For decades, Ethiopians were accustomed to their politics moving at a glacial pace, punctuated by rare but decisive regime turnover. Citizens didn’t know what their rulers were up to, but they were confident conspiracies hatched in the palace and party headquarters would be executed efficiently.
Today, however, the Ethiopian political arena is marked by an unsettling air of drift. Coalitions seem to shift every week while the pattern of survival politics continues. It’s implausible that this turbulence is the product of intricate conspiracies. More likely, there’s a vacuum at the heart of power.
There’s no longer a fight to the death between the federal government and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front. That extraordinarily bloody war ended — at least for now — with a “permanent cessation of hostilities” signed in Pretoria, South Africa, on November 2.
The best estimate for civilian deaths in Tigray alone is over 500,000, mostly caused by hunger and disease. Faced with escalating starvation, the leadership sued for peace.
Meeting his commanders last week, Field Marshal Berhanu Jula defended the decision to stop fighting. He said that the army had suffered 254,000 fatalities in the war, not counting losses among the militia, which were likely much higher. At least one general challenged him, saying that, with a population of over 100 million, manpower wasn’t their problem. Jula answered that keeping a single drone airborne for a day cost a million dollars, and the money was no longer there.
But the peace deal to implement the Pretoria agreement that was signed in Nairobi, Kenya, is an enigma. Neither the agreement itself nor the two follow-up agreements on how to implement it contains any political content other than avowing respect for the existing constitution.
The substance of the agreement is that the Tigrayan resistance surrenders its heavy weapons and demobilizes in return for humanitarian assistance, the restoration of services, and the withdrawal of all forces — implicitly, the Eritrean Defense Force and Amhara regional militia and special forces — other than the national army. Even conceding that the deadlines written into the documents were wholly unrealistic, progress has been slow, and the Tigrayan disarmament has started before the Eritrean withdrawal. Optimists would nonetheless argue that the material conditions for Tigrayans are improving.
The politics, meanwhile, are entirely opaque. Observers are reduced to studying the body language of federal and Tigrayan leaders when they meet or deciphering cryptic public statements. Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s plan is simple and obvious: he wanted to declare the war over in order to rehabilitate his image among international donors and reduce the intolerable strain on the economy. In the Ethiopian media, Tigray has vanished. For the TPLF leaders, back-door politicking has its attractions, as they will struggle to explain a series of decisions taken during the war, such as failing to set up a more inclusive government after recapturing their capital Mekelle in June 2021, withdraw from their commanding military positions close to Addis Ababa six months later, or go public with the first rounds of peace talks in March last year.
Most Ethiopians suspect a secret bargain between the leaders in Addis Ababa and Mekelle; perhaps a security pact against common foes, perhaps a political pact so both can escape being called to account. It’s equally plausible that the agreement was two parts desperation and one part opportunism, and that both sides are now improvising their next steps as they go along — keeping themselves afloat, not steering toward any particular destination.
The biggest unanswered question is the status of the 2018 pact between Abiy and the Eritrean dictator Isaias Afewerki. Eritrea’s security apparatus has its claws deep into Ethiopia’s intelligence services and black market, as well as having consolidated its ties with the Amhara region.
The Pretoria Agreement signals an end of manifesto-driven politics, the demise of Ethiopia’s leftist tradition of fighting and negotiating on principle. It’s being interpreted simply as the loser bowing before the victor, promising faithfully to accept client status and parrot his narratives. That augurs ill for the resolution of conflicts elsewhere in the country, especially the intense fighting between the Oromo Liberation Army and the combined forces of the federal army and militia and special forces from the Amhara and Oromo regions. That war is less intense but more widely spread than last year’s Tigray fronts. It is counter-insurgency on the cheap, combining conspicuous brutality, looting and divide-and-rule. The aim is to bring down the price of buying off the battered remnants of the rebel leaders. It heralds a variant of the brutal provincial political markets seen in Somalia, South Sudan, and Sudan’s Darfur over recent decades.
In an odd twist, Abiy has appropriated the vocabulary of the “political marketplace” and repurposed it as a campaign to enforce compliance among his party cadres. In its standard form, political marketplace theory explains the logic whereby mercenary transactional politics trumps institutionalized governance. Abiy himself was the principal agent of transforming Ethiopia from an aspiring developmental state on the East Asian model into a turbulent hybrid of kleptocracy and gangsterism. In Abiy’s public rhetoric, it’s reformulated as a self-help handbook for individuals to turn away from corruption and instead embrace the Prosperity Party’s validated path to riches. Its actual purpose is to enforce obedience.
Two decades ago, the leaders of the then-ruling Ethiopian Peoples’ Revolutionary Democratic Front clamped down on “rent-seekers,” proclaiming that they stood in the way of national development. Predictably, it became an old-fashioned purge of those who didn’t perform the rituals of party loyalty. Using the language of individualizing culpability for systemic failures, the Prosperity Party crackdown is following the same playbook.
Abiy’s new doctrine points to a policy vacuum at the heart of government — neither ideology nor institutions, only an individual who identifies the national interest with his own continuation in office.
Under the EPRDF, international donors followed Ethiopia’s national agenda, because there was a coherent, if sometimes idiosyncratic, plan for national development. Now, kowtowing to Ethiopia’s sovereign entitlement is only a habit, enforced by name-calling critics as racists or neo-imperialists.
Still, the Ethiopian policy vacuum cannot be filled by outside prescriptions. But neither is there an internal formula for rescuing the country. “National dialogue” has become a mantra, but there is little consensus on what it means — other than that a process controlled by the ruling party wouldn’t be legitimate. Few of the preconditions for a workable national dialogue are in place: there’s no free press; social media is filled with hate speech; and significant constituencies don’t want to be part of the country at all. A process of reconciliation and national reappraisal will take years, and in the meantime a functional political arrangement is needed.
In Tigray, faced with overwhelming immediate needs, the agenda of rehabilitation can focus on empowering local communities and civil society organizations. Foreign aid donors, returning to Tigray, will find that many of the projects they funded in earlier years — medical centers, agricultural projects, water supply systems — were deliberately destroyed or uprooted and stolen by the very government that is now begging for money to rebuild them. For donors, it’s more ethical and more effective to dispatch aid direct to the affected communities, bypassing the compromised government in Addis Ababa and the paralyzed authorities in Mekelle.
It's amply evident that the necessary agenda of accountability for international crimes cannot be entrusted to either Abiy or the TPLF. The federal government insists that investigations can only be undertaken by national authorities and tried recently to defund the United Nations Committee of Human Rights Experts that was mandated to investigate crimes committed during the war. The TPLF leadership, reversing its earlier rhetoric about opposing impunity, stayed silent over these moves. Pursuing justice for massacre, mass rape and starvation is one agenda on which international partners should not compromise.
Five years ago, civic mobilization brought Ethiopia to the point of democratic change. Protesters demanded real inclusion in ruling institutions and fairer governance of diversity as well as accountability. Those demands have not gone away. Abiy’s years in power have shown he has neither interest nor capacity to deliver. The U.S. and other donors, that are now bailing out Ethiopia in the hope of preventing state failure, have both the responsibility and the instruments to reinvigorate that agenda. It is the progressive politics of democracy, human rights, tolerance, and inclusion that give substance to the otherwise empty vessel of “African solutions for African problems.”
