For the past three decades, Ethiopia has been an economic success story inside a political and ethnic tinderbox. The selection in 2018 of Abiy Ahmed as a seemingly conciliatory prime minister was meant to settle tensions that had spilled out on to the streets and threatened the previous government. Instead, it has lit a match.
Friction between the government in Addis Ababa and the restive Tigray region in the north of the country has been building for months. Mr Abiy pushed aside many Tigrayan leaders as part of a purge of the old regime.
The Tigray People’s Liberation Front, which dominated the four-party coalition that ran the country for 27 years, has refused to join the prime minister’s Prosperity party, a national organisation designed to draw the ethnic sting from politics.
Tigray’s regional government held elections this September in defiance of a Covid-related postponement of the national poll until next year. Now Mr Abiy, who claims that Tigrayans attacked the federal army in Tigray, has sent in troops to quell rebellion.
The stakes could not be higher. Conflict could ripple through a country held together by a thread. It is not only the Tigrayans who are angry with Mr Abiy. In Oromia, whose people make up 35 per cent of the country’s 110m population, many feel that Mr Abiy, himself an Oromo, has not done enough to further their cause.
In Amhara, a region that long dominated national politics before Tigrayans held sway, there is also a sense of marginalisation, plus a nasty dispute with Tigray over land.
Many would-be mini-nations in the south are pushing for referendums to declare themselves autonomous regions. Hate speech is rife. It is not inconceivable that Ethiopia could unravel in a Yugoslav-style break-up that would destroy one of the most positive economic experiments on the continent.
Under a state-led model pioneered by the late Meles Zenawi, a former prime minister, Ethiopia has grown at 10 per cent a year for nearly two decades. But the political question has never been solved. In the longer run, the only way out is a settlement built around a genuinely federal power-sharing arrangement.
Mr Abiy is right that the country must move away from the ethnic framework that is the original sin of Ethiopia’s current problems. The 1995 constitution sought to devolve political power based on ethnicity. But instead of soothing identity politics, it only served to stoke ethno-nationalist sentiment.
Any reconfiguration must involve genuine dialogue, something that Mr Abiy — who sometimes appears to believe he has a monopoly on truth — has been reluctant to embrace. In the short term, the country must pull back from the brink. A ceasefire should be implemented in Tigray and the two sides must drop their reluctance to talk.
This is an internal matter that no external arbiter can solve. Still, the African Union should offer to mediate, if only to provide a face-saving mechanism for the combatants to climb down from entrenched positions. Mr Abiy must also set a definite timetable for the free and fair elections he has promised, however high-risk those may be. If he wins, he will have gained legitimacy. If he loses, he should leave centre stage.
Mr Abiy was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2019 for concluding peace with Eritrea and promoting liberal reforms based on respect for human rights. Having removed the lid from the Ethiopian pressure cooker, he has been burnt by the resultant gush of steam. War is no remedy. Now, more than ever, Mr Abiy must prove that his peace prize was merited.
www.ft.com
