting of OLF history, Gutama Hawas belongs at the centre of the story. In Lencho's telling, he is at best a background figure.
The same is true of Nadhii Gammadaa and others from that founding generation. The contributions of colleagues and comrades who built the movement alongside Lencho — who organised, fought, argued, and sacrificed alongside him — have a way of receding in his accounts, while his own role in the ideological and political development of Oromo nationalism comes consistently into the foreground.
This pattern is not unique to Lencho. Political memoir is almost always partly self-serving; no one writes their own history in which they are a minor character. But the stakes here are higher than personal vanity. The founding generation of the Oromo liberation movement is ageing. The historical record is being written now, in memoirs, oral histories, and political essays produced by the people who lived it. When one of the movement's most prominent surviving voices systematically fails to credit colleagues whose contributions were equal to or greater than his own, that is not a private omission. It is a distortion of Oromo political history. It shapes what the next generation learns about who built what they inherited.
Lencho Leta is entitled to write about his own experience and to foreground his own thinking. He is not entitled to do so in a way that erases the men who stood beside him — especially when those men are no longer in a position to fill the gaps themselves.
Back to the Flag
So: will he be buried wrapped in the Ethiopian flag?
The question in my title is not rhetorical. In a country where the flag you are buried in carries political meaning — where it says something about what you believed, what you fought for, and what you ultimately concluded was worth fighting for — it matters. The Lencho Leta of 1974 would have been buried in the OLF's flag, or in no state's flag at all. The Lencho Leta of 2013 and beyond, who abandoned the independence demand, who returned from exile after 2018, and who made his accommodation with the Ethiopian federal project under an Oromo prime minister, has placed himself squarely within the Ethiopian national frame.
Whether that represents wisdom or surrender depends on what you believe the Oromo people needed most at this particular moment in history. If the most urgent task is genuine democratisation and ethnic equity within a shared Ethiopian state, then Lencho's evolution is not only defensible — it is arguably the only realistic path available. If you believe that four decades of armed struggle, thousands of martyred fighters, and the accumulated grief of a generation that waited and marched and buried its young entitles the Oromo to something more genuinely transformative than a better deal within the same structure, then the evolution looks like a careful man's careful retreat.
Both readings can be true simultaneously. That is what makes him a complicated figure rather than a simple hero or a simple traitor.
What I know, sitting with these questions decades after my uncle's house in Robe, is this: the men we make into heroes at twelve are rarely prepared for the scrutiny we bring to them at fifty. Lencho Leta is a significant figure in Oromo and Ethiopian political history — one of the few people who shaped both the opening argument of the liberation struggle and its eventual negotiated conclusion. He is also a man who defined the struggle more in terms of what he could negotiate than what his people originally demanded. He has written extensively without crediting the colleagues who built alongside him. He has spoken for the Oromo without speaking for the Muslim Oromo in any sustained or specific way. He has transformed, on the central question of his political life, without ever offering the full accounting that transformation demands.
These are not disqualifying observations. They are necessary ones.
History is not well served by the reverence I carried out of Robe as a twelve-year-old boy on the back of a Ural truck, feeling like a superhero beside my cousin Jamal Abda. It is better served by harder, less comfortable questions. Lencho Leta has earned the right to be taken seriously. That is precisely why he should be taken seriously enough to answer them.
The flag question will answer itself in time. The questions I have raised here will not.