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Put to the test

Tom Gardner: Addis Ababa correspondent, The Economist, ADDIS ABABA

Abiy Ahmed will present Ethiopia with an unhappy choice

THE OMENS seemed so promising. “The coming time in Ethiopia will be [one] of love
and forgiveness,” said Abiy Ahmed in his inaugural address as Ethiopia’s prime minister
in 2018. After years of anti-government protests, the young reformer promised a new
dawn for Africa’s second-most-populous country. He freed political prisoners,
unmuzzled the media and welcomed opposition parties back from exile. He made peace
with Eritrea, for which he won the Nobel peace prize in 2019. And he styled himself as a
transitional leader, tasked with ridding Ethiopia of dictatorship and shepherding it
towards its first free elections.

In 2021 Ethiopians will find out if Abiy has set the country on the road to liberty—or
plunged it into anarchy. In November the prime minister ordered his forces to hit back
in response to what he claimed was an “attack” on a base housing federal troops in the
northern region of Tigray, the most powerful of Ethiopia’s ten ethnically constituted
states.