Residents Say 21 Died in Gerese After an Investment Site Was Expanded Without Them

Residents of Koshale kebele in the Gerese area of the Gamo zone told Tikvah Ethiopia that 21 people were killed in a conflict connected to the expansion of an investment site. The account is theirs. No federal or regional authority has confirmed a figure, and none had commented at the time of writing.

What the residents describe

According to one resident, who asked not to be named, a company that has been operating in the area for the past five or six years made a fresh request to expand its site. The expansion was granted, the residents say, without consulting the farmers whose land it affected. The dispute that followed became violent.

"The cause of the conflict is because the investment site was given without consulting the local residents," one resident told Tikvah.

Why consultation is the recurring fault line

Ethiopia's investment regime moves land to investors through regional and zonal administrations rather than through purchase from the people farming it. Where that transfer is handled as a paperwork matter between an administration and a company, the people losing use of the land learn about it after the decision — and the grievance arrives without any process attached to it.

That is the pattern residents are describing in Gerese: not a disagreement about compensation terms, but about never having been in the room. It is the same sequence that has produced disputes around horticulture, sugar and industrial-park sites elsewhere in the country, and it is a commercial risk as much as a civic one. An investor who holds a lease that local farmers regard as illegitimate holds an asset that can stop producing without notice.

Open

The company has not been named in the reporting and has not commented. Neither the South Ethiopia regional administration nor the Gamo zone administration has confirmed the death toll, said how the expansion was approved, or stated whether a consultation process was required and skipped. Until an official count exists, 21 remains a residents' figure.

Sources: Tikvah Ethiopia, 2 October 2026