Fikreselassie Wogderess was 46 years old when he was thrown into jail after a coalition of rebel forces fought their way into Addis Abeba in 1991. The next two decades of his life would be anticlimactic for a man that had once rubbed shoulders with the powerful and was once himself at the peak of power.

By the time he was released, after his sentence was commuted from death, he had little pretensions of how his country had changed. He was also in his mid-60s and needed to fly to Bangkok, Thailand, for medical treatment.

When he went to the immigration office to get a new passport, he stood at the back of a long queue that had gathered in the morning. He had not expected to be recognised, let alone afforded any special service. Like most regimes in Ethiopia, the EPRDF had gone to great lengths to discredit their predecessors. A man that served the Dergue regime as a Prime Minister, however briefly, was a target.

But once he stood at the end of the line at the immigration office, murmurs began. Someone finally collected the courage to ask whether he was Fikreselassie, once the Prime Minister of Ethiopia. He answered that he was. The people in the queue could not believe how he could be made to stand in line with them, given the status he once held. One by one, they yielded their places to him until he was at the front of the line.

This was vindication for Fikreselassie, who believed in the power of people. This was despite his reticence.

“He was a people-centric person,” says Fisseha Desta (Col.), former vice president during the Dergue years.

The two knew each other during the “revolution years,” and then they were incarcerated together for two decades. When they were released, they moved into the same neighbourhood in Ayat, Addis Abeba. It was an almost half a century old friendship until the passing of Fikreselassie of complications from kidney failure at Hallelujah Hospital, where he was recovering from COVID-19. Survived by two daughters and a son, the former Prime Minister was laid to rest on December 16, 2020.

Before the Dergue, Fisseha was a dedicated air force man. He was only 17 years old when he joined in the early 1960s. He did so well that four years later, he was part of a batch that was sent to the United States for a brief training on the handling of new technologies.

He was a medium level officer in the army by the time he was sent to represent his command in a recently established coordinating committee of the armed forces and police. This committee, later christened the Dergue, would months after its establishment make up the entirety of the provisional government set up to see Ethiopia’s transition into socialism.

Within three years, the bloody struggle for power within the Dergue that saw Mengistu Hailemariam (Col.) come out on top would propel Fikreselassie to the secretary-generalship. This was also the year that Somalia invaded Ethiopia, making him one of the familiar faces as the government mobilised forces to defend its territory.