Advocacy team member
Lalisa Benti is a former supervisor at Ethiopian airlines where he specialized in aviation engineering and a published afaan Oromo autor. He has two decades of industry experience, currently serving as a senior engineer at southwest airlines since 2015. He was born in west Wollega zone of the Oromia region from a protestant christian family and completed his secondary education at Aira High School. After graduating from Addis Ababa University (AAU) in Mechanical Engineering, he held various industry positions in the country for almost a decade before relocating to the USA in 2008. He was an aircraft engineer with Atlas Air for a dozen of years before his current appointment. He started his activism for the Oromo cause while a high school student by utilizing his gift of crafting resistance poems. As a 9th grader, he was detained and tortured for his artistic work addressing the atrocities of the TPLF regime, the then government of Ethiopia. As an undergraduate student at AAU, he took part in the Oromo student movement in opposing the government’s decision to move the capital of Oromia from Finfine to Adama. In addition, he actively participated in the effort of holding the government accountable during suspected government involvement in deliberate, large scale, five weeks long forest fire in Oromia region [Bale and Borena] in February of 2000. At the time, he was one of the organizers to mobilize college students to respond by facilitating large scale student involvement to extinguish the fires. He joined the Oromo Federalist Democaratic Movement (OFDM), an opposition party to the government, right after graduating from his University. His book titled “Eenyu Siin Jedhu” [roughly translated – what is your identity] captures the historical and the present Oromo struggles.