The Man Who Unraveled Ethiopia

The Abiy Project: God, Power and War in the New Ethiopia, by Tom Gardner, Hurst & Company, 353 Pages.

In 2018, when Abiy Ahmed became prime minister of Ethiopia, the charismatic new leader seemed to be all things to all people. He was feted as a liberal reformer who could bring a glorious future to an ancient, troubled land. In 2019, he was awarded the Nobel Prize after rapidly making peace with neighboring Eritrea after 20 years of hostility. Yet by 2020, Abiy’s government, now allied with Eritrea, was involved in one of the most brutal civil wars of the modern era. Ethiopia now teeters on the edge of state collapse. In The Abiy Project: God, Power and War in the New Ethiopia, journalist Tom Gardner tells the complex story of how one of our era’s most unusual leaders rapidly took Ethiopia from hope to despotism and despair.

Gardner arrived in Addis Ababa in 2016 to work as the Economist’s Horn of Africa correspondent, two years before Abiy took power. He witnessed Abiy ushering in an unprecedented era of political and media freedom, emptying the jails of political prisoners, and offering amnesty to former rebels outside of the country. Ethiopia seemed to be flourishing. Abiy, however, soon began moving against the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, which had led the ruling coalition for over 25 years and filled most positions in the Ethiopian “Deep State” with their minority ethnic group. He made peace with Eritrea without the approval of the TPLF, which led to Tigray refusing to accept orders from the federal government. Ethiopia and Eritrea went to war against them. Abiy rapidly became more tyrannical, as not only the Tigray War but widespread ethnic violence consumed the country, with the worst intensity moving from region to region. Soon, the former hope looked like naivete.

Gardner portrays Abiy as an enigmatic figure. Little about Abiy’s childhood is known, and much of the reporting is contradictory. The greatest part of his origin myth is that his mother believed in a prophecy that he would one day rule Ethiopia. Abiy, a charismatic speaker, convert to Pentecostal Christianity, and former spy, is something like a mix between a televangelist and the CEO of a Silicon Valley startup. As Ethiopia was sinking into violence and misery, Abiy at times was focusing on buying more comfortable chairs and better coffee makers for Ethiopia’s government offices, even once referring to himself as a “Bay Area kind of guy” while also promoting a sort of “prosperity gospel.” In one amusing quote about his combination of adaptability and shallowness, a former employee said, “He’s good with technology, and he can Google something, read about it on Wikipedia, and then turn it into a PowerPoint presentation.”

Armed with religious fervor and the skills of the average C student, Abiy managed to charm Western leaders beyond all reason. Gardner notes that in the first few months, “comparisons in the Western press ranged from Barack Obama, Emmanuel Macron and Justin Trudeau to Nelson Mandela, Mikhail Gorbachev and even Che Guevara.” As for myself, he reminds me of the mid-20th century conservative writer Peter Viereck’s coinage “Genghis Khan plus the telegraph”—the synthesis of medieval autocracy with modern technocracy. Gardner notes the mixture of old and new in his introduction, writing, “Abiy applies twenty-first-century techniques of online propaganda and disinformation just as he resurrects the courtly politics of imperial Ethiopia.”

While one gets the impression that Gardner has the conventional liberal internationalist views, he avoids both the mistake of demanding that Ethiopia function like a Western European country, and also the converse of giving Ethiopia a pass for human rights violations or other problems on the grounds of “cultural differences” (although it is clear that Ethiopians themselves have a higher tolerance for political brutality than Westerners.) Gardner tells an illustrative story of the West’s initial relationship with Abiy where the Ethiopian leader found himself planting trees with Francis Fukuyama. In a typical piece of transparent flattery, Abiy had one of Fukuyama’s books on hand for the occasion. 

Fukuyama said of the experience, “Over the years, I’ve seen a lot of people that have gotten really good at talking to Westerners, because they know exactly how to hit all the right buttons. He was certainly doing that in his conversation with me. Was he sincere? I have no idea. But he said the right words.” It is a stunning admission that Fukuyama recognizes that people across the world can easily parrot the language of liberal internationalism but that he cannot tell whether they are sincere and, further, doesn’t seem to care. (One can’t help but note that his faction’s core grievance against Trump is that he won’t repeat their platitudes.)

For all of this, the Obama comparison to Abiy is strong. He seems to have come into power believing that with some nice words he could erase history and move past ethnic conflicts within his society. Gardner writes, “Abiy sought to transcend this difficult history: to wipe away with the complexities of identity, ideology and nation-building in a single stroke and build afresh. Instead he was consumed by it.” Similarly, in 2008 no one would have imagined that one of Obama’s main legacies would have been a notable decline in race relations in the United States, as he spoke of a brighter future but then his supporters increasingly attributed any opposition to his program to racism. Fortunately, what the U.S. went through doesn’t come close to what happened to Ethiopia.

Gardner compares Ethiopia to Yugoslavia in the ’90s, which is perhaps the best way for outsiders to understand the country, which has been organized under an “ethnic federalism” system since the fall of the communist junta in 1991. Of Yugoslavia, the English author Rebecca West wrote that English people who visit cannot accept that everyone has ill-treated everyone else, and “came back with a pet Balkan people established in their hearts as suffering and innocent, eternally the massacree and never the massacrer.” Gardner does an impressive job of avoiding this pitfall, which can easily be witnessed among most outsiders who comment on Ethiopian affairs. One is left with the impression that ethnic partisans of any of Ethiopia’s groups would feel that they were treated unfairly in the text, which speaks to Gardner’s successful non-partisanship. Although many innocent individuals have been harmed in Ethiopia’s internal conflicts, none of the major ethnic groups have been innocent as violence and ethnic cleansing raged back and forth between them.

The main weakness of this book is not the fault of the author. In his six years in Ethiopia, until his expulsion in 2022, Gardner was never able to get an interview with Abiy, who prefers communicating directly with the public on his own terms. This leaves the reader seeing Abiy himself only from public statements and those willing to speak about him. This is unfortunate because, when Abiy does give an interview, his bizarre nature is fully on display. In one instance, he gave an English-language interview about his geopolitical outlook where the answers had been lifted “almost verbatim” from a Henry Kissinger interview in the Atlantic and a New Statesmen essay by the comedian Russell Brand. In the absence of interviews with Abiy, Gardner extensively interviewed the opposition leader Jawar Mohammed. While Jawar comes off as a reasonable and well-informed source, it feels as if he became the author’s friend and is not so important a political figure as his prominence in the book suggests.

Overall, in The Abiy Project Tom Gardner does an excellent job at the difficult task which he describes as “writing a first draft of history.” This text is well written, contains meticulous citations, and draws from a broad array of sources within Ethiopian society, its expatriate community, and foreigners who have worked in the country. As the author acknowledges, as time goes on we will learn more about the inscrutable Abiy, particularly whether he was primarily driving events or responding to them. For now, The Abiy Project is essential reading for anyone who wants to learn about Ethiopia’s unraveling under this bizarre leader.