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