In his two years in office, Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed has cultivated a reputation internationally for his commitment to diplomacy and international cooperation, even winning the 2019 Nobel Prize for his efforts to promote peace in the Horn of Africa. At the same time that Abiy’s earned plaudits from the international community, his domestic agenda (including the dissolution of the ethnic coalition that constituted the ruling party in favor of a unitary party, the release of political prisoners, and the privatization of the state run entities, such as the telecommunications company) has encountered opposition at home. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Abiy’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic is characterized by his taking up the mantle of regional leadership, organizing a continent-wide response to the crisis and coordinating a polished appeal to the international community for additional assistance, while struggling to implement his plans at home.
Abiy: Spearheading the African Response
Abiy has been unequivocal about the need for international assistance to help African countries manage the challenges presented by the COVID-19 panic. His appeal to the G20 for financial assistance asserted that the virus constitutes “an existential threat to the economies of African countries,” and compelled members of the G20 to recognize that “just as the virus knows no borders, our responses should also know no borders.” Abiy’s appeal included a request for $150 billion in budget supplements and private sector investment, also relief for heavily-indebted African countries, and called for greater cooperation with multilateral organizations like the World Health Organization (WHO) and Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). In an op-ed with the Financial Times, Abiy also raised the alarm about the potential for the pandemic to wallop African economies and cautioned that Africa’s development partners should retain their commitment to internationalism and not let aid budgets be “diverted to domestic priorities.”
In mid-March, Abiy reported that “he had secured a continent wide support” for efforts to combat coronavirus in Africa from Jack Ma, the founder of the popular Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba. Ma, through the Jack Ma Foundation, pledged “20,000 testing kits, 100,000 masks, and 1,000 medical use protective suits and face shields” to all 54 African countries and also promised internet-based clinical training to improve African health systems’ ability to treat COVID-19 patients. Since then, Abiy has taken a leading role in the distribution of this aid, routing relief deliveries through the country’s crown jewel, Ethiopian airlines. As of March 27th, just 5 days after the supplies arrived in Addis Ababa, Ethiopian Airlines had delivered relief to 41 countries.
Struggling to manage the crisis at home
In addition to grappling with the international community’s unwillingness to devote resources to bolstering African countries’ capabilities to respond to the pandemic, Abiy has also struggled to manage the disease within his country’s borders. As of April 8, when the government declared a state of emergency, there were 52 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the country and one reported fatality. Though Abiy and his administration moved relatively quickly to close the country’s land borders, bar large gatherings, close schools, adopt domestic economic and trade reforms to improve the national response to the pandemic, the cleaning and sanitization of public spaces in Addis Ababa, and promote social distancing as a national practice, among other reforms, the enforcement of these dictates have encountered considerable challenges.
Some of these hurdles, such as the fact that social distancing may be difficult in the types of informal settlements common in African cities, that those working in the informal sector or living in economically precarious situations may not be able to work from home, and that the lack of access to water complicates the implementation of best practices regarding hand washing are shared with other African countries. The US embassy warned that foreigners, thought to be responsible for bringing COVID-19 to Ethiopia, faced violence in the country; these attacks mirror a broader pattern of xenophobic violence that has followed the spread of the disease globally.
Other issues are more specific to Ethiopia. Some religious leaders, for example, stand accused of defying government regulations by continuing to hold large services, placing their congregations at risk of becoming disease vectors. Effectively implementing social distancing and effectively treating COVID-19 among Ethiopia’s internally displaced population (estimated to be more than 3 million people as of July 2019, making it one of the largest internally displaced populations in the world) is a pressing challenge. The country’s National Electoral Board has indicated that the already-delayed elections will be further delayed by the pandemic; the Board will release a new timeline once the pandemic has been managed, injecting Ethiopia’s already precarious political transition with another source of uncertainty.
Some of these country-specific challenges are a direct result of the Ethiopian government’s actions; for example, the three-month telecommunications shut down in parts of Western Oromia state, where the government has been battling an insurgency, made it difficult both for citizens to obtain critical information about how to take care of themselves and their families and for the international community “monitor disease outbreaks or provide adequate assistance.” The Ethiopian government’s slowness to lift the internet and phone black out (and its adoption of such tactics generally) underline that the government’s anti-democratic attributes only complicate its effort to respond to the pandemic.
Ahead of the (again delayed) 2020 elections, Abiy appears to be tying the success of the country’s response to COVID-19 to his policy platform. In a recent televised speech about the pandemic, Abiy stated “the only way to defeat the coronavirus is medemer,” a reference to Abiy’s governing philosophy of synergistic unity. While this may merely be a rhetorical tick, it may also be a sign of politicization of the public health response; if it is the latter, Abiy risks undermining the national effort to respond to the pandemic by tying it to his domestic reform agenda.
Undoubtedly, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed has played a critical role in organizing the response to COVID-19 in Africa. While Abiy has organized and distributed assistance to regional health systems, the response to COVID-19 in Ethiopia faces a number of hurdles. Enforcing social distancing and delivering assistance in a country that has a significant number of displaced people, a religious elite that have not uniformly adhered to government regulations, and which is scheduled to hold an election in a few months is extremely difficult. While the country’s quick moves to close schools and promote appropriate public health measures may help slow the spread of the pandemic in Ethiopia, some of the domestic policies Abiy has adopted have made these challenges more acute by making information gathering and sharing more difficult. Managing the COVID response requires both the brokering of international cooperation and the implementation of best practices at home; though Abiy is unique in his ability to succeed in the former, like other heads of state, he has struggled to achieve the latter.
