This story was originally published by Religion Unplugged.
(REVIEW) In 2018, Ethiopia’s new Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed appeared on the East African nation’s political scene almost from nowhere. Claiming to be responding to an assignment by God, the young Pentecostal Christian promised democratic salvation and national unity to a hopelessly divided nation.
Almost in a miraculous way, the self-proclaimed messianic leader went on to broker a historic peace deal with neighboring Eritrea, earning himself the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize. Hailed at home as a prophet and abroad as a liberal reformer, Ahmed was all things to all men. In no time, however, his narcissistic and self-centered policies had plunged the East African nation, made up of 127 million people, into bloodshed and human suffering of genocidal proportions.
With hundreds of thousands dead and tens of thousands of women having been raped in a civil war that he alone had the valve to defuse — but chose not to — many are asking if Ahmed was ever really a prophet from God or just a cunning opportunist who used the power of religion to achieve his own selfish personal goals at whatever cost.
These are some of the issues raised by journalist Tom Gardner’s book “The Abiy Project: God, Power and War in the New Ethiopia” recently released by Hurst Publishers.
“It is also an attempt to peel back the layers of myth which have built up around the man himself,” Gardner writes in the 400-page book.
Born Abiyot Ahmed Ali, the fourth child of Tezeta Wolde — an Orthodox Christian woman who was the fourth wife of Ahmed Ali, a Muslim from the Oromo tribe better known by the honorary Abba Fita, Abiy — was raised in a mixed religion environment, but was never particularly religious in his younger years. He even becoming a drunkard, drug addict and a womanizer as a young man. All this changed when he became a Pentecostal Christian convert, claiming to be answering God’s call to lead Ethiopia.
“This was the moment, he later told his fellow churchmen, that God’s purpose was revealed to him and he resolved to become a Pentecostal Protestant,” Gardner notes.
Pentecostalism has taken Ethiopia by storm in recent decades. In the 1960s, “Pentes” — as both Pentecostals and more staid Protestants are known in Ethiopia — made up less than 1% of the national population, as missionaries were maligned and stigmatized for their association with the West and condemned as traitors to Ethiopia’s national destiny as the last home of true Christian faith.
“Yet by the time Abiy took power just four decades later, Protestantism, and in particular its more ‘charismatic’ Pentecostal variants, had exploded—so much so that Pentes accounted for perhaps as much as a quarter of the population,” Gardner explains. “For many of those living through a period of such rapid social and economic change, the new faith, with its hopeful stress on individual empowerment and salvation, coupled with its modern, even capitalist aesthetic, seemed to offer a far more empowering message than the fatalist conservatism of traditional Orthodoxy … most of this growth had come at the expense of the Orthodox church.”
By joining one of the country’s biggest Pentecostal denominations, the Ethiopian Full Gospel Believers’ Church, in his early 20s, the future leader set his sights on what he believed to be God’s destiny for him.
“But there was also little reason to doubt the centrality of religion to his political project,” Gardner writes. “Pastor Bekele Woldekidan, one of Abiy’s earliest spiritual patrons in the Full Gospel’s church, later recalled how Abiy would turn up at his office to tell him of his conviction that he was destined to be prime minister from his very early twenties.”
He says over the years that many others — from party colleagues to foreign officials — would also encounter the same unblinking, righteous self-belief.
“I don’t see any contradiction between Abiy’s words, his rhetoric and his actions,” an advisor in the prime minister’s office told Gardner. “It’s the biggest driving force in his life. He genuinely believes he is God-anointed.”
Starting his adult life with a career in the military, he was then being seconded to the state intelligence department before emerging as a minister of science and technology. Sure enough for those who believed that God’s gracious hand was upon him, he would soon sashay his way through Ethiopia’s labyrinthic politics with “titanic self-belief” to suddenly emerge at the top of the pile in April 2018 at the age of 42.
To the army of Ethiopian Pentecostals, his rise to power was hardly surprising.
“Pentecostal churches, meanwhile, declared that Abiy had been sent by God — for his name alluded to the Easter fasting season, and he had risen to power during Lent,” Gardner writes about the ‘Abiymania’ that gripped the country. “One best-selling book, ‘Moses,’ compared the prime minister to the prophet.”
Gardner writes that Pentes entered politics — and thus brought with them an overtly religious conception of statecraft, with the potential to influence government and society in profound and consequential ways.
“And most importantly, they straddled the line between politics and religion, with many of them pronouncing Abiy in 2018 to be a fellow prophet sent by God to heal Ethiopia’s ethnic divisions,” Gardner writes. “The following year, several publicly endorsed his newly formed, and tellingly named, Prosperity Party. Between 2020 and 2022 many would also lend their moral support to his military campaign in Tigray.”
With this new “messiah” at the helm of Ethiopian politics, changes started showing. In addition to the miraculous peace deal with Eritrea, sweeping domestic reforms also took place immediately, including the release of tens of thousands of prisoners and the return of once-banned opposition groups. For the first time in 13 years, there were no journalists in prison, and some two dozen publications and six privately owned satellite channels were licensed.
But for those who knew the man close enough, these goods times were too good to last forever. And sure enough, the honeymoon was soon gone as something started changing about this “prophet from God,” as many deemed him.
“As prime minister, Abiy would never be an entirely conventional Pente politician,” Gardner observes. “There was, for instance, no mention of religion at all in his 2019 political tract. … He was close to several Orthodox leaders, including some virulently reactionary ones, and he enjoyed warm relations with many Muslims clerics, too. To the horror of fundamentalist Pentes he even spoke warmly of Irreecha — a traditional Oromo thanksgiving festival which many Christians regarded as ‘pagan,’ and which he would allow to be celebrated annually in Addis Ababa’s iconic Meskel Square. Later, many committed Christians also questioned why a man so ostentatiously God-fearing could appear so unmoved by the mass bloodshed committed in his name.”
Fresh from the bloody Tigray war in which his government is confirmed to have used hunger as a weapon of war, Abiy, who sees Ethiopia as the superpower of the horn of Africa, has been on an aggressive drive in the region — even provoking the ire of neighboring Somalia and Egypt.
“Like a Pentecostal Putin, he is part-preacher, part-spy,” Gardner concludes. “There are many Abiy Ahmeds. One is an aspiring emperor longing for a glorious past.”
Cyril Zenda is a Christian and an African journalist and writer based in Harare, Zimbabwe.
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