The arrival

How the EPRDF broke itself

The four-year protest movement that forced a Prime Minister’s resignation, and the closed-door vote that produced Abiy Ahmed

1 April 2018 — On the eve of the swearing-in

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. It did not. It began four years earlier, in April 2014, in a small town called Ginchi 80 kilometres southwest of Addis Ababa, when a local government decided to clear a forest and a football field to make way for an investment project. The students who turned out to object did not yet know what they were starting.

The trigger was the Addis Ababa Integrated Development Master Plan — a federal proposal to expand the capital’s municipal boundary by approximately 1.1 million hectares into the Oromia Special Zone that surrounds it. The plan was presented in Adama in June 2013 to stakeholders, with TPLF-dominated federal officials voicing support. To planners in Addis, it was a response to a growing middle-class demand for residential and commercial property and the city’s choked infrastructure. To Oromo farmers and the towns the plan was about to swallow, it was the seizure of land that the 1995 federal constitution had supposedly placed under Oromia regional authority. The Oromo word that appears on protest banners from the period — lafa — means “land,” and the slogan that organised the movement — “the matter of land is the matter of life” — left no ambiguity about what was at stake. [Wikipedia, “2014 Addis Ababa Master Plan,” accessed June 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Addis_Ababa_Master_Plan; IPI Global Observatory, “The Roots of Popular Mobilization in Ethiopia,” 19 June 2017, https://theglobalobservatory.org/2017/06/ethiopia-protests-oromo-addis-ababa-master-plan/]

The first wave of protests, in April and May 2014, was small, student-led, and located in western Oromia. The federal government’s response set the pattern. According to the Ethiopian government’s own account, at least nine students were killed in April and May; eyewitnesses placed the figure at 47. The Master Plan was suspended through the May 2015 federal election cycle — the election in which the EPRDF coalition and its allies claimed 100% of parliamentary seats — and then resumed immediately afterwards. On 12 November 2015, the local government in Ginchi began clearing the forest and football field again. The protests resumed within hours, this time spreading through Oromia faster than they could be contained.

Human Rights Watch documented at least 500 protest incidents across all seventeen zones of Oromia in the six months after Ginchi. Security forces — federal police, regional Special Forces, and elements of the ENDF — responded with live ammunition. HRW estimated at least 500 dead by October 2016; Amnesty International later put the figure for the full protest period closer to 800; an IPI Global Observatory tally drawing on international and local media sources put it above 1,200. The Ethiopian Human Rights Commission, normally inclined toward the government’s framing, would by mid-2017 acknowledge that more than 600 had been killed in protest-related incidents. [Human Rights Watch, “Such a Brutal Crackdown: Killings and Arrests in Response to Ethiopia’s Oromo Protests,” 16 June 2016, https://www.hrw.org/report/2016/06/16/such-brutal-crackdown/killings-and-arrests-response-ethiopias-oromo-protests]

The protests forced an early federal concession: in January 2016 the Master Plan was officially cancelled. The cancellation did not stop the protests, because by then the grievances had broadened beyond the original land question. They now included historic Oromo political marginalisation, the displacement of farmers by previous development projects whose beneficiaries had been a narrow elite, mass arbitrary detention, the use of anti-terrorism legislation to criminalise dissent, and the dominance of the Tigrayan-led security apparatus over a country in which the Tigrayan ethnic group constituted approximately 6% of the population while holding most senior military and intelligence positions. By summer 2016 the Amhara region had begun its own protest movement, partly in sympathy with Oromia and partly over its own long-standing claims to Welkait and Raya — historically Amhara areas administered as part of Tigray since the 1991 ethnic-federal reorganisation. Two of Ethiopia’s largest ethnic groups, the Oromo (around 34% of the population) and the Amhara (around 27%), were both in open opposition to the same federal government at the same time, for the first time in the EPRDF’s twenty-five-year rule.

The proximate catastrophe came on 2 October 2016, at the annual Irreecha thanksgiving festival in Bishoftu, a town 40 kilometres south-east of Addis. Irreecha is the largest Oromo cultural gathering; up to two million people attend in a typical year. Anti-government chants, which by 2016 had become routine at any large Oromo gathering, broke out during the official addresses. The federal security response included tear gas, baton charges, and according to some accounts, rubber bullets and live rounds fired into the crowd. The crowd panicked. People fell into ravines, were crushed in the stampede, or drowned in nearby Lake Hora. The Oromia regional government confirmed 52 deaths. Opposition figures and human-rights groups documented numbers as high as 300. The figure that has held in subsequent Oromo political memory is “around 500.” The discrepancy is not academic. The Irreecha massacre is the moment at which the protests stopped being primarily a movement against a land plan and became a movement against the federal political order. [Wikipedia, “2014–2016 Oromo protests,” accessed June 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014%E2%80%932016_Oromo_protests]

The federal government’s response on 9 October was to declare a six-month national state of emergency. The Command Post that ran the emergency exercised extraordinary powers; the constitutional courts proved unable to constrain it. Reports of mass arrests came from across Oromia and Amhara: between 11,000 and 26,000 people detained in the first weeks of the emergency, by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International estimates respectively. The notorious Maekelawi detention centre in Addis Ababa filled, and the holding facilities at Awash Arba and Tolay in the Awash valley filled past them.

Inside the ruling EPRDF coalition, the protests produced a counter-movement that would within eighteen months produce Abiy Ahmed. The Oromo People’s Democratic Organization (OPDO), since the EPRDF’s founding in 1989 a junior partner widely regarded inside Oromia as the TPLF’s “puppet” or “Trojan horse,” began under new leadership to distance itself from the federal line. In October 2016, the speaker of the Oromia regional parliament, a relative unknown named Lemma Megersa, was elevated to the regional presidency. He had become a national figure the previous November after a town-hall speech in Burayu in which he said of the Master Plan, “Even if it is for the benefit of the Oromo people; even if it were to pour gold on us, it will not be implemented if rejected by the public; it will not be implemented.” The phrase travelled.

Around Lemma a group of OPDO reformers coalesced: his deputy Abiy Ahmed, the OPDO communications head Addisu Arega, and a wider circle of regional officials prepared to publicly challenge the TPLF-dominated federal line. They called themselves, internally, Tim Lemma — Team Lemma. The Oromo diaspora media outlets (OMN, OPride, ESAT) that had been driving the protest narrative from abroad began amplifying Team Lemma’s speeches. By the end of 2017 Lemma had what one analyst called “unprecedented control” over the OPDO. The old guard — Abadula Gemeda, Kuma Demeksa, Diriba Kuma, Girma Biru — had been outmanoeuvred at the OPDO Congress and within the regional administration. [OPride, “Lemma Megersa: OPride’s Oromo Person of the Year 2017 Runner Up,” February 2018, https://www.opride.com/longform/lemma-megersa-oprides-oromo-person-of-the-year-2017-runner-up/]

The TPLF understood the threat. At an EPRDF Executive Committee meeting in late December 2017 — eighteen days of closed-door discussion that produced a public statement notably blunt by EPRDF standards — the senior coalition leadership formally rebuked Lemma and his reform agenda, including his rapprochement with Amhara political leaders. Lemma’s team was given directives to “undertake a deep internal self-correction.” Should they refuse, three federal officials told the OPride journalist who was tracking the meeting, the TPLF planned to replace them at the next Congress.

The TPLF strategy worked, for a moment, at the price of accelerating its collapse. On 3 January 2018, the four EPRDF party chairs held a joint press conference: the TPLF chairman Debretsion Gebremichael, the ANDM chairman Demeke Mekonnen, the SEPDM chairman Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn, and the OPDO chairman Lemma Megersa. Lemma stood out. His tone was visibly angry; his language oblique but unmistakable. He suggested, in the careful manner of an EPRDF official who was not yet ready to resign, that the government had lost its mandate and that the leadership should accept responsibility. The phrase used in the joint communiqué was that the ruling coalition would “release political prisoners” and “close some detention centres,” including Maekelawi, “to foster national reconciliation and broaden democratic space.” More than 6,000 political prisoners would be released over the next six weeks. [Africa Center for Strategic Studies, “The Many Layers of the Ethiopia Crisis,” 17 April 2018, https://africacenter.org/spotlight/many-layers-ethiopia-crisis/]

The release did not stop the protests. On 26 January, Lemma’s Oromia government pardoned 2,375 prisoners in a single regional act — 1,568 already convicted, 557 under investigation, 250 with cases active in court. The Qeerroo, the loosely organised Oromo youth network whose street action had been driving the protests since 2015, called for a regional stay-at-home strike beginning the second week of February. The strike held. Inter-city transport, daily markets, and commercial activity across most of Oromia stopped for three days.

On 15 February 2018, in a televised address to the nation, Hailemariam Desalegn announced his resignation. He told the country he had submitted his letter to the executive of his own party (SEPDM) and to the EPRDF Council, and that he was resigning to “be part of the solution” and “to help facilitate the ruling party’s reform agenda.” The resignation was the first by an Ethiopian Prime Minister in modern political history. The day after the announcement, parliament declared a fresh six-month state of emergency. Eighty-eight EPRDF and allied lawmakers voted against the emergency — an unprecedented public dissent within a parliament that had unanimously passed every government bill for a decade. The emergency passed anyway, by what opposition voices described as a manipulated count. [Addis Standard, “Breaking: Ethiopia PM Hailemariam Desalegn resigns,” 15 February 2018, https://addisstandard.com/breaking-ethiopia-pm-hailemariam-desalegn-resigns/; Wikipedia, “Resignation of Hailemariam Desalegn,” accessed June 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resignation_of_Hailemariam_Desalegn]

What followed, from 15 February to 27 March, was six weeks of behind-closed-doors negotiation that the Ethiopian public could not see and that even the diplomatic missions in Addis could observe only through leaks. The vehicle was the EPRDF Council — 180 members, 45 from each of the four constituent parties (OPDO, ANDM, SEPDM, TPLF). The Council would elect a new chairman of the coalition, who would by parliamentary mathematics become the next Prime Minister.

Three candidates were nominated. From the OPDO: Abiy Ahmed, who had been elected OPDO chairman on 22 February, one week after Hailemariam’s resignation, and was the political vehicle for Team Lemma’s national ambition. From the SEPDM: Shiferaw Shigute, the chairman of Hailemariam’s own party, whose argument was that the Southern coalition should be allowed to complete the term. From the TPLF: Debretsion Gebremichael, the TPLF chairman, who was the senior Tigrayan candidate. (The ANDM under Demeke Mekonnen reportedly considered a candidacy but ultimately backed Abiy.)

The political logic of the moment ran through Lemma. He was, by every street-level measure, the figure the protest movement had produced. The Qeerroo wanted him. The Oromo public wanted him. He had been the visible architect of OPDO’s transformation. But there was a constitutional obstacle: Lemma was not a member of the federal House of Peoples’ Representatives, and the Prime Minister had to be one. To become Prime Minister he would have needed to be appointed to parliament first, which would have required either an extraordinary procedural manoeuvre or a delay neither the OPDO nor the broader coalition was willing to risk. Lemma did what he later told confidants was the necessary thing: he stepped aside in favour of Abiy, who was already an MP for the Agaro district, on the understanding that he, Lemma, would remain OPDO chairman and would serve as a constraining force on the new government. The arrangement would last roughly nine months before Abiy began the process of removing him.

The Council convened on 27 March. The vote was conducted by secret ballot. Abiy Ahmed received 108 votes out of 180; Shiferaw Shigute received 59; Debretsion Gebremichael received 2 (with 9 invalid or abstaining, by some counts). For the first time in 27 years, the EPRDF had held a genuinely contested leadership election. For the first time in Ethiopian political history, an ethnic Oromo would lead the federal government. [Al Jazeera, “Abiy Ahmed elected as chairman of Ethiopia’s ruling coalition,” 28 March 2018, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/3/28/abiy-ahmed-elected-as-chairman-of-ethiopias-ruling-coalition; Ethiopia Observer, “Abiy Ahmed named EPRDF chair,” 27 March 2018, https://www.ethiopiaobserver.com/2018/03/27/abiy-ahmed-to-be-named-eprdf-chair-sources/]

Three points about the result are worth holding clearly in mind.

First, the vote was contested but the field was already shaped. Lemma was not on the ballot. The TPLF candidate Debretsion received almost no support beyond his own party’s 45 seats — a measurement of how far the TPLF’s authority inside the coalition had collapsed during the protest years. The choice was effectively between an OPDO reformist (Abiy) and an SEPDM continuist (Shiferaw). The reformist won, and the margin was decisive (60% of the vote), but the result reflected coalition exhaustion as much as it reflected coalition consensus on the future direction.

Second, the man elected was not, in 2018, primarily known for his reform credentials. He had served as a Lieutenant Colonel in the ENDF, as a senior officer at the Information Network Security Agency (INSA) — Ethiopia’s signals-intelligence body — and as Minister of Science and Technology in Hailemariam’s cabinet. He had been deputy president of Oromia under Lemma since October 2016. Born in 1976 in Beshasha, Agaro, to a Muslim father and Orthodox Christian mother, he had converted to Pentecostal Christianity around 2000 and had quietly become a member of the Full Gospel Believers Church. He spoke Afaan Oromo, Amharic, and Tigrinya — the third language acquired during his ENDF service, when he served as a radio operator and rose through ranks dominated by Tigrayans. He held a PhD from Addis Ababa University’s Institute for Peace and Security Studies (defended May 2017). He was 41 years old. [Wikipedia, “Abiy Ahmed,” accessed June 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiy_Ahmed]

He arrived at the EPRDF chairmanship without significant national profile and without obvious experience of national-level political management. What he had was the patronage of Lemma Megersa, the support of the Amhara reformist current under Demeke Mekonnen, and the calculation of TPLF and SEPDM voters that an OPDO candidate was the only choice that could plausibly bring the protests to an end.

Third, the protest movement that produced this outcome had not, at the moment of Abiy’s election, been demobilised. The Qeerroo was still in the streets. The Amhara protest network around Fano and the regional youth movements was still active. The state of emergency declared on 16 February remained in force. The 6,000 prisoner releases ordered by Hailemariam’s caretaker cabinet had been partial — many key opposition figures, including OFC deputy chairman Bekele Gerba and several Muslim leaders, were still in detention. Maekelawi had been closed as a detention facility but its functions had been transferred elsewhere. The federal security architecture that had produced four years of killings was still in place, staffed by the same people, operating under the same rules.

What had changed, on 27 March 2018, was that the political leadership had blinked first.

The political experiment about to begin would test whether one man, atop a coalition he did not fully control, with a security apparatus he had risen through, and with a country that had been killing its own citizens at scale for four years, could turn that exhaustion into reform. The first six weeks would suggest he could. The first six years would demonstrate that the experiment had been more constrained than its early international press understood.

The man being sworn in tomorrow is the product of the failure of the coalition that produced him. He is also, on 1 April 2018, its only available answer.

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Sources for Article 1A

1. Wikipedia, “2014–2016 Oromo protests,” accessed June 2026 — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014%E2%80%932016_Oromo_protests
2. Wikipedia, “2014 Addis Ababa Master Plan,” accessed June 2026 — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Addis_Ababa_Master_Plan
3. IPI Global Observatory, “Data Analysis: The Roots of Popular Mobilization in Ethiopia,” 19 June 2017 — https://theglobalobservatory.org/2017/06/ethiopia-protests-oromo-addis-ababa-master-plan/
4. Human Rights Watch, “‘Such a Brutal Crackdown’: Killings and Arrests in Response to Ethiopia’s Oromo Protests,” 16 June 2016 — https://www.hrw.org/report/2016/06/16/such-brutal-crackdown/killings-and-arrests-response-ethiopias-oromo-protests
5. Newsweek, “Oromo Protests: Why Ethiopia’s Largest Ethnic Group is Demonstrating,” 25 May 2016 — https://www.newsweek.com/oromo-protests-why-ethiopias-biggest-ethnic-group-demonstrating-430793
6. ROAPE, “Protest, Repression and Revolution in Ethiopia,” January 2019 — https://roape.net/2019/01/24/protest-repression-and-revolution-in-ethiopia/
7. Africa Center for Strategic Studies, “The Many Layers of the Ethiopia Crisis,” 17 April 2018 — https://africacenter.org/spotlight/many-layers-ethiopia-crisis/
8. Addis Standard, “Breaking: Ethiopia PM Hailemariam Desalegn resigns,” 15 February 2018 — https://addisstandard.com/breaking-ethiopia-pm-hailemariam-desalegn-resigns/
9. Wikipedia, “Resignation of Hailemariam Desalegn,” accessed June 2026 — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resignation_of_Hailemariam_Desalegn
10. Wikipedia, “Hailemariam Desalegn,” accessed June 2026 — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hailemariam_Desalegn
11. Al Jazeera, “Abiy Ahmed elected as chairman of Ethiopia’s ruling coalition,” 28 March 2018 — https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/3/28/abiy-ahmed-elected-as-chairman-of-ethiopias-ruling-coalition
12. Al Jazeera, “What next for Ethiopia after EPRDF picks Abiy Ahmed as leader?”, 28 March 2018 — https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/3/28/what-next-for-ethiopia-after-eprdf-picks-abiy-ahmed-as-leader
13. Ethiopia Observer, “Abiy Ahmed named EPRDF chair, amidst uncertainty and instability,” 27 March 2018 — https://www.ethiopiaobserver.com/2018/03/27/abiy-ahmed-to-be-named-eprdf-chair-sources/
14. Daily Nation, “Ethiopia in uncharted territory as coalition chooses prime minister,” March 2018 — https://nation.africa/kenya/news/africa/Ethiopia-in-uncharted-territory/1066-4330790-fiaau3/index.html
15. Wikipedia, “Abiy Ahmed,” accessed June 2026 — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiy_Ahmed
16. Wikipedia, “Lemma Megersa,” accessed June 2026 — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemma_Megersa
17. OPride, “Lemma Megersa: OPride’s Oromo Person of the Year 2017 Runner Up,” February 2018 — https://www.opride.com/longform/lemma-megersa-oprides-oromo-person-of-the-year-2017-runner-up/
18. GlobalSecurity.org, “Lemma Megersa,” February 2018 — https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/ethiopia/lemma.htm
19. Foreign Policy, “Abiy Ahmed Betrayed Oromia Before He Went to War in Tigray,” 25 January 2022 — https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/01/25/abiy-ahmed-ethiopia-qeerroo-oromia-betrayed/
20. The Africa Report, “Ethiopia’s leadership race: the Oromo leader at the front,” February 2018 — https://www.theafricareport.com/709/ethiopias-leadership-race-the-oromo-leader-at-the-front/

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The hundred days

A new Prime Minister opens the cell doors, calls home the exiles, and renames a regime

Filed early July 2018 — covering Abiy’s first hundred days, 2 April to 10 July 2018

There is a phrase the Prime Minister has been using in public for several weeks now: kal yigedlal, kal yadinal. A word can kill, a word can save. The aphorism, which Abiy Ahmed quotes regularly enough that Ethiopian columnists have begun to roll their eyes at it, captures the thesis of his first hundred days: that the previous government failed because it spoke the wrong language to its own people, and that he, by changing the language, can reset the political reality.

He may be partly right. He is certainly not entirely right. But to understand the first three months of the Abiy era, you have to start with the speech.

On 2 April 2018, in the chamber of the House of Peoples’ Representatives, before a parliament composed almost entirely of his own coalition, the new Prime Minister delivered a fifty-eight-minute inaugural address that broke with three decades of EPRDF rhetorical convention. Where his predecessors had spoken in the precise vocabulary of revolutionary democracy and the developmental state, Abiy spoke in the register of national reconciliation. He apologised — explicitly — for state violence against the protesters whose mobilisation had brought him to office. He invoked God in a chamber whose previous occupants had been formal atheists or theological neutrals; the last Prime Minister to mention “the Creator” before the Ethiopian parliament was probably Haile Selassie. He thanked his mother, who he said had told him at the age of seven that he would one day occupy a position of national leadership. He thanked his wife and spoke of the responsibilities of mothers in shaping Ethiopian citizens. He quoted an anonymous Oromo elder: “We are Ethiopians when we live; we become Ethiopia when we die.” [English transcript: OPride, “Full English Transcript of Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s Inaugural Address,” 3 April 2018, https://www.opride.com/2018/04/03/english-partial-transcript-of-ethiopian-prime-minister-abiy-ahmeds-inaugural-address/; reflection: Effective States and Inclusive Development, “Not an ordinary speech,” March 2021, https://www.effective-states.org/not-an-ordinary-speech-a-reflection-on-the-first-speech-of-the-new-prime-minster-of-ethiopia/]

The organising concept of the speech, repeated more often than any other word, was medemer — the Amharic verb for “to add together,” used by Abiy as a noun in the sense of “synergy,” “addition,” “coming together.” Medemer, the speech argued, was the Ethiopian political philosophy the moment required: the addition of the country’s diverse ethnic, religious, and regional currents into a shared national project. The vocabulary was new. The argument was older than the EPRDF — closer to Haile Selassie’s pan-Ethiopian centralism than to Meles Zenawi’s federalism — though Abiy did not say so directly. The political function of medemer was to provide a single ideological framework that could be set against the EPRDF’s twenty-seven years of ethnic federalism without explicitly attacking that framework, which remained the constitutional architecture of the state Abiy now governed.

Within Ethiopia, the speech was received with what international correspondents described as “stunned approval.” Bumper stickers went up. Medemer entered colloquial Ethiopian speech as a phrase that could mean anything from “the new political project” to “stop fighting and work together.” Inside the OPDO and across reformist circuits of the ANDM, the speech was greeted as the formal arrival of the political project Lemma’s team had been incubating. Inside the TPLF leadership in Mekelle, the speech was read as the opening of an ideological campaign against the federal architecture the TPLF had built and depended on for political survival. The TPLF response, mostly conveyed through proxies in the Tigrayan media and in private conversations with foreign diplomats, was that medemer was a coded restoration of Amhara-Oromo centralism, that Abiy’s “Ethiopianness” was the ethnic federation’s old assimilationist enemy returned in new vocabulary, and that the coalition that had elected him would have cause to regret the choice. None of this was said publicly in April 2018. Most of it would be visible by November 2020.

The speech was, in the most literal sense, the easy part. What Abiy did in the next ten weeks was harder, faster, and broader in scope than any reform sequence Ethiopia had seen since the 1991 EPRDF takeover.

The releases. Building on Hailemariam’s January announcement, the new government accelerated the release of political prisoners. By the end of July, the cumulative figure released since the Hailemariam-era 3 January press conference exceeded 13,000. Notable individual releases included Andargachew Tsige, the Ginbot 7 leader who had been sentenced to death after a 2014 rendition from Yemen; Bekele Gerba, the OFC deputy chairman; the Zone 9 bloggers; Merera Gudina; numerous Muslim leaders detained during the 2012–14 protests; and journalists whose detentions had been documented by the Committee to Protect Journalists for years. The Maekelawi detention facility in Addis was closed as a political detention site; the Tolay holding centre in the Awash valley released its detainees. By mid-2018 Ethiopia, which had been one of the top-ten jailers of journalists globally in 2017, was reporting zero journalists in prison — the first such reading in over a decade.

The unbannings. On 22 June 2018, the government formally delisted the Oromo Liberation Front, Patriotic Ginbot 7, and the Ogaden National Liberation Front as terrorist organisations. The decision reversed designations that had been used for years as the legal infrastructure for mass arrests, asset seizures, and prosecution of opposition figures. Within weeks, OLF chairman Dawud Ibsa, Ginbot 7 chairman Berhanu Nega, and ONLF leadership returned to Addis Ababa from exile in Eritrea, the United States, and elsewhere. Crowds at Bole International Airport on the day of OLF’s return were among the largest seen for a political event in modern Ethiopian history. The delisting opened the formal political competition that the 2010 and 2015 elections had been designed to exclude.

The Eritrea opening. On 5 June 2018, three weeks into his premiership, Abiy made a more substantial commitment than any predecessor had managed in eighteen years: he announced that the federal government would accept, without preconditions, the 2000 Algiers Agreement and the 2002 Ethiopia-Eritrea Boundary Commission ruling. The ruling had awarded the disputed town of Badme to Eritrea. Three previous Ethiopian governments had refused to implement it; the Eritrean government had cited the non-implementation as justification for its permanent war-footing posture and for its support of various Ethiopian opposition groups. Abiy’s acceptance of the ruling was the cancellation of the formal pretext that had kept the two states in a low-grade cold war since 2000. Within days, Asmara sent a delegation to Addis. By 9 July — the hundredth day — Abiy was in Asmara, signing the Joint Declaration of Peace and Friendship with President Isaias Afwerki on a tarmac, and the land border, phone lines, and Ethiopian Airlines flights to Asmara were about to reopen. The Joint Declaration would form the basis for the Nobel Peace Prize sixteen months later.

The cabinet. On 16 October 2018, four months after the period covered here but in continuity with the early appointments — Abiy reorganised his cabinet from 28 to 20 ministers and appointed women to 10 of the 20. The appointments included Sahle-Work Zewde, named the first female President of Ethiopia in the country’s history; Aisha Mohammed Musa as Minister of Defence; Muferiat Kamil as Minister of Peace, the new ministry with oversight of intelligence and federal police; and Billene Seyoum as the first Press Secretary of the Office of the Prime Minister. The composition was unprecedented in Ethiopian political history. It was also a substantive operational realignment of the security architecture: Defence under a woman who had not come up through the ENDF or INSA, and Peace as a new umbrella over intelligence functions that had previously reported directly to the Prime Minister’s office. [Premiership of Abiy Ahmed, Wikipedia, accessed June 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Premiership_of_Abiy_Ahmed]

The state of emergency. The emergency declared on 16 February, after Hailemariam’s resignation, was formally lifted on 5 June 2018, ahead of schedule.

The diaspora. In late July and August 2018, Abiy toured the United States, holding rallies for Ethiopian diaspora communities in Washington DC, Minneapolis, and Los Angeles. The DC rally drew tens of thousands. The political signal was new: a sitting Ethiopian Prime Minister soliciting support and remittances from a community that under previous EPRDF governments had been treated alternately as a security threat and a propaganda target. The economic signal was bigger: diaspora remittances, which had been running at $4 billion annually pre-2018, were a critical foreign-exchange source and Abiy was making the case that they should now flow through formal channels rather than parallel ones.

The trade and economic openings. In a separate sequence of moves through June and July, Abiy committed to allowing private foreign investment in Ethiopian Airlines, the Ethiopian Electric Power Corporation, Ethio Telecom (the state telecom monopoly), and the country’s logistics infrastructure. The previous EPRDF government had treated these state-owned enterprises as the developmental-state core. Abiy was signalling a partial pivot away from that model toward what economists in Addis began calling “Homegrown Economic Reform” — a phrase that would mature, six years later, into the IMF-backed birr float of July 2024.

The atmosphere. On 23 June 2018, three weeks before the hundred-day mark, Abiy held a “Million Strong” rally in Meskel Square in support of his reform agenda. The crowd was estimated at hundreds of thousands. Near the conclusion of his address, a grenade was thrown from the crowd toward the stage. Two people died and approximately 156 were injured. Abiy himself was unhurt and was filmed, in the immediate aftermath, calling for restraint. The assailants were identified, arrested, and charged within days. The federal government attributed the attempt to elements of the security apparatus opposed to Abiy’s reforms. The diagnosis was probably partially accurate; it was also politically convenient. The Meskel Square attack was not, as the international press largely treated it, an isolated act of opposition violence. It was an early signal that the security architecture Abiy was attempting to reform contained powerful actors who did not consent to being reformed.

By 10 July, the hundredth day, the public reception in Addis was something close to euphoria. The state-affiliated Ethiopian News Agency and the formerly stiff state broadcaster were running tribute coverage. International press headlines compared Abiy to Nelson Mandela, to Mikhail Gorbachev, to Mahatma Gandhi; the BBC called him “one of the most dynamic and charismatic politicians to emerge in modern Africa.” The mobile-phone polling that emerged from independent surveys put approval ratings above 80%. Ethiopian Airlines was reporting record passenger growth. The Addis Ababa stock exchange — which did not yet exist — was being discussed in serious policy circles as a near-term project.

It is worth setting against this atmosphere four observations that were available at the time, and that would explain a great deal of what came next.

First, the coalition Abiy depended on was already showing fractures. Lemma Megersa, the OPDO chairman who had stepped aside for Abiy and remained the most popular Oromo politician in the country, was about to be appointed Minister of Defence — a position that in Ethiopian federal practice removed him from regional politics and placed him on a track that would marginalise him from the OPDO leadership Abiy was now using as his political base. Within a year, Lemma would be openly disagreeing with Abiy about the EPRDF merger; within fifteen months, he would be removed from cabinet; within thirty months, he would be under house arrest. The reformist coalition that had elevated Abiy to the premiership was, by July 2018, already beginning to consume itself.

Second, the security architecture was untouched. No senior ENDF general had been removed. No senior INSA officer had been replaced. The federal police hierarchy had been reshuffled but not restructured. The men who had ordered the killings of Oromo and Amhara protesters between 2014 and 2017 were, with rare individual exceptions, still in their offices in July 2018. The Meskel Square grenade attack was a public demonstration of how much of the old apparatus remained in place. Abiy’s response, characteristically, had been to project equanimity rather than to conduct a purge. The decision was understandable; it also meant that the security infrastructure that would prosecute the Tigray War in November 2020, that would crush the Amhara protest in April 2023, and that would conduct the drone campaign of 2024–25, was substantially the same security infrastructure that had killed roughly a thousand protesters between 2014 and 2017.

Third, the structural problems were unresolved. The ethnic-federal constitution remained in force. The contested boundaries between Tigray and Amhara (Welkait, Raya), between Oromia and Somali (Moyale, Babile), between Amhara and Tigray more broadly, were untouched. The OLA’s refusal to disarm in August 2018 would surface within weeks. The drought conditions in the Somali region, the Eritrean-Tigrayan refugees in Tigray, the Sudanese refugees in Gambella, the ethnic-violence flashpoints across at least seven regions — all remained as they had been. A change of language at the top of the federal government did not, on its own, alter the structural distribution of grievance.

Fourth, the man at the centre was not, by his own account, a politician of consensus. Abiy spoke regularly of being chosen by God and selected by his mother. He took the criticism of his early reform pace from his own coalition partners — TPLF and SEPDM voices privately warning that he was moving too fast and too unilaterally — as evidence of their resistance to the necessary transformation. He preferred direct address to citizens over coalition meeting-rooms; he preferred personal rallies to party congresses; he conducted policy by speech more than by interagency process. These traits would be celebrated, in 2018, as charisma. They would be diagnosed, in 2024, as the structural condition of a country governed by one man without internal check.

None of this was hidden, in July 2018, from observers who were looking. The International Crisis Group’s “Keeping Ethiopia’s Transition on the Rails” report, the Africa Center for Strategic Studies’ “Many Layers of the Ethiopia Crisis” analysis, the Freedom House testimony to the US Congress in September — all noted the same set of risks: that the reform agenda outran the institutional capacity to deliver it, that the security architecture was unreformed, that the coalition that produced Abiy was internally exhausted, that the structural drivers of the protest movement remained in place, and that the man at the top was operating without the political constraint that successful reforms in similar contexts had required.

On 10 July 2018, none of those warnings was politically dominant. The dominant fact was the crowds, the speeches, the released prisoners, the returned exiles, and the tarmac handshake in Asmara. The dominant feeling, in Addis and in the diaspora capitals, was that the worst was over.

Each of those impressions was true. They were also each insufficient.

The hundred days had set a pattern that would persist. The pattern was that Abiy moved fast, the rhetoric ran ahead of the substance, the coalition behind him was held together by his personal authority rather than by institutional process, the international press was overwhelmingly receptive, and the costs of the rhetoric outpacing the substance had not yet come due.

They would.

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Sources for Article 1B

1. OPride, “Full English Transcript of Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s Inaugural Address,” 3 April 2018 — https://www.opride.com/2018/04/03/english-partial-transcript-of-ethiopian-prime-minister-abiy-ahmeds-inaugural-address/
2. Effective States and Inclusive Development, “Not an ordinary speech: A reflection on the first speech of the new Prime Minster of Ethiopia,” 2018 — https://www.effective-states.org/not-an-ordinary-speech-a-reflection-on-the-first-speech-of-the-new-prime-minster-of-ethiopia/
3. Embassy of Ethiopia (Belgium), “Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s first 100 days,” 2018 — https://ethiopianembassy.be/?p=11455
4. Africa News Channel, “Is Abiy Ahmed a Dictator or a Great Leader? An In-Depth Analysis (2018–Present),” 1 March 2025 — https://www.africanewschannel.org/featured/is-abiy-ahmed-a-dictator-or-a-great-leader-an-in-depth-analysis-2018-present/
5. Cogent Arts & Humanities (Taylor & Francis), “Critical discourse analysis of the second inaugural speech of Ethiopia’s Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed,” 2023 — https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23311983.2023.2172805
6. Wikipedia, “Premiership of Abiy Ahmed,” accessed June 2026 — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Premiership_of_Abiy_Ahmed
7. Wikipedia, “Abiy Ahmed,” accessed June 2026 — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiy_Ahmed
8. Freedom House, “Testimony on Ethiopia: Turning Promise into Progress,” 28 September 2018 — https://freedomhouse.org/article/testimony-ethiopia-turning-promise-progress
9. Africa Center for Strategic Studies, “The Many Layers of the Ethiopia Crisis,” 17 April 2018 — https://africacenter.org/spotlight/many-layers-ethiopia-crisis/
10. RENEW Capital, “Only 4 Months…” (covering Abiy’s first 100 days), August 2018 — https://www.renewcapital.com/newsroom/only-4-months
11. Foreign Policy, “Abiy Ahmed Betrayed Oromia Before He Went to War in Tigray,” 25 January 2022 — https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/01/25/abiy-ahmed-ethiopia-qeerroo-oromia-betrayed/
12. International Crisis Group, “Keeping Ethiopia’s Transition on the Rails,” 16 February 2018 — https://www.crisisgroup.org/africa/horn-africa/ethiopia/261-keeping-ethiopias-transition-rails

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End of expanded articles for Dispatch 1. Two articles, totalling approximately 5,200 words. Subsequent dispatches to be developed in the same format on continuing instruction.