Abiy Ahmed: The Complex Journey from Reformist to Wartime Leader in Ethiopia

It was a canny move. Although the defense ministry didn’t have funds for such a proposal, which was quickly shelved, the young officer—an Oromo, the country’s largest ethnic group, which has been historically underrepresented in government—now had his foot in the office door of one of the military’s leading lights, who also happened to be a Tigrayan, the ethnic group that had long dominated the upper echelons of the Ethiopian state. Teklebrhan, with whom he had hitherto had little contact, reasoned that if Abiy could write a dictionary then he must speak good English. And so, he invited Abiy to join his team working on a joint intelligence project with the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA).

For nearly two decades under the Soviet-backed Derg regime, ties between the United States and Ethiopia had been all but severed. That regime fell in 1991 as the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) and a coalition of allied ethnic liberation movements marched on Addis Ababa. A new, more pragmatic, government was formed under Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF)—headed by TPLF leader Meles Zenawi.

With the EPRDF in power in the 1990s, relations with Washington swiftly recovered. Soon, ties between the countries had returned to a strength familiar to Ethiopians of an older generation, who remembered how, in the latter part of Haile Selassie’s reign, Ethiopian troops had even fought alongside American ones in Korea. Yet it was the years following the 9/11 terrorist attacks that would really come to count as golden ones for what, to many Ethiopians, was their country’s most valuable diplomatic alliance.

So great was Ethiopia’s clout in Washington by the middle of the decade that, when it invaded Somalia in 2006 to topple an Islamist government, the United States would even come to its aid. By the late 2000s, Ethiopian airstrips were being used by U.S. bombers; intelligence from American satellites was being shared with the Ethiopian military; and Ethiopian commandos were being trained by U.S. special forces for counterterrorism operations. Ethiopia had become what foreign policy wonks called an American “anchor state,” pivotal for regional order and for guaranteeing Western interests in the Horn of Africa and the geo-strategically vital Red Sea trade route.

An American soldier walks through the desert with about a dozen Somali farmers.

A U.S. soldier meets with Somali farmers in Sankabar, Ethiopia, to check on the water pumps the U.S. military helped install in their fields on Jan. 17, 2006.Evelyn Hockstein/Tribune News Service via Getty Images

It was thus with American help that in 2006 Ethiopia established what was to become its own version of the NSA, the Information Network Security Agency (INSA). Given the simmering hostilities which continued through the 2000s, the agency was also to target Eritrea. Envisioned as a high-tech, civilian-military hybrid, INSA was to complement—and soon rival—the civilian intelligence agency, the National Intelligence and Security Service (NISS).

Charged with keeping Ethiopia’s growing digital infrastructure safe from foreign threats, it would later play a role in monitoring and censoring the internet. But although it had the power to intercept radio and cyber transmissions from abroad, and to interpret geospatial satellite imagery, it was not at first intended to be a domestic spy agency. Teklebrhan would become its first director, and Abiy, who had been sent along with five colleagues to study cryptography in South Africa for six months between 2002 and 2003 in preparation, was to head its department of Information Security Assurance. For his first four years at INSA, Abiy’s primary job was to help protect government and military agencies from cyberhacking.

He was among a small Oromo cohort in a leadership which, like that of the military, was still visibly dominated by Tigrayans and their party, the TPLF, which formed the most influential component of the EPRDF. “Abiy was a fast communicator, young and Oromo—that’s why he was chosen,” explained one of his Tigrayan superiors. “His main talent was communicating with people.”

The work also brought him into closer contact with American officials, allowing him to spend some time on U.S. training programs and cultivating some valuable foreign links in the years before he became prime minister. “I was the one who would send intelligence from this part of the world to the NSA, about Sudan and Yemen and Somalia,” he later boasted to the New Yorker. “The NSA knows me. I would fight and die for America.”

Fifteen years later, Abiy would be leading the country.

Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed stands in the center, flanked by soliders, of the new Meskel Square.

Abiy attends the inauguration of the newly remodeled Meskel Square in Addis Ababa on June 13, 2021.Jemal Countess/Getty Images

Another Abiy is a forward-looking modernizer. In 2022, he was also finalizing Ethiopia’s first-ever science museum: a temple to a hyper-modern vision of national progress built on scientific discovery and artificial intelligence. Here was the new Ethiopia Abiy sought to build: a country of “smart cities,” robo-cops, biometric identification cards, virtual reality simulation, and cutting-edge surveillance. Some have likened him to a Silicon Valley tech bro.

Abiy confounds and contradicts. A Pentecostal Putin, he is part preacher, part spy. He is fervently messianic but, at the same time, capable of pragmatism. At times, he seems like a Machiavellian mastermind, ruthlessly eliminating his enemies and outfoxing his rivals. “Everything is a conspiracy,” one of his colleagues later admitted. “I don’t think anybody in Ethiopia is as good a chess player as him,” said another. But he is also a gambler, for whom chaos is an opportunity that can be turned into a blessing.

In the pantheon of Ethiopian history, he is a figure at once profoundly familiar and utterly novel: both a Christian nationalist in the prophetic mold of the 19th century emperor Tewodros II, and a corporate CEO who uses positive thinking and self-help jargon to boost the productivity of his staff. Coming to power at a time of international upheaval— the world of Donald Trump, Xi Jinping, and Vladimir Putin—Abiy applies 21st-century techniques of online propaganda and disinformation just as he resurrects the courtly politics of imperial Ethiopia. As the global order splinters and traditional alliances fray, Abiy wants to be friends with everyone yet loyal to none. To understand where his approach to politics was honed, it’s necessary to understand his time within the country’s intelligence services.

A portrait of Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed adorns the side of a multi-story building.

Federal Police stand guard on top of a building with a portrait of Abiy during a pro-government rally in Addis Ababa on Nov. 7, 2021.Tiksa Negeri/Reuters

By the time INSA had been established in the mid-2000s, Abiy had built up an impressive network, counting senior generals, politicians, and businessmen among his confidants. Most significantly, he was on familiar terms with Prime Minister Meles himself. Though still in his very early 30s, and without any academic qualification beyond his diploma from South Africa, Abiy and Teklebrhan would regularly meet with the prime minister to brief him on developments at INSA, sometimes just the two of them. Later, as prime minister himself, Abiy would describe how he would use such opportunities to win Meles’s favor, for instance by passing him notes with eye-catching proposals or ideas. “Abiy was one of the very young, very sharp guys on the Oromo side,” recalled a senior American official who was close to the former prime minister at the time. “And he was trusted.”

Close colleagues from this time, however, painted a more ambiguous picture of the rising star. On the one hand, it was clear Abiy could be extremely personable. “He’s friendly; he hugs people, he smiles; he texts you his best wishes, invites you to things,” recalled Berhane Kidanemariam, a Tigrayan then in charge of Walta TV, a state-affiliated media outlet. Others alleged that Abiy used his position in INSA to build a political following. To win the loyalty of his colleagues, some recalled, he was known to make lavish promises, including—among other things—jobs and perks in the future.

There were also some darker allegations. Technically, monitoring the phone calls of ordinary Ethiopian citizens was not part of INSA’s mandate. From the outset, though, its leaders had been keen to acquire both the capability and legal authority for it, sparking a fierce turf war with NISS, Ethiopia’s official spy agency. In the end, the latter prevailed, and NISS retained its formal monopoly over domestic surveillance. But, according to some former colleagues, this didn’t deter Abiy, who gained a reputation for eavesdropping on private phone calls.

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“He was using his position at INSA to advance his own interests,” one source from inside INSA recalled. Though the agency lacked the legal power to monitor phone calls, it had the authority and capability to gather and store private email communications in Ethiopia. “We were monitoring everyone’s emails,” said a close colleague. “Abiy was my boss, we had access.”

In 2009, his boss, Teklebrhan, set off to London for a master’s program, leaving Abiy in charge of INSA. It was a contentious choice: Employees of a higher military rank, or with more academic qualifications, were known to be unhappy about it. But for those already familiar with Abiy’s strategy for self-advancement, it wasn’t surprising. This was, after all, a move he’d had a direct hand in engineering. From almost the moment INSA was established, colleagues recalled, Abiy had been pushing for his boss to go abroad, even taking it upon himself to raise the idea with some of his superiors.

But Abiy’s year in charge of INSA would in fact turn out to be among the most controversial aspects of his rise to power. It laid the seeds for the TPLF’s opposition to his premiership, and would ultimately contribute to the catastrophic fallout between Abiy and the formerly dominant party that led to war. At the heart of the matter was Abiy’s thrusting political ambition and his increasingly transparent attempts to leverage his position in INSA for career advantage. “He became too popular and he made his ambition for power too public,” said a friend at INSA. “In the EPRDF tradition, this was taboo. Power was believed to be an assignment, not an achievement. But Abiy had told everyone he’d be prime minister, and that the Lord had told him so.”

Ethiopia Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed speaks behind a glass during a rally.

Abiy speaks behind a glass barricade during a rally at Meskel Square in Addis Ababa on June 23, 2018. A blast at a rally in support of Abiy earlier that day killed several people. Yonas Tadesse/AFP via Getty Images

Abiy’s sense of personal destiny—his extraordinary conviction that he was sent by God to rule—proved remarkably prescient. In 2010, Teklebrhan returned from the U.K. and fired Abiy from INSA upon discovering what had gone on while he was away, including mismanaged projects and alleged corruption. Upon his departure, the future prime minister warned colleagues that he would return one day as their boss.

A mere eight years later, he had proved himself right. Sweeping into office on the back of mass protests in his home region, Oromia, he cast himself as populist crusader against authoritarianism, corruption, economic frustration—and, above all, the political primacy of his Tigrayan colleagues inside the ruling coalition, the TPLF. To the cheers of many Ethiopians both at home and abroad, the new prime minister quickly set to work cutting back their presence across wide swathes of the Ethiopian state. For a while it seemed to be working: Abiy was hailed as a liberal reformer by the West, and a prophet at home. Yet by November 2020, only a single decade after his humiliating departure from INSA, Abiy and the TPLF had gone to war.

A young person in front of a sign that depicts members of the Tigray People’s Liberation Front.

A young person rides by a sign that depicts members of the Tigray People’s Liberation Front as wanted by the Ethiopian Federal Police for treason in Bahir Dar, Ethiopia, on Nov. 26, 2020.Eduardo Soteras/AFP via Getty Images

If the army is “a copy of society,” as Leon Trotsky observed, and “suffers from all its diseases, usually at a higher temperature,” then the ENDF Northern Command on the eve of the Tigray War was effectively bedridden. Despite decades of indoctrination designed to inoculate it against ethnic division, by 2020 its ranks were riddled from top to bottom in it. Late at night on Nov. 3, it spectacularly splintered.

Much is contested or simply unknown, but a few facts are indisputable: that as Ethiopian federal forces, Amhara regional fighters, and Eritrean army soldiers positioned themselves around Tigray, members of the Tigrayan special forces forcibly entered barracks and weapons depots across the region and took control over large caches of heavy weaponry and personnel; that a significant portion of the Northern Command’s Tigrayan officer corps defected and joined their Tigrayan comrades in the regional special forces; that gun fights broke out with non-Tigrayan members of the command; and that large numbers of Ethiopian soldiers were disarmed and taken into Tigrayan custody.

Wounded captive Ethiopian soldiers arrive on a truck, surrounded by hundreds of other injured soldiers.

Wounded captive Ethiopian soldiers arrive on a truck in Mekele, the capital of Ethiopia’s Tigray region, on July 2, 2021. Yasuyoshi Chiba/AFP via Getty Images

This was a war of choice for Abiy, as it was for Eritrean leader Isaias Afwerki: Both were ready and willing to crush an enemy which each viewed as an obstacle to their power. But it was also one for leaders of the TPLF, for whom the prospect of ideological reversal—an Ethiopian state built not in their image but in Abiy’s; a more centralized federation in which a querulous Tigray would be forever forced to conform—was impossible to countenance.

But Abiy wouldn’t, perhaps couldn’t, stop. A man burning in his conviction of manifest destiny, he had by now disposed of any pretensions to pragmatism in matters he viewed as zero-sum questions of victory or defeat. On the eve of war, he was a portrait both of arrogance and anxiety. Paranoid about assassination, he was reported to have installed his most loyal commandos on every floor of the palace. At the same time, he appeared to be genuinely offended by the Tigrayans’ rhetoric, which cast him as both a buffoon and a villain: weak but dictatorial, incompetent yet all powerful. The possibility that the TPLF still had popular support itself, and that millions of Tigrayans would rather rally to its defense than kneel to his sword, wouldn’t register at all.

Abiy Ahmed poses with his Nobel Peace Prize.

Abiy poses after he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize during a ceremony in Oslo on Dec. 10, 2019. Fredrik Varfjell/AFP via Getty Images

In 2019, a year after he made a historic peace deal with Eritrea, Ethiopia’s smaller neighbor which seceded in 1993, he was awarded the Nobel Peace prize. The Nobel committee’s chair said the prize recognized Abiy’s “efforts to achieve peace and international cooperation, and in particular his decisive initiative to resolve the border conflict with neighboring Eritrea.” She also praised Abiy’s domestic reform efforts, including the release of tens of thousands of prisoners and the return of once-banned opposition groups.

Accepting the prize at a ceremony in Oslo, Abiy declared war “the epitome of hell for all involved. I know because I was there.” But little more than a year later, one of the worst wars of the 21st century had erupted in Ethiopia’s northern region. Abiy was not alone responsible for it. But he was arguably more so than anybody else. He may well go down as the most controversial recipient of the 123-year-old prize since Henry Kissinger in 1973.

And I misjudged him, too. In 2018, I argued in an article in Foreign Policy that Abiy was not really a populist—and that if he had to be described in terms imported from abroad, then what he most closely resembled was a liberal democrat. This was wrong, even at the time: Abiy was never a liberal, and nor was he ever a democrat. Like any populist, he could be deceptive and dishonest, allowing different constituencies to believe whatever they wanted about him, however contradictory. He also conflated his own fate with that of the nation, believing himself to be indispensable, and deployed rhetoric that was often xenophobic, fascistic and—on occasion—arguably even genocidal.

But his mission in government has not only been about amassing power and enriching himself. It was also about remaking the whole of Ethiopia in his own image.

This essay is adapted from the book The Abiy Project: God, Power and War in the New Ethiopia.