Nairobi, February 17, 2026 — Recep Tayyip Erdogan arrived in Addis Ababa on Tuesday for his first visit to Ethiopia in over a decade, marking the centenary of Turkey's embassy presence in the country and elevating a relationship that, behind the diplomatic ceremony, is driven by concrete and competing interests.

The visit arrives at a pivotal moment. Turkey is not simply pursuing a trade relationship with Ethiopia — it is consolidating a strategic presence in the Horn of Africa that has geopolitical, commercial, and military dimensions that much of the Western press has consistently underreported.

What Ankara Actually Wants

For Turkey, Ethiopia is a node in a larger continental project. Analysts and African foreign policy researchers who have tracked Erdogan's Africa strategy over the past decade identify at least four overlapping interests driving Tuesday's visit.

First, Red Sea access and maritime positioning. Ethiopia's ongoing and unresolved quest for a sea outlet — following its landlocked status after Eritrea's independence in 1993 — has made it a key player in the Red Sea geopolitical contest. Addis Ababa's fraught negotiations with Somalia and its earlier, now-suspended memorandum of understanding with Somaliland for port access have drawn in multiple external powers. Turkey, which has cultivated deep ties with Somalia (and notably brokered a security agreement with Mogadishu), sits at a strategic intersection. Ankara's ability to mediate between Addis Ababa and Mogadishu — as it did with last year's Ankara Declaration — gives it unusual leverage in regional diplomacy.

Second, arms markets and defence cooperation. Turkey's Bayraktar TB2 drone has become the instrument of choice for several African governments facing non-state armed actors. Ethiopia deployed Turkish drones during the Tigray war. The military relationship is neither new nor peripheral — it is a central pillar of the Ankara-Addis relationship that neither government typically foregrounds in public statements.

Third, construction and infrastructure contracts. Turkish state-linked and private construction companies have significant project pipelines across East Africa. Ethiopia's infrastructure ambitions — roads, housing, industrial parks — represent a substantial market. The alignment between Addis Ababa's development agenda and Ankara's export-oriented construction sector is commercially significant.

Fourth, diplomatic bloc-building. Erdogan has cultivated a self-positioning for Turkey as a power that speaks to the Global South without the colonial baggage of Western nations and without the transactional opacity that many African governments now associate with China. The framing — Turkey as a Muslim-majority democracy with developmental credentials and historical solidarity — has genuine resonance in parts of Africa.

African Analysts on Turkey's Role

'Turkey is offering something genuinely different from both the Western model and the Chinese model,' said an Ethiopian economist and foreign policy commentator based in Addis Ababa. 'Western partners come with conditions — governance, human rights benchmarks. China comes with projects but also with debt structures that have been problematic for several countries. Turkey comes with a different kind of political relationship, rooted in Islamic solidarity in some cases, in military cooperation in others.'

That framing is not without its critics. 'We should be careful about romanticising Turkey's Africa engagement,' cautioned a Kenyan international relations scholar at the University of Nairobi. 'Turkey has its own interests — commercial, strategic, political. The question for Ethiopian policymakers is whether those interests align with Ethiopia's long-term development needs or whether they create new dependencies.'

The Anniversary Frame and the Real Agenda

Erdogan's visit is officially framed around the centenary of Turkish-Ethiopian diplomatic relations, which date in some form to the 16th century and were formalised with an embassy in Addis Ababa in 1926. The symbolism is real — these are old ties — but the substantive agenda centres on cooperation agreements expected to be signed, covering trade, security, and infrastructure.

The visit also arrives at a moment of acute domestic pressure for Abiy Ahmed. With tensions on the Eritrea border escalating, ongoing security challenges in Oromia and Amhara, and an economy under severe foreign exchange pressure, the Ethiopian prime minister needs demonstrable international partnerships. A state visit from a NATO member with drone technology and construction capital is not unwelcome.

'For Abiy, Turkey is useful precisely because it is not a Western power and not China,' the Addis-based economist noted. 'It gives Ethiopia room to manoeuvre.'

Whether that room to manoeuvre translates into genuine strategic autonomy for Ethiopia — or simply adds another external actor whose interests must be managed — is the question African analysts are watching most carefully as the ceremonial agreements are signed in Addis Ababa today.

Reporting from Nairobi with additional sourcing from Addis Ababa. TRT World reporting on the visit is available at trtworld.com.