The numbers of individuals leaving Eritrea continues to rise, and accounts from across the political spectrum bemoan the conditions endured by the population within the country. In such an arena, it seems pertinent to ask how loyalty to the government and/or nation is cultivated and maintained, and by and towards whom. While the older clique of ruling elites developed allegiance in part through personal experiences of the trenches and fighting during the liberation struggle, transmission of values to the next generation has been unable to rely on such experiential means. Alongside time spent in national service, and particularly at the Sawa military training camp, a strong nationalist ethos or, much more rarely, loyalty to the government has depended upon both physically coercive actions and, importantly, emotional appeals to individual’s self-mastery. Patience, discretion and self-control are the under acknowledged key to this endeavour, allowing as they do for projections and promises to instill hope without any demonstrable evidence of change or capacity for it. This paper thus explores how hope-filled political imaginaries become embodied in Eritrea within a space where interactions with formal state interactions are chronically disappointing. It compliments studies undertaken with the country’s extensive diasporic population, which has long noted the emotional intensity of loyalty within these spaces, through exploratory interviews with civil servants and civilians within Asmara.