The prophet in the palace: Abiy’s destructive vision for Ethiopia

During celebrations marking the Battle of Adwa in March this year, Ethiopian President Taye Atske Selassie proclaimed that Ethiopia's right to “reliable and sustainable” access to the sea derived from the “sovereign trust inherited from those who died in the battle.” Lost amid the military buildup near Tigray's borders and a torrent of bellicose rhetoric aimed at Eritrea, it was a remarkable claim for several reasons. First, it was ahistorical. The Battle of Adwa, fought in 1896 against an invading Italian colonial army, was a struggle to defend Ethiopian territory -- not as part of a military expansion campaign for littoral Red Sea territory. More importantly, however, the president's assertion was emblematic of the Ethiopian government-- haphazard, ill-defined, and wielding historical paraphernalia and religious incantation to justify domestic and regional military adventurism. In just a few sentences, Taye Atske Selassie inadvertently encapsulated the logic that has animated Abiy Ahmed's eight years in power.

For much of that time, however, it has been difficult to discern what Abiy's vision for Ethiopia actually is beyond repudiating his predecessors and promising to usher in a national renaissance. His doctrine of Medemer -- loosely translated as “coming together” or “synergy” -- has never amounted to a coherent governing programme in the mould of Meles Zenawi's developmental state, which sought to transform Ethiopia's economy through state intervention during the 1990s and 2000s.

The Medemer State, the prime minister's own book, reads less as a governing blueprint than as a philosophical tract railing against Marxism and ethnic nationalism while extolling collaboration, humility and moral restitution. Instead, Abiy's supposedly liberalising agenda has emerged in fits and starts, increasingly resembling a civilisational manifesto rooted in notions of Ethiopian exceptionalism. From the earliest days of his administration, the young leader has preferred imagery of Solomonic heritage and the unbroken Ethiopian state, promising a restoration that is spiritual and geopolitical in nature, rather than clearly defined economic and political policy.

Always undergirding Abiy's tenure of power has been his religious beliefs, rooted in the ‘Prosperity Gospel’ of the American Pentecostalist movement. At its core, it contends that God rewards the righteous with material abundance, a belief that Abiy wholeheartedly subscribes to-- as well as the vision that resonates with the heart of his ‘Prosperity Party.’ When the prime minister came to power in 2018, almost by accident, he told his audience that he was Ethiopia's “seventh king,” a reference to the prophecy told by his Orthodox mother when he was a child. Such a claim was not genealogical, however, with Emperor Haile Selassie being the country's 225th emperor, but rather Pentecostal. Whilst the Amhara nationalists, once allied to him-- many of whom have now broken to the Fano insurgency-- consider the “One Ethiopia” in imperial terms of Orthodox Christianity, Abiy's vision is messianic. But his overt wielding of religiosity-- once backed by televangelist preachers like Israel Dinsa-- has frayed the religious fibres of the country as well, driving a raft of sectarian tensions.

Such focus on optics and imagery has often rendered the machinery of Ethiopian government a performance without substance, all meaningless statistics and photo-opportunities interspersed with the tough economic medicine dispensed by the IMF. Front and centre is Abiy, whose fawning state media portrays him as a reforming visionary, abreast of every detail and minutiae of government and administration. It is the architecture of a personality cult that is more than political, but sacral as well, with the intention of establishing him in the pantheon of great Ethiopian leaders, be it standing atop the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam or touring visiting heads of state through the gleaming new parks of Addis and the neatly parcelled-up history of Adwa in the USD 10 million museum.

But eight years on, and having secured another choreographed electoral victory earlier this month, Ethiopia is more fractured than at any point since Abiy came to power. Rather than serving as the unifying figure he promised to be, the prime minister has presided over the catastrophic war in Tigray and insurgencies across Amhara and Oromia. His government has concentrated power in Addis, hollowing out the federal architecture that once promised regional autonomy. Supporters of Medemer have portrayed it as a corrective to ethnic fragmentation. In practice, it has served as an ideological justification for recentralisation. Nor has the attempt to cultivate a quasi-sacred personality cult succeeded. Persistent conflict, humanitarian catastrophe and economic crisis have continually punctured the crafted image of providential leadership.

Yet there is a deeper contradiction embedded within the historical inheritance Abiy claims to embody. Much of the ideological architecture he draws upon originates in the Kebra Nagast, the fourteenth-century Ge'ez chronicle known as The Glory of Kings. Compiled to legitimise the Solomonic dynasty, it recounts how Menelik I, the son of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, brought the Ark of the Covenant from Jerusalem to Axum, transferring divine favour to Ethiopia and its rulers. Abiy's innovation has not been to reject that tradition but to recast it, grafting a Pentecostal theology of direct divine revelation onto an older mythology of dynastic legitimacy.

Yet the foundational myths he seeks to monopolise -- Adwa, Axum and Solomon -- are inseparable from Tigray. It is here that the contradiction becomes impossible to ignore. Abiy presents himself as the custodian of Ethiopia's civilisational inheritance, yet it was his government that launched the sinisterly euphemistic “law enforcement operation” in November 2020, unleashing a war estimated to have claimed some 600,000 lives.

Among the conflict's many tragedies was the assault on Tigray's cultural heritage itself. Rock-hewn churches were damaged, manuscripts and sacred objects looted, and hundreds of priests, monks, scribes and worshippers-- the custodians of one of Africa's oldest Christian traditions-- were killed. The seventh-century al-Nejashi mosque has since been repaired after artillery fire shattered its dome in late 2020. But manuscripts trafficked into Eritrea or dispersed through illicit markets, like the lives lost, cannot simply be restored.

For all of Abiy’s efforts to weaponise Ethiopia’s sacred past, his government’s relationship with Tigray has collapsed under the weight of extraordinary violence. Meaningful reconstruction, restitution and accountability remain remote. Yet Addis continues to present itself as the guardian of Ethiopia’s heritage, celebrating the return of artefacts looted during the British expedition to Maqdala in 1868 while remaining conspicuously silent about the devastation inflicted on historical heritage within Ethiopia itself. Repatriation ordinarily represents a measure of historical reckoning-- an acknowledgement, however partial, of past wrongdoing. In Abiy’s prophetic vision, it functions instead as another performance of stewardship, staged alongside the destruction of the very heritage it claims to protect.

It is this impulse to co-opt or bulldoze history that makes the Corridor Development Project far more than a mere beautification of sidewalks. Launched in December 2022 in Addis before expanding across the country, the project has razed swathes of the city and displaced hundreds of thousands in the name of urban renewal, widening roads and building promenades. Tellingly, the Adwa Victory Museum itself has been relocated from Tigray, where the battle was fought, to repackage and repurpose the foundational myth from its origins.

Again, the aesthetics of his rule are as much vanity as theology, with the government simultaneously building a sprawling quasi-imperial court in the Chaka hills, believed to be partially underwritten by their Emirati allies. Much of Addis's ramshackle soul has been lost in these developments, particularly in the Amhara-majority Piazza neighbourhood full of early 20th-century modernist buildings, which was pulled down in March 2024. But the “clean” imagery of the grand new promenades in Addis -- with their flower-like candelabra towering overhead -- is a Potemkin village, a thin veneer of progress and prosperity as much of the country remains mired in instability and economic pain. Moreover, such grand public monuments are unmistakably those of a court, undergirding the notion that Addis is not a federal city or Finfinnee -- the Oromo word for “natural spring” that names the site -- but rather an imperial capital.

Abiy's rhetorical deployment of Adwa in March offers perhaps the clearest example of this broader historical project. The battle remains the single greatest military defeat inflicted by an African army upon a European colonial power and resonated far beyond Ethiopia, inspiring anti-colonial movements from Brazil to Marcus Garvey's Pan-Africanism and, later, Rastafarianism. Yet within Ethiopia its meaning has always been contested. Menelik II -- whom Abiy has conspicuously sought to emulate -- combined victory over Italy with campaigns of violent territorial expansion across Oromo, Sidama, Somali and other southern societies. Although soldiers from many communities fought at Adwa, for many Ethiopians the battle also marked the consolidation of an imperial order built upon dispossession and forced assimilation. Groups such as the Oromo Liberation Army continue to frame Adwa not as liberation but as a struggle between competing colonial projects, rooted in the land confiscations carried out by Menelik's Nafxanya settler-soldiers.

Abiy has sought to strip away such complexity, monopolising its meaning and repackaging it as the property of a unitary Ethiopian nationalism with himself as its principal heir. And the imagery of Adwa by the president in March was not deployed to resist colonial or imperial pressures, quite the opposite. Instead, it licenses territorial assertion and military mobilisation into Eritrea underpinned by a prophetic inheritance that Abiy has anointed himself to redeem.

Since late 2023, Abiy's government has been consumed by the pursuit of “sea access” -- a euphemism for a territorial demand on Eritrea, centred on the port of Assab, more often than not articulated in explicitly military terms. Ethiopia's landlocked nature may be a long-term concern for its economy and geostrategic standing, but the rhetoric of Abiy and his allies has repeatedly vacillated between quasi-imperial and economic justifications for threatening to seize Assab. Any further war in Tigray and across the Ethiopia-Eritrea border, should it come, would be immensely destructive, with an array of Gulf and foreign powers already aligned behind both sides. It is also worth recalling that satellite imagery and reporting documented two massacres carried out by Eritrean soldiers in villages just east of Adwa during the last war, and it is still marked by displacement and hunger. But, in Abiy's framing, restoring sea access is the fulfilment of a prophetic inheritance, and the Adwa claim that sea access is a matter of sovereign trust inherited from the dead is not a diplomatic argument.

As the memory of Adwa-- the greatest victory of African colonial resistance-- is repurposed by Addis amidst imperial longing, ominous clouds remain gathered over Tigray and northern Ethiopia. Adwa wasn't that; it was bloody, and complicated. The version on offer in the new promenades and proclamations is neither. That, perhaps, is the point.