The Political Economy of Indigenous Governance: The Ancient Kushite Ethiopianist Framework and Oromo Leadership in East Africa

Abstract The dissertation investigates the political economy of indigenous governance in Northeast Africa. It advances an Ancient Kushite Ethiopianist framework that is centred on Oromo leadership, traditions, and institutions as a foundational system of political economy. It challenges the dominance of externally derived governance models and Abyssinian-centred historiography. It demonstrates that pre-colonial African governance, such as the Gadaa governance of the Oromo, embodied coherent principles of institutional organisation, accountability, and distributive ethics that warrant complete analytical treatment within political economy rather than confinement to political and cultural anthropology. The research is qualitative, historical, and interpretive. Methodologically, it combines analyses of texts, indigenous traditions and philosophies, archival and historiographic sources, oral histories, and comparative institutional analysis. Political economy theories, including decolonial, institutional, and moral theories, guide the study. The dissertation reconstructs the Oromo governance system, the Gada system, as a constitutional republican political order. The institutional features of the Gadaa System are analysed as stabilising mechanisms of the political economy. They regulated political authority, land use, conflict resolution, environmental protection, social welfare, and resource distribution. The findings demonstrate that both the Kushite Ethiopianist framework and the Oromo governance tradition articulate political and economic logics that prioritise social cohesion, limited power, and equitable resource allocation. They directly contradict assumptions that premodern African systems lacked institutional sophistication or economic rationality. The study also demonstrates that the late 19th-century state expansion in Ethiopia produced an internal settler-colonial order in southern Ethiopia that displaced indigenous Kushite institutions and entrenched centre-periphery asymmetries through institutional separations, extractive governance, historiographic distortions, and the denial of the multinational nature of the empire-cum modern state. The frameworks show that governance efficiency and equity in the African context emerged from institutions that bind authority to social obligation, distribute power across communities, and enforce accountability through the communal consent of the people at the grassroots level, rather than from centralisation or coercion. The dissertation finds that Oromo marginalisation is structurally embedded in the political economy of modern Ethiopia and advances a corrective framework by linking Oromo indigenous governance to institutional stability, equity, and democratic legitimacy, thereby restoring the Oromo to their historical position as heirs to the Kushite civilizational tradition. The dissertation proposes an Oromo-led, pluralist federal order as an indigenous constitutional order, as a viable alternative to unitary nationalism and political fragmentation. This study contributes to the decolonisation of governance theory. It expands debates on institutions, state formation, and development by reframing indigenous African governance, specifically Gadaa governance, as analytically central to political economy. It integrates historically rooted African institutional principles into contemporary governance discourse. It offers both scholarly clarity and a practical pathway to legitimacy and economic governance in Ethiopia, in particular, and across the Horn of Africa, in general. Keywords: Oromo, Ethiopia, Gada system, indigenous governance, political economy, historical institutionalism, moral economy, decolonial methodology, state formation, institutional displacement, historiography, Kushite Ethiopianist.