Abiy Ahmed should write a book for Dummies titled, “On How to Destroy Your County In Less Than A Year.”

Paulos Irgau.

02-15-22

“If you build it, they will come” is a famous line pitched in the movie of the 90s, “Field of Dreams” Kevin Costner in it. It is the story of chasing one’s dreams and doing anything possible to make it happen including a farmer turning his land into a baseball playing field on account it was his childhood dream.

When he was in doubt, an apparition would say to him, “if you build the field, the long dead baseball legends would come to play on the field.” And turn he did and come they did. Again, it is a story of believing in the impossible akin to the runaway bestseller novel, “The Alchemist” so to speak.

Why is it easier to destroy than to build including dreams; to set a forest on fire than to bring trees to life; to become a homeless than to own a dwelling; to crack an egg than to make one—to mention but a few. There is a lurking law governing nature to that effect says the bespectacled Professor with a bowtie while cleaning his throat and he goes on to say, it is the Second Law of Thermodynamics or the Law of Entropy. In a closed system, much like the universe, everything has the tendency to go into disorder.

And in a more ontological sense, that is precisely the reason life tends to get harder when we try to reverse the arrow of the disorder into order. We humans are supposed to be agents of positive changes when we ceaselessly engage in an uphill struggle to make things right and to conjure up an order out of a messy disorder but unfortunately more often than not, men would rise on the pedestal of history to kill and to destroy and Abiy Ahmed is one of the many who signed up to carry out just that.

One can make the argument then, it is much easier to destroy a nation than to build including the political entity—a state. As much as a state is an abstract, it would need an agent either to build or destroy it. Rome was not built within a day goes the cliché but it took the Vandals, Visigoth’s and the Franks less than a year to destroy an Empire that had spanned an awe inspiring land masses and traversing oceans.

Fast forward, in here and now, consider this: In September 2000, 189 world leaders from the United Nations signed eight Millennium Development Goals [MDGs] to be met by 2015. The goals are:

1. End poverty and hunger

2. Universal education

3. Gender equality

4. Child health

5. Maternal health

6. Combat disease [HIV AIDS, TB and Malaria]

7. Environmental sustainability

8. Global partnership.

Ethiopia was on schedule and on the right track not only to meet the deadline but on a trajectory to transform itself to a middle-income nation by 2025! Lo and behold, Abiy Ahmed the small man “venit vidit and vicit” and subsequently destroyed a big country and smack dab he did.

In a complete reversal to the mission of the goal, he declared war on Tigray by sub-contracting the invasion to Eritrea’s savage army when they looted properties, ravaged farms, gang raped young and older women, massacred young and older men, destroyed factories including health facilities. Needless to say, the invasion wrought a catastrophic environmental damage not to mention when child and maternal mortality soared exacerbated when Abiy put Tigray under total siege. Why? An onlooker may ask.

The answer is deceptively simple.  Abiy Ahmed is stupid, stupid, absolutely stupid small man! Stupid, precisely because he doesn’t have a sense of history. If he had, he would have known that no force can subdue the sheer power and determination of people much less the will to power of the Tigrean people. Stupid, precisely because he made a tactical and later on strategic alliance with the man whom Tigreans take for their sworn enemy—Isaias Afwerki.

No amount of sleek and smooth talk about the metaphor of a car without an engine could bend nor could militarily bluff the will of the Tigrean people. Instead, the unjust war declared on Tigray mobilized the young Tigreans of all political and academic persuasion to defend not only theirs but to take Tigray to the next and higher level when the road to independence is a foregone conclusion.

Moreover, the dire situation in the former state of Ethiopia is not about or because of Tigray or TPLF anymore for the nation is in a slippery slope as it drains into the abyss of the unknown when the PP high-priests are on each other’s throats on a race on who suffocates who first—a house divided cannot stand itself as Abe Lincoln put it centuries ago. However, out of the messy disorder in the former state of Ethiopia, order is rising Tigray is rising! If only Abiy Ahmed had a sense of history. Only if he had. What a pity!