The Abiy Chronicle
A serialized dispatch on Ethiopia, April 2018 to the present
A running, signed chronicle of Abiy Ahmed's premiership: dated dispatches tracing the arc from Nobel-laureate reformer to a centralizing leader presiding over a fragmenting state. From the April 2018 arrival through the Asmara handshake, the Tigray war, the Pretoria Agreement, the Piassa demolition, the July 2024 birr float, the Fano insurgency, and the June 2026 partial-map election. Twenty-nine dispatches and an editor's note, updated as the story continues.
An argument by Zef Telahun
Signed editorial perspective — not the site's neutral reference analysis.
Editor's note
This is a running chronicle, not a finished history. Each dated dispatch below was written to stand alone: a reader who opens at any single article should not need to read what came before. Read in sequence, they trace the arc of a single political experiment — Abiy Ahmed’s premiership — from the day of his appointment to the present.
The voice is consistent: empirical, structured, allergic to euphemism. Where actors are named, they are named. Where casualty ranges differ, the range is given. Where the government has used a euphemism — “law enforcement operation,” “anti-peace elements,” “Western interference” — the phrase is quoted, not adopted. The same evidentiary standard is applied to every actor on the page: federal government, Tigray People’s Liberation Front, Eritrean Defence Forces, Amhara regional forces, Fano, Oromo Liberation Army, and the international institutions that funded or looked away from the consequences.
New dispatches are added monthly.
Part I — The reform and its unmaking
The political event of 2 April 2018 is being narrated by the international press as if it began with the resignation of a Prime Minister in February…
The conflict the new Prime Minister is preparing to end is not, in any of the ways that matter, primarily about a town. The town is Badme…
The first round of celebrations had been on 22 June, the day the federal government formally delisted the Oromo Liberation Front, Patriotic Ginbot 7, and the Ogaden National Liberation Front as terrorist organisations…
The most consequential 72-hour sequence of Abiy Ahmed's premiership, after his inauguration itself, occurred between the evening of Saturday 22 June 2019 and the morning of Monday 24 June 2019…
The announcement came at 11:00 Central European Summer Time on Friday 11 October 2019, in the Norwegian Nobel Institute's auditorium on Henrik Ibsens Gate in Oslo…
The Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front had governed Ethiopia for twenty-eight years on a structural premise the new Prime Minister had decided was no longer politically tenable…
Part II — The war
The constitutional architecture of the Ethiopian state, as drafted in 1995, requires general elections every five years. The 2010 election had been held on 23 May 2010; the 2015 election on 24 May 2015; the 2020 election was scheduled for 29 August 2020…
The Ethiopian National Defence Force's Northern Command was the federal military's most equipped, most experienced, and most senior formation. It had been headquartered in Mekelle since the late 1990s, when its position had been chosen to address the…
Mai Kadra is a market town in the Tahtay Adiabo Woreda of the Western Zone of Tigray Region — territory that, in 2020, was administratively part of Tigray, but that the Amhara political constituency had been demanding be returned to Amhara…
Axum is a city of approximately 70,000 people in central Tigray. It contains the Church of Our Lady Mary of Zion, the most sacred site of Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity, which by Ethiopian Orthodox tradition houses the Ark of the Covenant brought to…
The federal government's "law enforcement operation" had been declared complete on 28 November 2020. On 28 June 2021 — seven months to the day after the declared completion — the Tigray Defence Forces marched back into Mekelle…
Between July and December 2021, the Tigray war's strategic geography shifted in a sequence of operations that, at one point in early November, appeared poised to end Abiy Ahmed's premiership by force of arms…
Part III — The unfinished peace
The agreement that ended the open phase of the Tigray war was signed at 17:30 local time on Wednesday 2 November 2022 at the headquarters of South Africa's Department of International Relations and Cooperation in Pretoria…
The day the Pretoria Agreement was signed — 2 November 2022 — Eritrean Defence Force units occupied positions in northern Tigray (the Erob and Gulomakeda districts on the Eritrean border, parts of Adwa, Adi Daero, Shire), in central Tigray (the Mariam…
In late February 2023, a USAID inspector working in Tigray Region observed an unexpected sight: a truckload of wheat sacks marked with US Agency for International Development branding, parked at the loading dock of a commercial flour mill in Mekelle…
The constituency that had given the federal government its principal regional support during the Tigray war began, in April 2023, to take up arms against the federal government…
The International Commission of Human Rights Experts on Ethiopia (ICHREE) was established by the UN Human Rights Council on 17 December 2021, by Resolution S-33/1, with a mandate to conduct "a thorough and impartial investigation into allegations of…
Part IV — The reckoning
The political project that produced the 1 January 2024 Memorandum of Understanding between Ethiopia and Somaliland had been visible in Abiy Ahmed's policy communications for at least the preceding year…
The Corridor Development Project was formally approved by the Addis Ababa City Administration Executive Council on 23 February 2024. The Project's stated objective, in the federal-government and city-administration communications that followed, was…
The Ethiopian birr had been a fixed-exchange-rate currency since 1949. Through the Imperial period, through the Derg, through the EPRDF era under Meles Zenawi and Hailemariam Desalegn, and through the first six years of Abiy's premiership, the…
The Fano insurgency that had begun in April 2023 entered its most consequential operational phase in July, August, and September 2024. Through the first six months of 2024, Fano formations across Amhara Region had been operating in a pattern that the…
The Oromo Liberation Army, the principal armed organisation operating against the federal government in Oromia Region since 2019, faced its most consequential internal crisis of the post-2018 period in September 2024 when one of its three regional…
Part V — The fragmenting state
The Tigray People's Liberation Front had governed Tigray Region for thirty years before the November 2020 war began. It had been driven from federal political power in March 2018…
The National Election Board of Ethiopia (NEBE) is, in its formal legal character, an independent constitutional body charged with administering Ethiopian elections and regulating political parties…
The Horn of Africa's regional security architecture in the fourth quarter of 2025 has been the outcome of a two-and-a-half-year sequence of strategic realignments that the November 2022 Pretoria Agreement had not been designed to accommodate…
The first eight weeks of 2026 constituted the operational period at which the Horn of Africa's accumulating forward risks became visibly comprehensive…
The events of 8 April – 5 May 2026 constituted, in operational terms, the political-institutional expression of the accumulated conditions that Dispatches 25 and 26 have documented…
The June 1, 2026 federal election was the seventh general election in Ethiopian post-Derg history and the second under Abiy Ahmed's premiership. The election's structural conditions had been shaped by the political-legal environment the federal…
Any serious analytical characterisation of the Ethiopian federal-government's operational condition at the end of June 2026 must proceed from a set of empirical observations that the federal-government's own public communications have not addressed…