Eight Years of Abiy Ahmed: What He Achieved, What He Did Not

On 2 April 2018, Abiy Ahmed Ali was sworn in as Ethiopia's Prime Minister, becoming the country's youngest head of government and the first from the Oromo ethnic group. Eight years later, the country he leads faces a cost-of-living crisis that is testing his government's political legitimacy and an unresolved Nile dam dispute that shapes Ethiopia's regional standing. Assessing his record requires confronting both what he built and what he broke.

Assessing Abiy's record requires resisting two temptations: the hagiography of his early admirers, who saw a democratic reformer transforming one of Africa's most repressive states; and the wholesale condemnation of his later critics, who treat the Tigray war as the only fact that matters. Both flatten a more complicated reality.

The peace with Eritrea, real, but incomplete

The Eritrea deal remains Abiy's most significant diplomatic achievement. The 1998–2000 border war between Ethiopia and Eritrea cost an estimated 80,000 lives. The peace agreement that followed, the Algiers Accord, was never implemented. For nearly two decades, the two countries existed in a state of neither war nor peace, with a militarised border, no trade, and no diplomacy. Abiy moved fast: within months of taking office he accepted the terms of the Algiers Accord, visited Asmara, and restored flights and phone lines. The Nobel committee's decision to award him the Peace Prize in 2019 reflected genuine surprise that something so long stuck had moved at all.

The limits of the deal became apparent quickly, however. Isaias Afwerki, Eritrea's president, was never going to democratise in exchange for normalisation, and he did not. The border demarcation promised under the Algiers Accord was never implemented on the ground. Eritrean troops' subsequent involvement in the Tigray war, fighting alongside the Ethiopian federal army against the TPLF, the very party that had been Eritrea's enemy, revealed that the "peace" was at least partly a strategic alignment, not a principled reconciliation.

The political opening that closed

In 2018, Abiy's Ethiopia looked briefly like a country changing course. Thousands of political prisoners were freed. Exiled opposition figures returned. Journalists released from prison described it as a "political miracle." The Oromo Federalist Congress and other long-banned organisations were legalised. State media was opened to criticism of the government, something unimaginable under Meles Zenawi or Hailemariam Desalegn.

By 2020, much of that opening had reversed. Senior OFC leaders, including Bekele Gerba, were arrested ahead of elections that were repeatedly delayed. Journalists critical of the government found themselves facing charges under laws that had been relaxed but never repealed. The 2021 elections, held as the Tigray war raged, were described by opposition groups as neither free nor competitive in large parts of the country. The institutions of reform, an independent judiciary, a genuinely free press, competitive multiparty elections, were never consolidated. What Abiy offered was liberalisation without institutionalisation.

The Tigray War, a catastrophe that cannot be footnoted

No assessment of Abiy Ahmed's eight years can treat the Tigray War as a line item. It was, by most estimates, the deadliest conflict in the world between 2020 and 2022. The UN, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch documented mass killings, systematic sexual violence, and the deliberate obstruction of humanitarian aid. Famine was used as a weapon. Eritrean forces, fighting alongside Ethiopia's federal army and Amhara regional militias, were accused of atrocities that investigators described as crimes against humanity.

The war began in November 2020 when federal forces moved against the Tigray People's Liberation Front, which had dominated Ethiopian politics for nearly thirty years and remained in control of Tigray after refusing to recognise the federal government's authority. The TPLF's own record of authoritarian governance gave many Ethiopians reason to support the initial offensive. But what followed, two years of siege, blockade, and documented mass violence, went far beyond any proportionate military objective.

The Pretoria peace agreement of November 2022 stopped the fighting, but it did not deliver accountability. No senior military or political figure has faced meaningful consequences for the conduct of the war. A joint investigation by the UN Human Rights Office and the Ethiopian Human Rights Commission found evidence of violations by all parties, but no international tribunal has been established, and domestic proceedings have moved slowly. Peace without accountability is not peace; it is a pause.

The economic promise, mostly unfulfilled

Abiy came to office with genuine ambitions for economic transformation. He partially liberalised sectors that had been state monopolies, aviation, telecoms, logistics, and courted foreign investment with a vigour his predecessors had not matched. Ethiopian Airlines grew. The GERD, started under his predecessor, was pushed to commercial operation, giving Ethiopia energy capacity that could eventually reduce its dependence on expensive diesel imports and generate export revenue.

The macro picture, however, deteriorated. Ethiopia's foreign exchange reserves have been under sustained pressure. Inflation peaked at over 30 percent in the early 2020s and has remained elevated. The war in Tigray disrupted major agricultural regions and required enormous military expenditure. The IMF and World Bank have provided significant support, but in exchange for currency devaluation and subsidy cuts that have squeezed ordinary Ethiopians hard. The economic miracle that was supposed to follow political reform has not materialised in any way most citizens can feel.

The verdict, and what comes next

Eight years in, Abiy Ahmed governs a country that is more peaceful than it was at the peak of the Tigray war, but less free than it was in 2018 and less stable than it appeared in 2019. He is constitutionally eligible for another term. There is no organised succession in sight and no political force strong enough to challenge him at the ballot box on anything approaching fair terms.

The most honest assessment is also the most uncomfortable one: Abiy is not a failed leader who achieved nothing, nor is he the reformer his Nobel citation described. He is something more troubling, a leader of genuine political talent and vision whose choices produced both real breakthroughs and catastrophic harm, sometimes simultaneously, and who has so far faced no meaningful accountability for the latter. That is the balance sheet after eight years. Whether the next eight look different depends less on Abiy's intentions than on whether Ethiopia builds the institutions capable of constraining any leader, this one included.