A ruling-party lawmaker, Mohammed Ahmed, called the Chamber to its feet for Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed (PhD). Moments earlier, a sharp opposition voice, Desalegn Chanie (PhD) rose to "testify before history."

This is two portraits of Ethiopia collided on the floor of Parliament today as federal lawmakers received Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed's (PhD) report on the concluding term of the current house. One MP portraited a country held up across Africa as a model of urban renewal and green ambition, the other of a country at war with itself and buckling under debt.

Mohammed, a legislator from the governing Prosperity Party, who praised the Premier's stewardship and urged his colleagues to rise in a standing ovation. The gesture crowned a run of loyalist tributes through the session, for the Green Legacy tree-planting campaign, a much-imitated urban corridor-development drive, gains in tourism and agriculture, and a surge in foreign direct investment that government allies cast as proof the country had turned a corner.

Desalegn, the vocal opposition lawmaker thanked the Prime Minister, then set about dismantling the report, telling the chamber he intended to "testify before history about the government's weaknesses." He criticised the ruling party for passing laws while silencing the public and extinguishing political alternatives, and recast the past five years as a “chapter of tragedy rather than triumph.”

“Civil war and drone strikes had scarred the Amhara, Oromia, Gambella and Benishangul-Gumuz regions, displacing millions, damaging religious institutions and hardening the country's political fractures,” he said.

He demanded an immediate end to the fighting in Amhara and Oromia regionalstates, and pressed the government on whether a genuine national dialogue, paired with transitional justice, was taking place at all.

His sharpest thrust was aimed at the numbers. The government's report, he charged, rested on “manipulated data”. It claimed 1.5 trillion Br in revenue and 11 billion dollars in exports and remittance.

“Conditions on the ground told another story,” he said.