The Man We Invented
Reviewing Tom Gardner's The Abiy Project: How wishcasting, myth, and a broken system unraveled Ethiopia.
When I picked up The Abiy Project by Tom Gardner, I didn’t have high expectations. Gardner is an Africa reporter for The Economist, and over the past few years, I had read many of his pieces. I had found his writing predictably slanted: often overly sympathetic to insurgents fighting the Ethiopian government and inclined towards dark, dramatic speculation of state collapse, frequently quoting anonymous Western diplomats. Still, with nothing better to do at 35,000 feet on a five-hour flight, I opened the book’s first pages.
To my surprise, the book was as gripping as any binge-worthy Netflix series; the hours collapsed into a blur. By the time I landed, my respect for Gardner’s seriousness—the diligence of his reporting, the density of his sources, and his willingness to go where the story actually lived—rose sharply. Likewise, my assessment of the moral character of the book’s central protagonist, Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, fell by almost an equal measure.
Gardner presents a comprehensive account of the events leading up to Abiy Ahmed’s rise, the political machinery that enabled it, and the turbulent years of his rule.The book functions both as a biography and as an analysis of Ethiopia’s deeper structural problems. Abiy is cast as a problem to be explained: reckless, power-hungry, and destabilizing, though Gardner also acknowledges, at moments, that he is a symptom of a political system already under strain. While the pathologizing of Abiy is a central theme, the book is packed with genuine insights.
Ethiopian politics is an extremely complicated battlefield, where the past, present, and future are contested with equal intensity. Sometimes it feels less like politics than a struggle over reality itself. Few countries have experienced transformations as radical, and as compressed, as Ethiopia has since the 1970s: a seven-hundred-year-old monarchy toppled almost overnight; a brutal Soviet-style dictatorship that exported a once-tiny diaspora into the millions; and in 1995, a wholesale constitutional reordering that elevated ethnicity in a society where identity had historically been fluid. Still, Ethiopia and its people are remarkably resilient, and both the idea and reality of Ethiopia as a unified state persist.
Gardner frames this complexity by casting Ethiopia as “the world’s last empire,” with the center forcefully holding together a reluctant constellation of peoples. In his telling, Addis Ababa—regardless of who governs it—is a coercive center, and the peripheries are zones of grievance and resistance. He treats these tensions as structural, the deep base on which his interpretation rests. His core thesis is that onto this already fragile political settlement came Abiy Ahmed, who, rather than carefully managing contradictions and institutionalizing power, personalized it, improvised politics, and accelerated the state toward the brink of collapse.
Gardner may be shaped by familiar Western frameworks of viewing Ethiopia and tempted by dramatic speculation, but in the end, he has produced a work that is deeply sourced, morally attentive, and historically consequential. It made me reassess my assumptions about Abiy Ahmed and forced me to confront Ethiopia’s structural fragility with a fresh perspective.
Gardner’s Story
Where Gardner truly shines is in how much of Abiy Ahmed’s early life he is able to pull out of rumor and into reality. Ethiopian political culture is riddled with speculation and conspiracy theories. Gardner, alert to our national habit of exaggeration, works carefully to separate what can be known from what remains speculative. The result is a coherent portrait: a childhood marked by distance from his father; an upbringing shaped by an Orthodox Amhara mother; an adolescence defined by entry into the security state; and a formative near-death experience during the 1998 Ethiopia-Eritrea war that helps explain Abiy’s enduring sense of providence.
For years, Abiy’s time at INSA—the country’s cyber-intelligence agency—functioned as a myth. We filled the silence with projection: Was he a genius hacker? A master spy? Gardner dissolves this myth not by finding a smoking gun, but by checking the HR file. The truth is far more mundane. Abiy didn’t need to be a master spy; he was just a bureaucrat who quietly learned the internal wiring of the machinery the TPLF had built. He didn’t rise by challenging the titans of the old guard, but by making himself useful to them—mastering the very apparatus he would later use to dislodge them.
Gardner is emphatic about Abiy’s ambition from his earliest days. Still, he was by no means the favorite to take over the Prime Ministership in 2018. How did someone who was, at best, a background singer in the orchestra of the Oromo Protests outmaneuver the headliners—Lemma Megersa, Jawar Mohammed, the old guard of the EPRDF—and centralize power into his own hands? The answer, in Gardner’s telling, is a mix of calculation, improvisation, instinct, and an extraordinary ability to be underestimated. Time and again, those whom he sidelined did not see him coming. That pattern, which persists even now, may be one of Abiy’s defining strengths—and one of the most unsettling truths of the book.
Gardner also sheds light on the increased involvement of the UAE and the Gulf states in Ethiopia and the broader Horn, a trend that began in the early 2010s. He sketches a region increasingly dependent on Gulf patronage, where states matter much less than leaders. His account of Ethiopia’s relationship with the UAE—drones for gold, palace renovations, and strategic embedding throughout the security apparatus—is both concerning and clarifying.
Reading this book also forced me to confront a comforting assumption I had quietly relied on: that because Abiy is despised equally by Amhara, Oromo, and Tigrayan elites, he must simply be a misunderstood politician trying to manage impossible constituencies. Gardner complicates this charitable explanation. He shows how cynical the early ‘Oromara’ project truly was, and how Abiy and Lemma Megersa knowingly fed different visions of Ethiopia to different audiences. What I had viewed as a desperate balancing act was, in Gardner’s telling, intentional design.
I went into the book confident I already understood the era. Instead, I found gaps filled, chronology clarified, and the uncomfortable recognition that some of my assumptions were merely convenient stories I had told myself.
Where Gardner Persuades
What ultimately persuades in The Abiy Project is not a single argument but the accumulation of earned authority. Gardner did not assemble this book from distant hotel lobbies or secondhand summaries. He went where the story actually lived. He traveled to places many Ethiopians themselves would hesitate to visit, often at personal risk. He was present in Oromia during the height of the protests. He was in Mekelle just days before war erupted. He describes the texture of Addis Ababa from behind the wheel, navigating its chaos on the roads rather than narrating from a distance. He treated proximity to suffering not as a rhetorical flourish, but as a journalistic obligation.
His authority rests not just on where he went, but on how he listened. One of the most striking passages in the book recounts his time with the sister of a slain Amhara leader. He does not instrumentalize her grief or flatten it into a blunt indictment. Instead, he sits with her pain, allowing suspicion and ambiguity to coexist, and resists the urge to turn her tragedy into a neat political lesson. This restraint is one of the book’s main strengths: suffering is treated not as background noise; it anchors the entire story. For Gardner, minimizing destruction was the primary obligation of power, and Abiy’s failure to do so stands as the defining indictment of his tenure.
To understand the source of this moral lens, it’s necessary to understand the Anglophone intellectual tradition Gardner writes within. He inherits a “center-periphery” framework that has dominated English-language writing on Ethiopia for decades—forged during the long war against the Derg, when a generation of Western observers found moral legitimacy not in the state, but in the guerrilla movements fighting it. In this tradition, the state is viewed primarily as a coercive center, while authenticity and moral clarity reside at the margins. This perspective does not make Gardner dishonest; it explains his instict to travel to the margins to hear the victims themselves. His partiality and the book’s power both come from the same reflex that places the moral burden of violence squarely on the state.
Ultimately, this is a book only Gardner could have written. It is defined by a unique combination of access and persistence: from interviews with Western diplomats involved in the Pretoria talks to insights gathered from Ethiopian politicians who knew Abiy long before he became a household name. His footnotes alone constitute a serious archive of Amharic speeches, historical texts, and other references. Despite the specific biases of his intellectual world, Gardner emerges here not just as a journalist but as a historian. He is brave in his reporting and disciplined in his prose. He has earned the right to be taken seriously—and even, at times, the right to be wrong—because he has written a work of permanent historical value.
Where the Book Falls Short
Throughout the book, I found myself agreeing with Gardner morally, while diverging from him analytically. His insistence on centering human suffering is not only justified but necessary. Yet his explanation for how Ethiopia unraveled places too much explanatory weight on Abiy himself.
The last part of the book, which covers the Tigray War, crystallizes this divergence. The dysfunction of the past seven years did not originate with Abiy. It is the product of a three decade long political experiment of identity politics that incentivized zero-sum mobilization, and fragmented sovereignty. The 1995 constitution did not resolve Ethiopia’s so-called national question; it froze it and made it administratively enforceable. The result was a pressure cooker primed for conflict once central authority weakened.
Gardner largely accepts ethnic federalism as a moral default, a necessary corrective to oppressive centralized rule. But Ethiopia in 1991, when the TPLF came to power, was not unraveling because of ethnic domination; it was exhausted by war, dictatorship, and economic failure. The Soviet-like constitution imposed in that moment—and later formalized in 1995—was already past its intellectual expiration date.
The war violently underscored this reality. It exposed the central contradiction of the TPLF’s rule: the 1995 constitution promised maximal regional autonomy on paper, but in practice, the TPLF consolidated central power to a degree rivaling the Derg or the Emperor. The conflict was ultimately driven by a collision of hypocrisies: the TPLF—once ousted from power—became the most vocal defenders of the constitution they had long ignored, while Abiy, a student of their methods, sought to exercise the very centralized control they had perfected. Gardner understates their responsibility for both constructing and destabilizing the system Abiy inherited.
The difference in interpretation is not confined to the war. Gardner spends pages litigating Abiy’s educational credentials, casting doubt on his schooling, degrees, and intellectual legitimacy. Whatever its factual merit, this emphasis is misplaced. The problem with Abiy isn’t that he might be uneducated; the problem is that he is often smarter than his opponents assume. If Abiy is a political rube with a fake degree, how did he outmaneuver Jawar Mohammed, whose Stanford and Columbia pedigree far exceeds his own? How did he politically dislodge the TPLF—the party of the “ferociously intelligent” Meles Zenawi—without firing a shot in 2018? My issue with the credentialism is that it distracts from the real puzzle. Either credentials matter less than Gardner implies, or Abiy successfully gamed systems designed by people far more credentialed than himself. In either case, the fixation on credentials explains nothing about his actual rise.
A similar distortion appears in Gardner’s treatment of Abiy’s faith, which is repeatedly framed as aberrant and irrational. This perspective treats religion as a pathology rather than as a political grammar deeply embedded in Ethiopian life. In reality, the secular Marxism of the TPLF (and the Derg) was the historical outlier; faith has always structured legitimacy and authority in Ethiopia. By treating Abiy’s worldview as a form of mystical irrationality, Gardner relies on a dated secular reflex that fails to engage with religion as a serious source of legitimacy.
Wishcasting and Projection
If Gardner errs by dismissing Abiy’s agency—pathologizing his faith and underestimating his intellect—the world erred by inventing a version of him that never existed. Abiy Ahmed’s arrival in the spring of 2018 as a supposed liberal reformer appears less revolutionary in hindsight than many had hoped. What followed was not so much reform but a collective act of wishcasting: a tendency by Western governments, Ethiopian elites, diaspora communities, and even the Nobel Committee to project their own aspirations onto Abiy rather than seeing the transition moment with a sober eye.
Oromo activists, central to the protests that catapulted Abiy to power, saw a leader who would finally respect the spirit of the 1995 constitution and grant their region more autonomy. Ethiopianists and Amhara activists saw an opportunity to dismantle that same constitution and heal the country’s fractured national identity. Western governments craved an African democratic success story to sanitize their on-again, off-again history of building and tearing down the continent. Abiy, for his part, understood all these irreconcilable projections and governed accordingly. For a time, he tried to be everything to everyone. The result was not a synthesis—or Medemer, as he would title his books—but disappointment.
What Gardner captures well is how this politics of projection eventually gave way to something more brittle. Despite Abiy ruthlessly centralizing power by sidelining his rivals and hollowing out the opposition, the power he wields now is thinner than it appears. Outside of the capital, and a handful of strategic corridors, his control of the various regions is uneven and contested. The monopoly on violence is gone. Regional militias, in Tigray and Amhara, now hold the kind of coercive power that used to belong exclusively to the center. This is the new reality of Ethiopia. We can debate who broke the shell, but the egg cannot be unfried.
The devastating Tigray War, which by many accounts was the worst conflict of the 21st century, did not resolve Ethiopia’s fundamental political crisis so much as expose the costs of a system that elevated ethnic politics while attempting to govern through a centralized security state. What had for three decades been a country managed through centralized coercion—with regions enjoying little freedom—ironically became decentralized under Abiy Ahmed.
The fragility is no longer only political, but increasingly economic. Structural reforms pursued to secure IMF and World Bank financing have dramatically raised the cost of living, particularly in urban centers. It is true that Addis Ababa remains the crown jewel of the state economically; however, Ethiopian history suggests that when Addis sneezes, the regime catches a cold and does not survive long after. The center still matters, but its margin for error has dramatically narrowed.
Gardner is careful to show that Ethiopian society itself is not as radicalized as its political elites. Identity is an effective mobilization tool in an ethno-federalist state, but most Ethiopians live across ethnic boundaries—they intermarry, work, worship, and move through a complex, intertwined social landscape. The maximalist visions that dominate elite politics are imposed from above, amplified by insecurity, and hardened by armed competition. The current state’s weakness magnifies these dynamics, but it did not invent them.
This is why The Abiy Project ultimately matters beyond demystifying the figure of Abiy Ahmed himself. The book does not offer comfort or easy prescriptions. It insists on sequence and consequence. Gardner calls it a first draft of the history of the Abiy years. But he is being modest. For many Westerners who will engage Ethiopia in the years ahead, it will function as something closer to a final one.