What makes Waaqeffanna hard to separate from Oromo public life is gadaa. The system sorts men into generation classes that move together through a fixed sequence of grades, each with its own duties, and it transfers political and ritual authority from one class to the next at set intervals in a ceremony that has been performed for centuries. The men holding office at the top of the cycle legislate, judge and lead ritual for their term and then hand over. It is a religious institution and a constitutional one at the same time, which is why UNESCO inscribed it in 2016 as an indigenous democratic socio-political system rather than as a rite.
The qaalluu is the religious office proper. A qaalluu is a ritual leader of hereditary standing whose shrine is a place of pilgrimage and arbitration, and whose blessing carries weight in matters gadaa does not settle. Under the imperial and later administrations the office was pressured and in places reduced to a formality.
Irreecha is the tradition at its most visible. It is a thanksgiving, held as the rains end, at running or standing water; the best known gathering is at Hora Arsadi in Bishoftu, though it is kept at many waters and on mountains. Participants carry fresh grass and flowers to the water, give thanks to Waaqa for having brought them through the season, and ask for the one to come. Since the early 1990s the festival has drawn very large crowds, and published attendance figures vary so widely that the atlas records them as contested rather than repeating any of them. Irreecha has also become political ground: in 2016 a confrontation between security forces and the crowd at Bishoftu ended in a lethal stampede, an event that is now part of what the festival means to many of the people who attend it.