Abiy could have avoided Tigray conflict, as he is a peacemaker

By Charles Onyango-Obbo

Ethiopia has just had easily its most horrible year, since the fall of the Mengistu Haile Mariam junta in 1991, and the rise of Meles Zenawi and his Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) to power.

Meles expanded the TPLF into a broader governing coalition, the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), stabilised the country, and kicked off an impressive wave of economic reconstruction. But it was, at best, an enlightened dictatorship. His death in 2012, his replacement with the light-handed Hailemariam Desalegn, who was mainly a transitional figure, and then the rise of Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed in April 2018 were all ingredients in the explosion in the brutal war in Tigray in November 2020.

Could the Tigray war have been avoided? Yes. Abiy, after all, was politically reformist in ways modern Ethiopia hadn’t seen. He buried the hatchet with old Ethiopian adversaries like Eritrea and, for his pains, got the Nobel Peace Prize.

The TPLF core of the EPRDF had been in power for 27 years, and a section of it that wanted to had enriched itself. There was glory for saving Ethiopia and turning its fortunes around that they could claim, and be content.

But, as the bad boy of boxing Mike Tyson said, everyone has a plan until they are punched in the mouth. A sulking TPLF, feeling marginalised and persecuted by Abiy, went revanchist. And Abiy, driven by the wide-ranging loathing for the TPLF, wasn’t accommodationist.

Hell broke loose

After a year of killings, rape, displacement, pillage and destruction, the TPLF and its Oromo Liberation Army are fighting their way to Addis Ababa.

In this Ethiopian tragedy, is a small but sinister story, which is not much-talked-about, that bedevils the rest of Africa. Progress anywhere needs a helpful soundtrack.

Ethiopia, like most of Africa, from the time of Meles, has endured decades of negative and gloomy commentary from both African and non-African intellectuals, and media.

While their failures and transgressions are many, and they deserve to be denounced and challenged, there is in and about Africa again a deeply rejectionist narrative about government that drowns out all hope.

While Abiy was cheered in his early days, and the possibilities of his reforms were celebrated, the majority of African and international (mostly Western) intellectuals told almost only of the inevitability of his failure. He was a centralist seeking to amass power in Addis Ababa, disband federalism; a cynical populist reformer who was oblivious to Ethiopia’s centuries-old Byzantine ways and hatred of foreigners trading in their lands.

Some of it was, and remains, extremely hysterical and, when it gets into the social media machine that runs on the fuel of negativity and anger, gets very loud.

And the TPFL were painted as dangerous, predatory highlanders who wanted only to rule, and not to be ruled.

These narratives almost always weaken the progressive forces in governments and political organisations and create environments where enlightened action is hard. This is a difficult problem to solve because no policy can fix it, and the sacred space for democratic conversation must be preserved.

However, the gods sometimes answer prayers. If your prayers are only for the worst, those are the ones they will answer.

Charles Onyango-Obbo is a journalist, writer, and curator of the “Wall of Great Africans”. [email protected]