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

TOM GARDNER, Africa correspondent for The Economist, has just published The Abiy Project: God, Power and War in the New Ethiopia, a groundbreaking biography of Ethiopia’s Nobel Peace Prize–winning prime minister Abiy Ahmed. The book simultaneously offers an incisive study of this controversial figure—whom Gardner describes as a “Pentecostal Putin […] part-[p]reacher, part-spy”—and an expansive history of Ethiopia’s recent decades. Its every page eye-opening, The Abiy Project is a testament to truth, justice, and human dignity during a hellish period of Ethiopian history.

Officially fought between 2020 and 2022, Ethiopia’s civil war—usually referred to as the “Tigray War” because the vast bulk of the struggle took place in that region—still continues to simmer today throughout this second most populous African nation. For his critical reporting on the conflict, Gardner was systematically targeted, physically attacked, and ultimately deported from the country. His book trenchantly documents the institutionalized criminality and horrific violence that ravage Abiy’s “new Ethiopia.”

At the same time, The Abiy Project is refreshingly free of the othering rhetoric and passive-aggressive attacks that have come to characterize so much discourse about the country today. Gardner has patiently listened to seemingly everyone who would talk to him—from orphaned street children to untouchable heads of state—and his journalistic rigor is what gives this book such extraordinary depth, comprehensiveness, and humanity.

The Abiy Project is not a conventional biography: Gardner’s analysis is much deeper and wider. Still, his focus is on the Ethiopian prime minister, so who is Abiy Ahmed?

Gardner describes Abiy as a “shape-shifter,” since the man variously styles himself as a self-help guru, a visionary entrepreneur, a corporate CEO, a somber military commander, and Ethiopia’s greatest monarch. “Abiy is at once playing the role of an almighty emperor,” Gardner writes,

imposing order on perceived chaos; a future-facing moderniser, scrubbing away an ugly past; a KPI-leading executive, successfully delivering high-end projects; and a righteous prophet, leading his wayward and sinful flock along the winding path to heaven.

Above all, Abiy is a Machiavellian ruler obsessed with his own personal power. Gardner observes that across Ethiopians’ rancorous divisions, the one point of agreement seems to be that Abiy is “delusional and megalomaniacal.” He quotes a diaspora Ethiopian who mourns “the nonchalant way [Abiy] just accepts people dying.” A former ally described Abiy as “street-smart, nasty, and selfish. All he cares about is what’s in it for him.”

Given Abiy’s Machiavellian amorality, the fearsome political culture he has imposed on the country is predictable. Trust is absent in his elite inner circle. Gardner describes how “disillusioned officials liv[e] in perpetual fear” of being outed for their whispered criticisms. Filsan Abdi, Ethiopia’s only federal minister to resign under Abiy’s rule, told Gardner, “They all talk behind his back, all the time […] They don’t believe anything he says. They think he’s crazy.” An Oromo official in Addis Ababa spoke of Abiy’s brutality against those who cross him. Gardner summarizes Abiy’s politics as an all-or-nothing, imperial yet pragmatic struggle. Sometimes he lets people live; other times, he ends them. Whether he is militarizing the entire Ethiopian population against his “enemies” or extending magnanimity to his rivals, “these are the gifts of monarchs to bestow.” Like an emperor, Abiy’s goal is total submission.

In many ways, The Abiy Project is a rebuke to the Nobel Peace Prize Committee, who awarded Abiy its coveted international honor in 2019. It is equally an expression of solidarity with suffering Ethiopians to whom the book is dedicated. Throughout its pages, the smiling Abiy is depicted as a shameless liar and ruthless killer—“a man burning in his conviction of manifest destiny,” even as he besieges, starves, bombs, and purges his own people.

Yet Gardner also writes about Abiy with a humane compassion. He narrates how Abiy was raised as a rural boy in an obscure village dreaming of being king and leading Ethiopia to unprecedented heights of power and prosperity. Deep down, the murderous emperor remains a vulnerable child longing for significance and salvation.

If Abiy is “a portrait both of arrogance and anxiety,” then what is his “project”? In Gardner’s view, it is nothing short of “remaking Ethiopia in his own image.” His expansive biography demonstrates that Abiy is insatiably driven by power, using flagrant deception, extreme violence, and systematized corruption to achieve his aims. The horrifying but normalized economy of kidnapping civilians for massive ransoms is just one example. To monopolize power, Abiy has “sacrificed democratisation on the altar of a political project built on the premise that he alone was indispensable.”

From his earliest days in office, the prime minister was consumed by the need for “the public’s undying devotion.” Nevertheless, as the war’s violence raged in mid-2022, his approach became increasingly ruthless. He shifted from seeking to be loved to insisting on being feared. Looking back, Gardner observes that “Abiy’s project had never really been a democratic one.” Rather, the promise of democratization was always an expendable tool for winning popularity, domestically and internationally, and capturing power. This ruse seems to have worked, temporarily at least.

Across 19 chapters, Gardner makes clear that Abiy sees himself as Ethiopia’s new Haile Selassie. In fact, Abiy calls himself the “seventh king,” the consummate inheritor of Ethiopia’s mythic empire in which rulers claimed to be sons of the Arabian war god Maḥrem and servants of an imperialized Christ. Like the old autocrat before him, Abiy has quashed nearly every flicker of dissent in Ethiopia.

As the war raged, Abiy’s messianic “dream of remaking Ethiopia in his own image” rapidly vanished. Instead, he inflamed ethnic rivalries, and the goal of national unity became ever more ragged and improbable. Nevertheless, Gardner notes, Abiy persists in his claim that Ethiopians will owe him their thanks in the end.

Zooming out, Gardner observes how Abiy and his project reflect a wider breakdown in international order and a rising authoritarianism around the world. As Russia, China, Israel, and the United States “trample on international law,” Abiy feels little need to respect its norms. Gardner quotes a veteran Western diplomat saying that “this is an age where, if you’re ruthless and reckless, nobody gets in your way”—a lesson, Gardner observes, that “Abiy has long taken to heart.”

Due in large part to Ethiopia’s ongoing civil war, the world today is witnessing more conflict-related deaths than at any time since the Rwandan genocide. The Ethiopian people have been relentlessly dehumanized in this narcissistic man’s imperial power game. Ironically, Abiy himself was present at Rwanda’s 30th commemoration of its apocalyptic bloodbath. If Ethiopia’s top general, Bacha Debele, is right (as quoted by Gardner), Abiy’s new Ethiopia holds the infamous distinction of killing 1.5 times as many people as the Rwandan genocide.

What, then, has Abiy’s “new Ethiopia” become? It is a society at war with itself, the product of Abiy’s messianic project, “drastically militarised and dangerously radicalised.” Five million neighbors have been displaced by violence, even as Abiy claims to have solved the problem of homelessness. Twenty million people have been subjected to extreme food insecurity, even as Abiy insists that “there is no hunger” in Ethiopia and the United Nations has awarded him its prestigious Agricola Medal for rural development. Addis increasingly glitters like Dubai, even as Ethiopia is ravaged by normalized abductions (including in Addis Ababa itself), political assassinations, and devastating conflict. Many young Ethiopians feel hopeless, believing their only option is to choose between “exile or the gun.” A nationwide brain drain has become an impoverishing flood.

How has this “new Ethiopia” emerged? Across nearly 400 pages, Gardner guides the reader through four escalating facets of Ethiopia’s recent history: “Revolution,” “Reform,” “Crisis,” and “War.” These weighty words aptly summarize Ethiopia’s modern journey from a Christian empire to a communist dictatorship to a stillborn secular democracy. Gardner argues that Abiy’s new Ethiopia, contextualized within this larger historical horizon, was never really headed toward liberal democracy, nor was Abiy “an agent of reform.” Instead, the traumas of the past were being relived and radicalized. Competing visions of Ethiopia as a modern constitutional order were seen as only resolvable through violence: “Opponents were enemies; to triumph was to vanquish, and politics meant war.” The war of weapons emerges out of the war of words, a pattern ominously visible in the United States today.

The outcome has been catastrophic. Gardner’s book provides soul-shattering accounts of the war’s devastation. The depredations he chronicles include soldiers stripping some 70 percent of Tigray’s hospitals, ransacking historic heritage sites, looting factories, burning vital farming equipment, and stealing food aid from starving people. (USAID called this “the largest-ever diversion of food aid in any country.”)

Androcide, “the systematic killing of boys and men,” has been pervasive, as has sexual violence. Researchers estimate that tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of Tigrayan women and girls have been raped, among countless other women who were sexually assaulted in neighboring regions of Ethiopia. One woman describes being stabbed, drugged, and raped for 10 days straight by 30 Eritrean soldiers. The ubiquity of sexual violence leads Gardner to conclude that the weaponization of mass rape in the war was, at best, “tolerated,” if not “implicitly ordered,” by Ethiopian and Eritrean military officers.

On the macroeconomic level, Gardner notes that funds Ethiopia desperately needs for development were funneled into fighting. A recent report estimates that Ethiopia’s recovery bill will cost $44 billion. The Institute for Economics & Peace calculated that nearly $110 billion has been wasted on the war—over seven years’ worth of Ethiopia’s federal budget.

While Gardner carefully analyzes competing accounts of Ethiopia’s civil war, he offers a clear narrative about Abiy’s decisive leadership in the conflict. Crucially, he dispels the popular myth that the war erupted spontaneously on the night of November 3, 2020, after the Tigray People’s Liberation Front attacked the Northern Command base. He shows that Abiy had been discussing military options against Tigray with his team in Addis for months, if not years, earlier. Unleashing that violence on Election Day in the United States was a clever cover.

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Many Ethiopian elites have insisted that Abiy’s invasion of Tigray was purely “defensive” and thus a “just war,” though Gardner shows this view to be a rationalization at best. Indeed, he documents the wider Ethiopian public’s appalling tolerance for the atrocities and expenditures of the war. He names Christian leaders’ warmongering in particular as a significant force in justifying the catastrophe: both Pentecostal leaders and the Orthodox church “arguably did most to publicly bless the war and sanctify its excesses.” If Abiy is right that “a country’s fate turn[s] on the moral and intellectual capacity of the individuals leading it,” then his project presents a sobering challenge for Ethiopian religion and ethics today

Throughout The Abiy Project, Gardner explores how religious rhetoric—especially the so-called “Prosperity Gospel”—has been weaponized for Abiy’s war-making powers. This corruption of Christianity insists that if you “submit” to your leaders, “God” will make you healthy, wealthy, and supreme over your “enemies.” As I documented in a 2022 article for Foreign Policy, Christian nationalism is wildly popular in Ethiopia today, peddled by grifting “motivational speakers.” Abiy, a prosperity preacher himself, has unsubtly rebranded his predecessors’ “Revolutionary Democracy” as his own “Prosperity Party.” “As a committed Pente [Pentecostal],” Gardner writes, “Abiy could always turn, as he had done in the past, to the idea that God’s hand would deliver peace without the need for justice.” The Prosperity Gospel has become a potent ally of the Ethiopian government; in fact, a respected Ethiopian intellectual told me that it is the unofficial “state religion” of Ethiopia today. Amid a flood of violence, Abiy designed his chic new office suite after Noah’s Ark.

On the Protestant side of Ethiopia’s Christian divide, Abiy established the Evangelical Council of Ethiopia, composed of the country’s most influential preachers, churches, and denominations—all directly accountable to Abiy himself. Dr. Betta Mengistu, a founder of Ethiopia’s Pentecostal movement and a personal friend of Abiy’s, co-leads this institution. On the Orthodox side, Abiy appointed Daniel Kibret, the immensely powerful deacon and author, as his personal adviser. Early into the war, Deacon Daniel inflamed the violence with explicitly genocidal speeches. He described Tigrayans as “weeds” and “monsters” who should be systematically exterminated, erased from Ethiopia’s historical memory. Today, Daniel is an influential member of Parliament and seemingly omnipresent in Abiy’s various initiatives.

Across religious sects, Gardner documents how the god of “prosperity” has been weaponized to serve Abiy’s impoverishing project. Sadly, nowhere in this long tome is God ever invoked for the sake of truth, justice, compassion, or even repentance. Instead, “God”—a Christian rebranding of the archaic Maḥrem—has been systematically refashioned as a tool for power, violence, and political self-justification, especially by the prime minister himself. In the process, millions of Ethiopians have been “suspended between moments of tentative hope that their loved ones might still be alive, and an unbearable sense of loss.” Against the global media’s amnesia, Gardner reminds us that “though the Tigray War has [formally] ended, their nightmare has not.”

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In his penultimate chapter, Gardner documents the powerful social media campaign that zealously defended and fueled Ethiopia’s war. In addition to the devastation it dealt to millions of Ethiopians, this movement harassed, attacked, and ultimately expelled Gardner from Ethiopia. Nevertheless, the author offers an impressively fair-minded, even empathetic description of these Russian-style “digital armies” and their deployment at Abiy’s command. We watch as “a flurry of new organisations,” styled as independent from Abiy’s government but closely allied with it, take center stage in the online battle to define the narrative of the war.

The Global Ethiopia Advocacy Nexus (GLEAN), established by media mogul Neamin Zeleke, mobilized “some of the most organised and influential activism in recent Ethiopian history”—in service of war. For the first time ever, Ethiopia’s senior cabinet ministers and diaspora activists were exchanging hashtags, most famously #NoMore, which purports to reject Western meddling in the country’s affairs. Billene Seyoum, Abiy’s press secretary, wrote in a private WhatsApp group that the mission was to “tur[n] all government institutions into ‘digital armies.’”

Midway into 2022, Gardner observes, there were still no signs of any grassroots peace movement in Ethiopia. It wasn’t until September 2022 that a solitary peace walk, organized by courageous Ethiopian women, took place in Addis. To my knowledge, this was the first and only public demonstration for peace since the war erupted. Abiy has systematically militarized Ethiopian society and muzzled any space for peacemakers. In a country where nearly 70 percent of the population claims a Christian identity, the peacemakers whom Jesus blessed as “the children of God” have been all but silenced.

Nevertheless, Gardner concludes his grim book with defiant hope. Throughout Ethiopia’s hellish civil war, countless people have practiced “ordinary kindness, and extraordinary bravery, amid horrifying violence and social upheaval.” These people prove that, “despite everything, it can always be otherwise.” Gardner honors Oromo families who sheltered their Amhara neighbors, Eritrean soldiers who protected Tigrayan women from rape, and an Amhara man who hid a Qemant woman and her children from Amhara militiamen.

Neither optimistic nor pessimistic, Gardner ends The Abiy Project with a subtle invitation to practice this “ordinary kindness, and extraordinary bravery.” In Ethiopia, the spotlight is repeatedly shone on powerful elites, but Gardner emphasizes the role of everyday people as agents of change for a truly new Ethiopia. Significantly, Abiy’s name doesn’t appear in the book’s final paragraph. The Abiy project eventually vanishes, as all dictatorships ultimately do. A peaceful Ethiopia is still possible—an Ethiopia of ordinary people who aren’t defined by power-hungry men like Abiy, the elites who prop up his project, and those who violently oppose it.

Tom Gardner’s empathetic book defies Abiy Ahmed’s Machiavellian project and suggests that, rather than ruling through fear, it’s better to love and be loved. This is the post-Abiy project that calls for all of our conviction, compassion, and courage today—the only true “winding path to heaven.” The Abiy Project will endure as a rebuke to all who supported Ethiopia’s unjust and unjustifiable war, serving as a source of solace, a small landmark of historical accountability amid the ruinous impunity of Abiy’s “new Ethiopia.”

LARB Contributor