Life Matters | Sep 02,2023
Prime Minister Abiy answered his critics with a mix of gratitude and edge, thanking lawmakers, many of whom, he noted, are returning for another term, before singlling out the opposition figure who had spent the session trying to "testify before history" against his government.
"I wish it wasn't the last speech for you," Abiy told Desalegn Chane (PhD), the parliamentarian who moments earlier had catalogued civil war, spiralling debt and a "generational catastrophe" in the country's schools.
The line, delivered in response to Desalegn's questions, carried an unmistakable double meaning in the wake of an election that has left the opposition holding a sliver of the chamber.
The Prime Minister framed that result as a mandate rather than a warning.
"The vote had handed the government a 'blank check' from the entire population, but not a licence for complacenc," he told Parliamentarians. "We won't take it for granted."
In a striking characterisation of the electoral settlement, Abiy said the incumbent Prosperity Party had chosen to contest an 85pc share for itself and concede the remaining of parliamentary seats for the opposition, casting the ruling party's dominance as a deliberate act of accommodation rather than an artefact of a lopsided contest.
He extended the argument to the national dialogue that Desalegn had questioned, disclosing his party had proposed that any single party be allowed to lead the government for only two electoral terms.
On the wars scarring the country, Abiy pushed back on the bleak picture drawn from the opposition benches.
"Conflict rooted in ethnicity and religion," he argued, "has receded compared with earlier years. The armed groups still fuelling violence are driven by external actors pursuing their own interests in Ethiopia."
This is an assertion that folds the country's internal fractures into the same geopolitical frame that loyalist MPs invoked when they pressed the Premier on Red Sea security and "historical enemies."
The rebuttal closed a session that had swung between ovation and indictment. A Prosperity Party lawmaker, Mohammed Ahmed, had earlier called the chamber to its feet in a standing ovation for the Premier. Desalegn had answered with an itemised bill of grievances, a 379 billion Br deficit, 15pc food inflation, 27 million citizens on food aid. The Prime Minister's response did not engage each figure so much as reset the terms of the argument.
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