Ethiopia leverage is tremendous, first and foremost her troops are occupying large swathes of the country while others are on standby in case anything kicks off, this is all the leverage she needs.
The second leverage she has is the classic British subversion through intimidation, assassination which instils fear in politicians, the CIA along with M15 and Mossad have built them an extensive surveillance network recently exposed by the intercept in an in depth analysis.
This allows them to eavesdrop on all communications giving them tremendous intelligence apparatus unrivalled by anyone else in Africa let alone Somalia, they know about all the important conversations that are taking place and can react before any effective opposition groups form, like the recent spate of murders.
They have managed to do this several times both in Somalia as well as Ethiopia to stifle such groups before they can even get off the ground, long before the ICU, they knew about the wadaads having regular meetings, hence via CIA they paid warlords to export them to Gitmo to stop a possible uprising.
Then you have their countless spies embedded deep within all regional and federal administrations in all the key positions to subvert both domestic as well as foreign policy to their likening, on top of arming/financing terrorists and opposition groups (Shabab/ASWJ/ISIS)
They have created an absolute extensive behemoth of a security apparatus with the help of Israel, America and the British that has been in place for decades now.
Ahamed Madoobe understood they have bugged everywhere including all the villa's of regional presidents, hence his insistence to talk underneath the trees as per Somali tradition in order to casually dodge them, when this began to happen, Gabre began to turn up to those meetings with a "gun" and this quickly stopped.
Due to extensive foreign backing they have all of us by the balls including the Ethiopian groups themselves, the only way to defeat this is to overwhelm them from all sides at ones, anyone that deviates will simply be taken out like the general calling for the embargo to be lifted was taken out this week through assassination by their proxies.