THENEWYORKER,OCTOBER3, 2022 35
move there, and open the entire com-
pound to the public, under its new name:
Unity Park.
After Abiy moves out, footbridges
and pedestrian tunnels will connect the
compound with a huge new park area,
across the road, where a small army of
Ethiopian workers was putting the fin-
ishing touches on gardens and a plan-
etarium, under the watch of Chinese
contractors. Not everything could be
outsourced that way, though. As we
passed the steps of Jubilee Palace, where
Selassie had been forced into the Bee-
tle, Abiy pointed to some eroded stone
bas-reliefs and whispered, “I will have
the Italians do the restoration work on
the fine things. I can’t have the Chi-
nese doing that. You understand.”
B
efore our excursions, Abiy liked to
meet me in a favorite spot: under
a tree in the palace compound, a short
walk from his residence. A butler sup-
plied coffee, served, in the Ethiopian
tradition, in tiny ceramic cups. After
we finished, Abiy would ask if I had
enjoyed it, and, when I assured him
that I had, he’d say, “Shall we go?”
Though Abiy rarely talks to report-
ers, he seemed happy to spend days
showing me his development projects.
He and his delegates took me to see a
sprawling banana plantation, part of a
scheme to promote agribusiness; a new
airport under construction; and a re-
cently completed industrial park in the
city of Hawassa—one of twelve that
he is building around the country. Abiy’s
aides talked in awed tones about his
tireless energy. A Western observer
with extensive experience in the region
put it differently: “He has proven amaz-
ingly adept at consolidating power and
then seemingly having no objective for
using it that lasts longer than a month.”
One morning, Abiy’s chief of staff,
an adroit man in his early thirties named
Mesfin Melaku, drove me to join Abiy
and his wife, Zinash Tayachew, as they
checked in on some of their projects.
Zinash, an ethnic Amhara from the
seventeenth-century city of Gondar,
met Abiy when they were both serv-
ing in the military, and not long after-
ward she converted to Pentecostalism,
his religion. Zinash is a gospel singer,
with a stirring voice; YouTube is full of
clips of her performing, audiences sway-
ing in time. She is otherwise a shy per-
son who largely stays out of view, rais-
ing their children. (She and Abiy have
three teen-age daughters and a young
adopted son.)
The First Lady was sponsoring a
program that built bread factories
throughout the country, to alleviate the
problem of food production. Mesfin
explained that, on today’s trip, she and
Abiy were visiting a young
developer who had volun-
teered to add a bakery to a
cluster of apartment tow-
ers that he was building.
When we approached, Abiy
was grilling the man about
his progress and urging him
to build more bakeries
around town. The devel-
oper nodded, with a neu-
tral expression, but he was
clearly taken aback. At another con-
struction site, Abiy interrogated a de-
veloper who had been building a soup
kitchen: a tin-roofed structure of con-
crete blocks with a cement floor. As we
walked away, Mesfin confided, “The
P.M. is not happy. He wants the soup
kitchen to be bigger.”
Abiy’s interventions can seem coun-
terproductive, even to his allies. As one
of his advisers told me, “Sometimes we
are angry at him for planting flowers
when we have so many other things
wrong in the country. But he says, ‘This
is for the future generations.’ His atti-
tude is ‘Why only concentrate on the
problems? We need to show that we
are more than the conflict.’”
Abiy finds funding for his ventures
wherever he can. He has held fund-rais-
ers on the sites of Addis’s new parks,
where he can lean on his country’s bil-
lionaires, many of whom built their for-
tunes under the old regime. In 2020,
his wife’s office announced that it had
solicited donations to construct twenty
schools in the countryside. Abiy gave
some two million dollars in profits from
his book to build more.
He has also printed new currency,
announcing that it was necessary both
to deter financial crimes and to “sal-
vage the country’s fractured economy.”
It has had little effect. During his term,
the rate of inflation has been more than
thirty per cent a year.
“Abiy likes to present himself as this
charismatic leader who puts himself
above it all,” Stefan Dercon, who teaches
economics at Oxford and who has ad-
vised Ethiopian governments for de-
cades, said. “But his vision is vague, as
leaders’ visions often are.” Dercon de-
scribed a kind of faith-based econom-
ics: “He has this belief in free enterprise
and prosperity through hard work. It’s
the prosperity gospel—he’s directly com-
ing out of that. I think he
just likes the shiny projects.”
Many of the impressive
results that Abiy touts—
huge wheat farms, irrigation
programs, industrial facil-
ities—are the continuation
of programs started under
the T.P.L.F.-led govern-
ment, which focussed its
development efforts on the
countryside. Abiy’s own
initiatives tend to cluster in cities, where
they can benefit young constituents—
and, he hopes, impress foreign visitors.
Without enough access to domestic
investment capital, he needs money
from outside.
There is much in Ethiopia to attract
investors. The country has an educated
population, decent infrastructure, and
enormous supplies of minerals, water,
and arable land. But development,
according to a recent I.M.F. report,
has faced a long list of impediments:
COVID-19, the war in Ukraine, a fero-
cious drought worsened by climate
change. Most significantly, the conflict
in Tigray has frozen international aid.
As a result of the fighting and the ev-
idence of war crimes, the Biden Ad-
ministration has cut off Ethiopia’s ac-
cess to credits and loans.
But Abiy has other funders who are
less concerned with human-rights vio-
lations. On a helicopter trip to Awash
National Park, a swampy wilderness
east of Addis, he travelled with a group
of Emiratis, whom he introduced
vaguely as “friends.” Abiy had built a
lakeside tourist resort in the park. The
water was disconcertingly infested with
crocodiles, but the landscape was rug-
gedly beautiful, and the developers had
erected kid-friendly animal statues
around the grounds. The resort was
one of half a dozen that Abiy was hav-
ing constructed in Ethiopia; the idea
was to seek international partners that
