Abiy The Great Imposter by Dawit Wolde Giorgis
Posted: 19 Feb 2022, 15:12
By Dawit W Giorgis
I mention Demara, because to me his story is the story of Abiy Ahmed, Ethiopia’ prime minister. Of course the setting is different and there are different motives behind his behavior, but several similarities indicate that Ethiopians and the international community have fallen victim to an elaborate charade created by this man.
Who knows what he is really like? Abiy can look like a compassionate, religious person, but at times he can also be brutal. One thing is becoming clearer as we try to understand him: he is a narcissist, and it is generally narcissists who become impostors. If they get into a leadership role, they believe that they alone know what is best, that everyone should trust them, that they can save the day. When narcissists become impostors, they become complicated people with a constant fear of failing or being exposed. Those fears can drive them to the extreme, leading them to act irrationally, contrary to common sense. They keep on lying, telling contradicting stories about themselves as they try to project a different image.
Ethiopia has seen leaders of all kinds in the past, but they were not con artists. Our leaders, with all their weaknesses and faults, held firmly to the idea of Ethiopian unity and were predictable. History might describe each one of them as kings or emperors but always as leaders with empathy and a full sense of patriotism. Not much is known about this man called Abiy Ahmed who just jumped into the political scene, but we do know that in no more than a year he has acted more and more like a dictator around whom the future of Ethiopia revolves.
In some ways all people have the propensity to become impostors. People’s public and private lives are often different. What we speak and teach in public or from the pulpit may be different from what we are like privately. When out in public, there is always the pressure to suppress our real selves.
Perhaps he is not so much an impostor as a sophist, as one commentator recently suggested. 6 The sophists were those men in ancient Greece who were good with words and could twist them whichever way they wanted to win an argument, playing on an audience’s emotion without any concern for the truth. His speech at his ascension to power galvanized almost the entire population, but in later months it became clear that he was adapting different speeches to different audiences. In his acceptance speech he glorified Emperor Menelik and Emperor Haile Selassie and repeated his praise on a few other occasions when addressing the public in Amharic, the official language. But when he addressed his Oromo constituency in Afaan Oromo he depicted these same leaders as enemies and, implicitly, the Amharas as oppressors. Perhaps he thought that in this way he could calm some of the political tensions in the country, but it has backfired, triggering fear of the “other” among Amharas, Tigrayans, and Oromos and elevating tensions to the breaking point. 7
PM Abiy’s most brazen act of deception was when he or his colleagues dreamed up a fake YouTube video with a bogus interviewer posing as a journalist from the Atlantic Magazine. The Prime Minister is very impressive and speaks with his usual eloquence about local and global affairs, but it was discovered that his replies were taken word-for-word from interviews with Henry Kissinger, an article by Russell Brand, and excerpts from the book Soft Power by Joseph Nye which Abiy is reading from a teleprompter! Or something similar.
Trying to answer the question why authoritarian leaders lie, Political Science Professor Xavier Marquez writes: Western political thought has three main arguments about why lying may be useful. First, some kinds of lies can hold political systems together: Myths such as Plato’s “Noble Lie” can cement shared values among citizens. Second, lies can be strategically valuable. This idea is represented by Machiavelli’s argument that princes should lie when necessary to achieve their goals. Finally, lies can cement the loyalty of subordinates.9
Over time these repeated lies and propaganda create a myth about the leadership like it has in North Korea and surprisingly in the most democratic country in the world, the USA under Trump. But lies will never prevent authoritarianism from collapsing. When the realities on the ground and the myth collide and when the lives of people are getting worse and not better, when even the most opportunistic of the elites cannot take it anymore, the system will fall apart and usually violently as it did in Libya, Egypt, Somalia, Sudan and many other countries. Abiy’s obvious lies and the myth of prosperity that he is trying to create will soon collapse and give rise to chaos. That is beginning now in Ethiopia and the questions that are being asked are where the country is heading and whether there will be civil war( though many believe that there is already a civil war with Oromo extremists trying to exterminate and displace Amharas living in Oromia and the war between government and the rebels in Tigray who have also displaced hundreds of thousands of Amharas from their and are architects of the extermination of Amharas, an ideology embraced by Abiy Ahmed who took it to the extreme level) ) or whether the resilience and the ties that have bound the people for centuries are stronger than the fake narrative sponsored by the political leaders, primarily by the OLF (ODP) that Abiy leads and the TPLF.
No matter how much Abiy and his government try to distract people’s attention and no matter how much they try to destroy evidence, fabricate stories, and imprison or tarnish the images of those who tell the truth through his hired attack dogs, there will still be overwhelming evidence (video, interviews, images, prints, etc) to show the world that genocide and crimes against humanity were and are being committed in Ethiopia under his leadership and with his knowledge. Under an expedient international court with access to all the evidence his actions or inactions will put him and his senior government officials and his ‘republican guards ‘in prison for the rest of their lives if they survive the wrath of the people.
— The End–
I mention Demara, because to me his story is the story of Abiy Ahmed, Ethiopia’ prime minister. Of course the setting is different and there are different motives behind his behavior, but several similarities indicate that Ethiopians and the international community have fallen victim to an elaborate charade created by this man.
Who knows what he is really like? Abiy can look like a compassionate, religious person, but at times he can also be brutal. One thing is becoming clearer as we try to understand him: he is a narcissist, and it is generally narcissists who become impostors. If they get into a leadership role, they believe that they alone know what is best, that everyone should trust them, that they can save the day. When narcissists become impostors, they become complicated people with a constant fear of failing or being exposed. Those fears can drive them to the extreme, leading them to act irrationally, contrary to common sense. They keep on lying, telling contradicting stories about themselves as they try to project a different image.
Ethiopia has seen leaders of all kinds in the past, but they were not con artists. Our leaders, with all their weaknesses and faults, held firmly to the idea of Ethiopian unity and were predictable. History might describe each one of them as kings or emperors but always as leaders with empathy and a full sense of patriotism. Not much is known about this man called Abiy Ahmed who just jumped into the political scene, but we do know that in no more than a year he has acted more and more like a dictator around whom the future of Ethiopia revolves.
In some ways all people have the propensity to become impostors. People’s public and private lives are often different. What we speak and teach in public or from the pulpit may be different from what we are like privately. When out in public, there is always the pressure to suppress our real selves.
Perhaps he is not so much an impostor as a sophist, as one commentator recently suggested. 6 The sophists were those men in ancient Greece who were good with words and could twist them whichever way they wanted to win an argument, playing on an audience’s emotion without any concern for the truth. His speech at his ascension to power galvanized almost the entire population, but in later months it became clear that he was adapting different speeches to different audiences. In his acceptance speech he glorified Emperor Menelik and Emperor Haile Selassie and repeated his praise on a few other occasions when addressing the public in Amharic, the official language. But when he addressed his Oromo constituency in Afaan Oromo he depicted these same leaders as enemies and, implicitly, the Amharas as oppressors. Perhaps he thought that in this way he could calm some of the political tensions in the country, but it has backfired, triggering fear of the “other” among Amharas, Tigrayans, and Oromos and elevating tensions to the breaking point. 7
PM Abiy’s most brazen act of deception was when he or his colleagues dreamed up a fake YouTube video with a bogus interviewer posing as a journalist from the Atlantic Magazine. The Prime Minister is very impressive and speaks with his usual eloquence about local and global affairs, but it was discovered that his replies were taken word-for-word from interviews with Henry Kissinger, an article by Russell Brand, and excerpts from the book Soft Power by Joseph Nye which Abiy is reading from a teleprompter! Or something similar.
Trying to answer the question why authoritarian leaders lie, Political Science Professor Xavier Marquez writes: Western political thought has three main arguments about why lying may be useful. First, some kinds of lies can hold political systems together: Myths such as Plato’s “Noble Lie” can cement shared values among citizens. Second, lies can be strategically valuable. This idea is represented by Machiavelli’s argument that princes should lie when necessary to achieve their goals. Finally, lies can cement the loyalty of subordinates.9
Over time these repeated lies and propaganda create a myth about the leadership like it has in North Korea and surprisingly in the most democratic country in the world, the USA under Trump. But lies will never prevent authoritarianism from collapsing. When the realities on the ground and the myth collide and when the lives of people are getting worse and not better, when even the most opportunistic of the elites cannot take it anymore, the system will fall apart and usually violently as it did in Libya, Egypt, Somalia, Sudan and many other countries. Abiy’s obvious lies and the myth of prosperity that he is trying to create will soon collapse and give rise to chaos. That is beginning now in Ethiopia and the questions that are being asked are where the country is heading and whether there will be civil war( though many believe that there is already a civil war with Oromo extremists trying to exterminate and displace Amharas living in Oromia and the war between government and the rebels in Tigray who have also displaced hundreds of thousands of Amharas from their and are architects of the extermination of Amharas, an ideology embraced by Abiy Ahmed who took it to the extreme level) ) or whether the resilience and the ties that have bound the people for centuries are stronger than the fake narrative sponsored by the political leaders, primarily by the OLF (ODP) that Abiy leads and the TPLF.
No matter how much Abiy and his government try to distract people’s attention and no matter how much they try to destroy evidence, fabricate stories, and imprison or tarnish the images of those who tell the truth through his hired attack dogs, there will still be overwhelming evidence (video, interviews, images, prints, etc) to show the world that genocide and crimes against humanity were and are being committed in Ethiopia under his leadership and with his knowledge. Under an expedient international court with access to all the evidence his actions or inactions will put him and his senior government officials and his ‘republican guards ‘in prison for the rest of their lives if they survive the wrath of the people.
— The End–
