Interview: Ethiopia and Abiy Ahmed
#81: With Tom Gardner
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Tom Gardner is the author of The Abiy Project: God, Power and War in the New Ethiopia. Gardner moved to Addis Ababa in 2016 as The Economist’s Horn of Africa Correspondent. He covered Ethiopia during its most tumultuous years in decades, travelling to all corners of the country before his expulsion by the Abiy Ahmed government at the height of the Tigray war in 2022. Since 2024 he has been The Economist’s Africa Correspondent based in Nairobi. Our questions are in bold, his answers in block quotes.
Who is Abiy Ahmed?
Abiy is Ethiopia's prime minister, a Nobel peace laureate, and—in my view—the most historically significant African leader of his generation. But I also think that his importance goes beyond Africa. Few leaders anywhere in the world today so vividly embody the politics of our age: an icon of religious (Christian) evangelical revival; a master of disinformation and 'post-truth'; and, above all, a creature of our fragmenting, increasingly lawless, multipolar world.
Why were there such high hopes when Abiy came to power?
In short, the world got Abiy wrong. When he came to power in 2018, he was feted in the West as a liberal reformer, one who’d shepherd an Ethiopia bedevilled by ethnic division into a democratic and “post-ethnic” future. As the first leader in Ethiopia’s modern history to identify as Oromo, the largest but historically among the most politically under-represented of the country’s many ethnic groups, Abiy was thought to be a unifier after years of fracture. It is worth noting that he came to power in the early Trump era, a time when there was a certain yearning among Western liberals (diplomats, academics, politicians, journalists) for a saviour, someone who could restore their faith in the arc of history.
Abiy was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2019. For what?
When we talk about the world getting Abiy wrong, the awarding him with the Nobel prize in 2019 is the high-point of what I call the era of delusionally naive "Abiymania". Ostensibly, the reason was that in 2018, shortly after coming to power, he made a historic peace with Eritrea, Ethiopia’s smaller neighbour which seceded in 1993. The Nobel committee’s chair said the prize recognised Abiy’s “efforts to achieve peace and international cooperation, and in particular his decisive initiative to resolve the border conflict with neighbouring Eritrea”. He also praised Abiy’s domestic reform efforts, including the release of tens of thousands of prisoners and the return of once-banned opposition groups.
Why did Abiy make peace with Eritrea?
The reality, though, was more complicated—far more complicated, and frankly sinister, than the Nobel committee could have realised, even if they had done their homework properly. The peace deal was really anything but: it was a security pact in all but name, between him and Eritrea's long-standing dictator, Isaias Afewerki. Abiy and Isaias shared a common enemy; the leaders of Ethiopia's Tigray region, which abuts Eritrea's southern border. This alliance ultimately paved the way for the war against Tigray, one of the very worst wars of the 21st century so far, which began two years later.
What role did Abiy play in the Ethiopian civil war?
Abiy was the war's chief architect. Unlike some analysts, I don't believe that his antagonists in Tigray—the Tigrayan People's Liberation Front (TPLF)—a controversial former liberation movement which had held outsized power in Ethiopian national politics for much of the previous three decades, was innocent. They too played a part in the tit-for-tat escalatory spiral which led to war in 2020. But Abiy was prime minister, and the buck ultimately stops with him. In a more overarching sense, too, my central contention is that Abiy’s highly idiosyncratic and personalised rule heightened what sociologists might call the Ethiopian state’s ‘structural contradictions’ to the point of near total collapse. As the country’s disrupter in chief, who took a sledgehammer to an already combustible set of political arrangements, Abiy was the prime catalyst for the country’s spectacular unravelling after 2018.
You wrote that he “may go down as the most controversial recipient of the Nobel peace prize since Henry Kissinger”. What makes you say so?
I think it is worth dwelling here on the horrors of his time in office. Hundreds of thousands, perhaps a million, people died in the Tigray War, which ended in 2022. His government committed extensive human rights abuses; what UN investigators have described as crimes against humanity, including the crime of forced starvation. Many would, fairly convincingly, argue that this was in fact a genocide. It involved rape as a weapon of war on an industrial scale.
Abiy was no bystander in this: ultimately, he licensed it—including by inviting troops from Eritrea, who had their own troubled history with Tigrayans, into the country to wage total war against their common foe. But there's more than just this: mass violence has been the defining feature of the Abiy era, from before the war in Tigray, and after. His troops continue to wage brutal campaigns against insurgents in other parts of the country today, notably the Amhara and Oromo regions, the two largest in the country. Abiy shows no signs of wanting to end these conflicts; and he has skillfully avoided any accountability for any of the crimes committed in the past six years.
What role do regional powers play in enabling him?
Abiy has one key regional sponsor: the United Arab Emirates, and in particular its ruler Mohammed bin Zayed. The two leaders have a close, almost brotherly relationship—MbZ clearly sees something of himself in Abiy, in his vaulting ambitions to reshape his country and immediate neighborhood in his own image. MbZ has bankrolled Abiy's government since 2018; furnished his armed forces with hi-tech equipment including the drones which arguably played the decisive role in the Tigray War; and is now funding the transformation of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia's capital, into a Dubai-like urban playground.
How high is the risk of another civil war in Ethiopia?
Ethiopia's civil war never really ended. There was a peace deal in 2022 which brought fighting in Tigray to a close. But it is extremely fragile, and could easily erupt again, not least because Abiy has failed to implement certain key provisions. And, regardless, by ending that war in the way he did he sowed the seeds for another: in Amhara, which has been a conflict zone since early 2023. Moreover, the Ethiopian state—once the strongest in Africa—is now so weak that almost nowhere is entirely safe and secure. Kidnapping, for example, is now rampant across much of the country outside of Addis Ababa.
What’s a question you wish you were asked and what’s your answer to it?
What is Abiy's role in the wider region? It is in the broader Horn of Africa region that Abiy could yet play the most dangerous role. He is currently embroiled in a bitter dispute over sea access with neighboring Somalia, which has pitted him not only against Somalia's president but also his previously close ally, Isaias of Eritrea. These tensions are drawing in regional powers, including Egypt, Turkey and the UAE. There is a real chance of a broader regional war in the coming years, most likely between Ethiopia and Eritrea, which previously fought a border war in 1998-2000 in which perhaps 100,000 died. My main warning these days is this: the worst may well be yet to come.
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