When Abiy Ahmed took power in Ethiopia, he was feted at home and abroad as a great unifier and reformer. Two years later, terrible violence was raging. How did people get him so wrong?
‘I’m sorry, I don’t know anything about Abiy Ahmed.” The message flashed up from someone I had been told to call Napoleon. It was the middle of 2023, six years after I had first arrived in Ethiopia, and one year after I had left, in the midst of a war which was tearing it apart. Ethiopia was lurching from crisis to crisis, and behind each of them loomed one figure larger than any other: the prime minister, Abiy Ahmed.
Napoleon was in the US. He had known Abiy when the two of them had worked together as cyber-intelligence officers in the 2000s. A mutual contact had prepared him for my call, and assured me that he was ready and willing. Just one day earlier, Napoleon had told me himself, via text message, that he would share with me what he knew of the character of the man who, five years earlier, had won control of the Ethiopian state. Now, though, Napoleon was having second thoughts. When I tried to ring, he blocked my number.
The closer someone had been to Abiy, it seemed, the less likely they were to talk about him. Even those living far away in safe countries in the west were often too afraid to speak with me. Some would read my messages and then block my number. A few would reply, promising to schedule an interview, only to disappear. Many would not answer my calls at all.
Over the six years I had been living and working in Ethiopia, I had tried to speak with as many people as possible who had known and worked with Abiy. Despite the appearance of openness that characterised his early days in power, almost everyone agreed he was an enigma. Later, as their lives, and those of all Ethiopians, were profoundly altered by the political decisions he made, many sought further explanations: who is Abiy, really, and what does he want?
When he came to power in 2018, Abiy was feted in the west as a liberal reformer, one who would shepherd an Ethiopia bedevilled by factional politics and competing identities into a democratic future. As the first national leader in Ethiopia’s modern history to identify as Oromo, the largest but historically underrepresented of the country’s many ethnic groups, Abiy was thought to be a unifier after years of fracture.