Will Nobel laureate Abiy double efforts for peace?
Ethiopian prime minister has cast himself as a transformational figure, promising peaceful coexistence
Prime Minister Abiy Ahmad of Ethiopia was recently awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for, the Nobel committee said, “his decisive initiative to resolve the border conflict with neighbouring Eritrea” and starting “important reforms that give many citizens hope for a better life and a brighter future.”
Since coming to power in April 2018, Abiy has taken Ethiopia on a political roller coaster. His administration started rapprochement with Eritrea after nearly two decades of stalemate. He has had tens of thousands of political prisoners released, has invited back banned political parties and armed groups, has apologised for human rights violations, has revoked repressive laws, has started to open up the economy and has appointed women to leading positions in government.
One could argue that not since Mikhail Gorbachev — another Nobel Peace Prize laureate — introduced glasnost to the Soviet Union in the mid-1980s has any country embarked on such radical reforms. But a lot more needs to happen before Abiy can deliver on his pledges, and for ordinary Ethiopians his efforts so far have been a white-knuckle ride.
Federalism and multiparty elections were introduced
to Ethiopia in 1995, but it is only now that genuine democracy appears imaginable in Africa’s second most populous country. The long-dominant Ethiopian Peoples’ Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), born as a revolutionary Marxist-Leninist coalition, never fully bought into the liberal democratic principles it introduced in the 1995 Constitution; it essentially ruled the country by semi-authoritarian means.
For many years, the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), which claims to represent the interests of the people from Tigray, a northern state bordering Eritrea — about 6 per cent of the population — essentially monopolised decision-making within the governing coalition. Over time, this form of minority rule alienated the Oromo people (more than 34 per cent of the population) and the Amhara people (about 27 per cent). Eventually, frustration led to countrywide protests between 2016 and 2018, during which Oromo youth in particular blamed the government for a lack of genuine representativeness, land grabbing and repression.
But Abiy’s Abyssinian spring has now entered a critical phase. With the sudden slackening of political controls and the dismantling of some of the state’s authoritarian features under his administration, repressed ethnic, political and religious conflicts have resurfaced across the country. As a result, about 2.9 million people currently are internally displaced, according to the Global Report on Internal Displacement — the largest such figure for any country. The EPRDF coalition itself is still divided along ethnic lines. In some parts of Ethiopia, such as the southeastern Somali region, changes in the central government have translated into changes in regional governments, and longtime TPLF loyalists have been replaced with Abiy supporters. Yet in other areas, regional ethnic parties that are part of the EPRDF have dug in their heels — in particular in the regions of Oromia and Amhara. Such instances of resistance have weakened the federal government.
The real test of Abiy’s progress will come in May 2020, when the next national elections are scheduled to take place. The prime minister and likeminded officials have announced plans to replace the EPRDF with the Ethiopian Prosperity Party, which, Abiy claims, will be a unified national party rather than a coalition of ethnic parties. But a number of ethno-nationalist movements are likely to fiercely compete with it, however it defines itself. Abiy has cast himself as a transformational figure, promising peaceful coexistence and an end to the government’s autocratic ways. He has won the Nobel Peace Prize; now, he needs to earn it.
■ Tobias Hagmann is a noted Swiss political scientist. Kjetil Tronvoll is an academic and the Director of Oslo Analytica.