Politics & Power Quote by Girma Woldegiorgis

Girma Woldegiorgis is doing the delicate work of stitching grief to legitimacy. The line opens by canonizing “heroic sons and daughters,” a phrase that sweeps soldiers, civilians, and martyrs into one morally unimpeachable category. That move matters: once sacrifice is framed as heroic and familial, dissent can be made to look not merely political but disrespectful, even unfilial. The dead become a kind of national capital.

The syntax is revealingly bureaucratic. “Paid sacrifices” and “score a number of victories” flatten blood and loss into accounting and sport. That’s not clumsiness so much as statecraft: it translates the chaos of conflict into a narrative of measurable progress, something a government can manage, report, and claim. Even “a number of victories” is carefully non-specific; it signals momentum without committing to details that could be challenged or that might expose uneven realities on the ground.

Then comes the real payload: “encouraging the nation-building process we are engaged in.” Nation-building is presented as an ongoing project with a clear direction, and the “we” is doing heavy lifting. It tries to merge leadership and populace into a single actor, smoothing over ethnic, regional, or partisan fractures that often define post-conflict politics. “Encouraging” is an understated verb that lowers the stakes rhetorically while raising them politically: if victories encourage nation-building, continued sacrifice is implied as both necessary and meaningful.

In context, this reads like reassurance aimed at a weary public and a signal to elites and external partners that the state remains coherent, purposeful, and worthy of loyalty and investment.