Fikru Maru, Defying Power, Healing Broken Hearts, Dies at 74

May 31 , 2025. By KETURAH CAMPBELL ( Deputy Editor - in - Chief of Fortune )

When Fikru Maru (MD) returned to Addis Abeba in early May, he carried with him the resolve of a man who had spent decades building bridges between two worlds. Thin but upright, he greeted guests himself at the gate of the new eight-story hospital on Libya Street, a few blocks from Bisrate Gabriel Church.

The project had been years in the making, evidence of his vision and persistence.

On the eve of the opening, Fikru paused in the pediatric ward. He turned to the head nurse and said, “No child should ever be turned away for lack of money.” Then, reaching into his pocket, he pressed 1,000 Br into her hand for the ward’s first patient fund.

It was a simple gesture, colleagues recalled, but one that captured his character as a decisive and humane person allergic to fuss.

The following day, he embarked on a tour of the hospital, walking every corridor, greeting nurses and porters by name, then embracing former trainees who now head cardiology units from Mekelle to Hawassa. They affectionately call themselves “Fikru’s Children,” a sobriquet he accepted with shy pride.

It was to be his last public appearance.

An Ethiopian-Swedish cardiologist who founded the country’s first heart clinic, Fikru, oversaw some 1,200 operations a year. He leaves behind a legacy of bold action and quiet compassion, as well as a memoir of his five years of captivity in a prison.

Born on the outskirts of Addis Abeba named Gurara, in 1951, Fikru was the fifth of nine children in a family battered by Ethiopia’s political storms of the 1960s and ’70s. Quickwitted and ambitious, he opted to join the Air Force rather than attend university. By the age of 27, he was one of the youngest jet squadron commanders under Emperor Haile Selassie’s government.

The cockpit offered speed and a modest officer’s wage, but it also came with a sidearm, one he would later lose. When the Emperor fell in 1974, the military Marxist regime known as the Derg seized power and purged perceived opponents. Two of Fikru’s brothers were among those executed. The loss confirmed his decision to seek life elsewhere.

His friend from the academy, Fekade Mamo (Lt.), recalled that cadets “shared everything.” One day, Fikru announced he was renting his own room, a luxury unheard of for trainees. He stunned friends again when he arrived in a battered 1973 Opel, defying expectations but undeterred by obstacles.

After his gun disappeared, likely misplaced, he began borrowing weapons from colleagues. That raised suspicions until one cadet reported him. Grounded by his commander and troubled by student unrest, he chose to go into exile. He walked across the border into Sudan, then made his way to Sweden.

In Sweden, he traded cockpits for medical school. He qualified as an interventional cardiologist and specialised in pacemaker surgery at Danderyd and St. Göran’s hospitals in Stockholm.

But, his thoughts remained on Ethiopia, where children with treatable heart defects died for lack of care.

Brook Lakew (PhD), a NASA scientist and fellow exile, remembered Fikru as a man, “continually remade himself to meet life’s challenges.” On a road trip through France, Lakew’s lack of a driver’s license led to a police stop. Brook stammered in Swedish; Fikru kept up the ruse until officers, perplexed, waved their Volkswagen minibus on.

“To this day, I don’t know if they let us go out of pity or sheer confusion,” Brook chuckled.

By the mid-1980s, Fikru was a respected consultant at a Stockholm clinic. He saved the life of a Swedish prince by implanting a pacemaker that others would not attempt. Yet, he never forgot the gap back home.

Ethiopia’s population had surpassed 80 million, but there were fewer than five cardiologists.

After years of fundraising, he returned with donated angiography suites and a business plan pairing Swedish investors with Ethiopian doctors. In 2006, he opened Addis Cardiac Hospital (ACH) in a rented building near Bole Airport. Within a decade, ACH was drawing surgical teams from Europe and North America and, according to Swedish surgeon Lars Wiklund, “reduced preventable deaths from congenital heart defects by 40pc in its first 10 years.”

By 2023, the hospital performed approximately 1,200 procedures annually, which is still a fraction of the national demand. The new facility on Libya Street was intended to double capacity and serve as a training hub.

Fikru’s crusade was not without hazards. In the early 2010s, he landed into controversies with customs officers to clear imaging equipment, allegedly brought in from Sweden without prior permits. In 2013, moments before boarding a flight, he was arrested on corruption charges. Three years later, after a fire at Qilinto prison where he was detained, prosecutors added terrorism to the sheet, alleging he had bankrolled the blaze.

Human Rights Watch labelled the prosecution political. Sweden’s foreign ministry, itself a staunch advocate for two jailed journalists in 2011, was accused of showing little zeal in his defence.

Inside Qality and later Qilinto prisons, Fikru kept up daily exercise circuits until a lung collapsed. Guards dismissed his agony as malingering, or, in a bizarre twist, a reaction to chocolate. At Tikur Anbessa Hospital, he was shackled to the bed.

He spent five years behind bars. During that time, he dictated a memoir, “Five Years of Captivity,” on scraps of paper smuggled out by visitors.

“It’s not really us sitting in there who are imprisoned,” he wrote. “It’s our families.”

His elder daughter, Selam, abandoned life in Sweden to campaign for his freedom. In 2018, he walked out of prison skeletal but smiling. Soon after, doctors diagnosed cancer, but he refused to be sidelined. He cofounded Tazma Medical & Surgical Specialised Centre, run by doctors whom Fikru had mentored and pushed to specialise in cardiology.

He also lobbied to include heart treatment in Ethiopia’s fledgling national insurance scheme.

Selam fondly remembers calling the operating theatre landline before smartphones existed. She would declare, “I love you,” and hear him reply, “I love you more,” over the speaker amid a chorus of masked chuckles.

“One of my most cherished childhood memories,” Selam said.

She followed in his footsteps to become a medical doctor, admiring his unshakable will through thick and thin. To her, he was always "Gashe", the name she called him as he told stories from his youth. She remembered how he would recount his days as a young shoeshine boy, or "Listro," using those stories to teach her the value of determination and going after what she wanted.

At home, he sang Sam Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come” from a garden tree as his sisters laughed below.

Cardiovascular disease is rising rapidly in Africa, and the question of how to fund treatment will outlive him. Fikru is survived by his wife, two daughters, four grandchildren and countless patients on two continents whose pulses, quite literally, bear his mark.

His life, spanning warplanes and operating rooms, resistance politics and private acts of kindness, stands as proof that one determined heart can teach many others how to beat.

PUBLISHED ON May 31,2025 [ VOL 26 , NO 1309]