July 15, 2026
By Addissu Admas
In Ethiopia, we have always put great stock in state leadership to pull our country from the disarray she has been in for a long time, provide her with stability, and direct her towards a future of peace and prosperity. We have had these messianic yearnings since at least the demise of Atse Haile Selassie I. Since our state conception was anchored for much of our history to an imperial form of government, we could never conceive that substantive transformation could take place save through the intervention of an exceptional epoch-making leadership at the top. This is what I would call a heroic conception of leadership whereby the radical transformation of the country is thought to come only through a leader wielding immense power. This is why we have placed unrealistic expectations on every leader that has succeeded the emperor, and today we are as profoundly disillusioned as never before.
True leadership, the kind one reads about in history books, has been conceived variously depending on the ideological orientation of the historian writing it. At the most basic level, what prefigures is the heroic military leader driving his men with courage and inflexible will into battle, at the risk of being wounded, maimed, or even killed. In this case, the defense of one’s sovereignty, power, and land, or conversely, the conquest of another country’s wealth, power, and land, are the objectives. The currency, in this case, is glory, loot, and expansion. The defense and protection of the people is not as such the primary goal, but a consequent one. The leader in this scenario is venerated and even worshipped for prevailing over other nations and making one’s own greater than others. As it were, here the conception of leadership coincides entirely with military prowess.
A less primitive conception of leadership emerges when the primary objective of the leader is not simply the winning of wars, the conquest of other lands, and the increasing of power and wealth for one’s nation, but the improvement of the lives of the common people in every way possible. Leaders who are actively engaged in facilitating trade and economic exchanges between nations; those intent on professionalizing the civil service, standardizing taxation, extending education to the disadvantaged and improving its quality; those promoting the arts, sciences, and sports, etc.… In other words, those leaders who, besides their primary function of protecting and securing their country, are profoundly invested in its betterment, epitomize a more evolved conception of state leadership. Numerous are the historic figures who embody such kind of leadership, and they have been often mentioned as models to follow for our would-be leaders.
A more recent conception of leadership, one that is most often associated with advanced democracies, concerns entirely the art of winning power through political maneuver. In this case, leadership has to do with political acumen geared at securing and holding political power for one’s faction or party, and thus the implementation of one’s ideology and the policies that emanate from it. In essence, it consists in winning consensus for one’s political program. In this case, “the great leader” is the one that succeeds in gaining state power for one’s party to lead the nation in accordance with one’s political persuasion, rather than leading by the power of one’s personality and vision.
The notion of leadership cannot be compatible with autocratic rule. Rather than leading, in this case, what the autocrat does is coerce the people to follow his/her dictates. Rather than asking what the people truly desire, the autocrat presumes to know what the people need and desire. The people, rather than active participants in the construction of their present and future conditions of life, are simply told to follow the leader. The hallmark of such leadership is its obsession with grandiose projects rather than solving the most basic problems of the people. They find these, in fact, uninteresting and undeserving of their attention. Thus we see PM Abiy far more engaged in the beautification of the city rather than being engaged in eliminating the existential threats posed by internal and external destructive forces and stabilizing the nation, just like Donald Trump is engaged in the reconstruction of his White House and the building of his “United States Triumphal Arch” instead of working to improve the lives of his most loyal constituency, the MAGA crowd. In both instances, the objective is more to preserve one’s legacy than to respond to and solve the “people’s problems.”
True political leadership should not be tied only to military defense (or conquest), to episodic or situational reforms, nor to the art of securing state power through “smart” political maneuver. It must have to do with the creation and nurturing of state institutions that can secure peace, stability, and welfare for the overwhelming majority of a nation’s people. What this signifies is that a true leader of the state must not see him/herself as the sole savior of the nation. Such a conception of oneself, once epitomized by Donald Trump’s famous words “I alone can fix it,” can only lead to disaster. No one person alone holds the solution to any one problem, let alone to the countless existing in a state. The era of “one mind one nation” should be dead and gone for good. The best solutions for the most vexing problems of humanity have always come when people have gathered together to solve them. The Latin proverb that there are “as many opinions as there are heads” (quot capita, tot sententiae) holds always true. However, the fact remains, in a dialectical sense, that a good synthesis (i.e., solution) cannot emerge without antithetic or clashing ideas.
The genuinely true leaders of history were not those whose names are attached to the great battles or wars, or emblazoned on the great monuments that have survived the erosion of time, but the ones who have created or made possible the creation of great institutions that have forever changed for the better the lives of the common people. These are the rarely mentioned ones or indeed remembered. They are the ones that created the parliamentary form of government (Alfonso IX of León of Spain in 1188); the framers of the U.S. Constitution who, inspired by the French legal philosopher Baron de Montesquieu (1689–1755), established a tripartite government system; others who established public school and health systems, housing and transportation, etc.
We in Ethiopia need to rid ourselves of our “Tewodros complex,” i.e., the notion that great leadership is about imposing one’s will over the people to unify, galvanize, and lead them to their supposed great destiny. Our conception of leadership should focus entirely on the establishment of institutions for democratic rule and the betterment of the lives of our citizens. This means we need to expect from whoever aspires to be a true leader and remembered as such to focus on the creation and reinforcement of democratic institutions of governance, the institutions that make the country self-sufficient not only in terms of material goods, but also in terms of developing a class of highly educated and trained workforce, providing healthcare and services to the people, etc.
One needs to be reminded that such “glorious” goals cannot be achieved, nor in fact started in earnest, until the terms of our co-existence are better determined and the conditions for their preservation are clearly defined. Moreover, they cannot be achieved while our military continues to expand and consume an increasing portion of our national budget. Even though the military is one of the necessary institutions of the modern state, there should not be any question that it needs to be rethought, reconfigured, and re-purposed for the reality of a federal, and hopefully confederal, Ethiopian state. In fact, the military, as a key component of the modern state, must be the subject of reform for any leader worthy of the name.
Editor’s Note: Views in the article do not necessarily reflect the views of borkena.com
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