Building a state takes decades of hard labour. Destroying one can be done virtually overnight. In September 2018, the prime minister of Ethiopia, Abiy Ahmed, flew to the Eritrean capital, Asmara, to sign a tripartite pact with Isaias Afwerki and Mohamed Abdullahi (known as ‘Farmaajo’), presidents of Eritrea and Somalia respectively. Both Abiy and Farmaajo were young and charming, apparently free of the shackles of their countries’ troubled pasts. They had recently taken office on a surge of optimism that they would deliver liberal democracy. Their host was a hard-bitten guerrilla fighter turned dictator. One veteran diplomat described it as ‘two rabbits going on a dinner date with a cobra’.

Abiy was on a meteoric trajectory. In 2019, he would win the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to resolve Ethiopia’s border dispute with Eritrea. Five years on, however, the promise of democracy in Ethiopia has been shredded. What’s more, the advances in internal stability and development made by the country in the preceding decades have been reversed. Abiy inherited a state that had (statistical vagaries permitting) the fastest-growing non-oil economy in the world. A visitor could travel safely to almost any corner of the country. Ethiopia was an anchor of stability in a troubled region: its peacekeepers were serving under United Nations and African Union flags in neighbouring Somalia, South Sudan and Sudan. These are all fading memories now. Abiy’s name will forever be linked to the war he chose to launch in 2020 in the Tigray region, which led to the deaths of at least 600,000 civilians through starvation, disease and massacres. In an insightful paper published in the journal Contemporary Security Policy in 2022, Harry Verhoeven and Michael Woldemariam asked, ‘Who lost Ethiopia?’ Why, in particular, did the United States stand aside while a crucial ally was becoming a basket case, even applauding the change in direction?

Tom Gardner saw all this unfold first-hand as correspondent for The Economist in Addis Ababa. He is now persona non grata in Ethiopia, and from The Abiy Project it’s easy to see why. He details how Abiy is a fraud. The Ethiopian ruler has an ego as gigantic as the towering megaprojects he is imposing on his poverty-stricken country, and the thing he can least stand is being exposed as a charlatan.

Abiy was a high-school dropout who joined the ruling party in his home state of Oromia and enlisted as a soldier. His big break came when he saw a chance to dive right into the bowels of the security state, volunteering for the newly established Information Network Security Agency (INSA). This allowed him to attend a six-month cryptography course in South Africa, from which he got a diploma, his only legitimate educational qualification. (The dissertation for which he was given a PhD was conjured out of the air in fourteen months, at the same time that Abiy was engaged full-time in politics. When I ran the text through standard plagiarism software, it turned out that well over half was copied and pasted from other sources.) One of the prime minister’s INSA superiors told Gardner, ‘Abiy was a fast communicator, young and Oromo – that’s why he was chosen. His main talent was communicating with people.’

Abiy’s communication skills were those of a preacher. He is a fervent Pentecostalist, a member of the fast-growing and transformational evangelical movement. At prayer breakfasts, he won the admiration of, among others, Jim Inhofe, a Republican senator, and David Beasley, a Republican former governor of North Carolina who went on to serve as head of the UN World Food Programme (and turned out to be a convenient friend when Abiy blocked food aid to Tigray).

Abiy worked his way to the top using guile and the most effective form of political flattery: telling people what they want to hear. He applied those skills to winning the backing of Western governments, notably that of the United States. There’s no evidence that he was ever an American asset. Rather, no one seems to have checked their man’s bona fides. Among those who drank the Abiy Kool-Aid were Emmanuel Macron, Tony Blair and António Guterres, along with numerous Western diplomats. Few have confessed their error. Fewer still have reflected on what it tells us about their blinkers.

Under Abiy, Ethiopia has become a victim of its own success. Once a famine-racked land that could never attract foreign investment, up to 2018 it experienced  nearly two decades of rapid economic growth, setting it on the path to middle-income status. The former prime minister Meles Zenawi, who died of an illness in 2012, was the architect of this transformation. His models were Taiwan and South Korea in their early years. He insisted that the government needed to keep a tight grip on the spoils of growth to prevent Ethiopia from turning into the kind of free-for-all kleptocracy that other, previously successful African states had become. Meles’s hapless successor, Haile Mariam Desalegn, struggled with the political strains unleashed by the rising expectations of young Ethiopians, the jockeying of his own lieutenants and the circling of foreign powers with their siren songs. Rich pickings would become available to foreign investors,
especially if the crown jewels of Ethiopia’s ‘developmental state’ – banking and telecoms – were privatised. 

When Haile Mariam resigned, Abiy was the candidate shuffled into the palace by the ruling party. Abiy promised everything to everyone, at home and abroad. An array of naifs and fellow travellers believed him, as well as those, such as Eritrea’s Afwerki, who smelled a useful idiot. His most consequential supporter was the president of the United Arab Emirates, Mohamed bin Zayed, to whom Abiy became a supplicant, getting undreamed-of flows of cash – for which he did not have to account – and a supply of drones that were crucial when Abiy and Afwerki’s war on the recalcitrant Tigrayans was going badly. 

The tale Gardner tells is a tragedy of how magical thinking led to extraordinary brutality and mass starvation. And the story is not over. Although Gardner tries to end on a positive note, describing how ordinary Ethiopians have shown compassion and civility, it is hard to put down his book without feeling despondent about the lives ruined and the hopes lost in a spasm of irresponsibility.