So the returns are in. Ethiopia’s Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed has secured yet another landslide victory for his Prosperity Party, a result so predictable it might as well have been printed on a ballot in Addis Ababa before a single vote was cast. But if you think this is merely a story of African electoral chicanery, you are missing the forest for the trees. The real story is the gathering storm that the British Embassy, with all its diplomatic fastidiousness, is now monitoring with what I can only describe as studied impotence.
Let us be clear: this is not a democratic triumph. This is a plebiscite staged in the shadow of a civil war. The Tigray conflict, which left tens of thousands dead and displaced millions, has not been resolved. It has been papered over. The federal government’s victory over the Tigray People’s Liberation Front was pyrrhic, and the underlying ethnic tensions that tore the country apart in 2020 remain as raw as a festering wound. Now, with the Oromo Liberation Army still active in the south and the Amhara region simmering with resentment over centralised power, Abiy’s landslide looks less like a mandate and more like a dare to his opponents.
And what of the UK Embassy’s role? They are ‘monitoring the situation’. How very British. One imagines the ambassador, a man with the stiff upper lip of a Victorian explorer, sipping tea as the pot boils over. The embassy’s statement, so carefully worded to avoid offence, is a masterpiece of diplomatic cowardice. It expresses ‘concern’ over ‘political tensions’ while conveniently omitting that these tensions are the inevitable fruit of a stolen election and a broken peace deal. When will we learn that monitoring is not a policy? It is an excuse for inaction.
History offers a grim parallel. In the late 1930s, Western diplomats watched with alarm as another charismatic leader consolidated power by promising unity while crushing dissent. They too sent reports, issued statements, and shifted uneasily in their chairs. They called it ‘appeasement’. We now call it a catastrophe. Abiy Ahmed is not Hitler, of course, but the pattern is familiar: the weaponisation of nationalism, the silencing of opponents, the manipulation of ethnic grievances to secure absolute control. The difference is that Ethiopia is a fragile state with a history of famine and violence. The stakes are higher, not lower.
The international community, and Britain in particular, must decide whether it will continue to play the role of the passive observer or finally act. What would action look like? For starters, the UK could condition its aid and diplomatic support on verifiable democratic reforms, not just a rubber-stamped election. It could demand the release of political prisoners, including the journalist Yayesew Shimelis, who was jailed for criticising the government. It could impose targeted sanctions on those responsible for the atrocities of the Tigray war, as the US has belatedly done. But no. We prefer to ‘monitor’. We prefer to wait until the conflict is so advanced that intervention becomes impossible, at which point we will wring our hands and call it a tragedy.
I am told that the Prosperity Party won 410 of 469 seats in parliament. That is not a landslide. That is a landslide that buries democracy. The opposition, such as it is, has been reduced to a chorus of the dispossessed. Meanwhile, in the regions, armed groups are already preparing for the next round of fighting. The UK Embassy knows this. They have the reports. They have the intelligence. What they lack is the will.
We are living through the slow collapse of the post-colonial state, and Ethiopia is the bellwether. If Abiy’s victory leads to renewed civil war, the blood will be on the hands of those who looked away. The embassy’s monitors will file their reports. The Foreign Office will issue its carefully worded condemnations. And the dead will be buried, unwept, in the highlands of Tigray and the valleys of Oromia. That is the real tragedy. Not the election. Not the propaganda. But the silence of those who could have stopped it.
