Abiy Is Drilling His Cabinet Like Soldiers While Ethiopia Bleeds

Ministers are supposed to answer to voters. Soldiers answer to commanders. In Ethiopia this week, the line between the two blurred in front of the cameras, and Abiy Ahmed was the one holding the camera.

Photos posted on social media show the prime minister taking part in military exercises at the Hurso training centre, alongside cabinet ministers, deputy ministers and heads of government institutions. Among them: Muferiat Kamil, Speaker of the House of Federation, Finance Minister Fitsum Assefa, and Health Minister Mekdes Daba. Nobody has said when the training started or how long it will last. Ethiopians are left to guess. That silence is itself a warning.

Ask yourself what a finance minister is doing on a firing range. Ask what a health minister is learning that she could not learn at a desk. Then ask the question nobody in Addis Ababa seems willing to answer: why does a government need its civilian leaders to look like soldiers at a time when the country is already fighting too many wars?

Because Ethiopia is fighting. The Tigray war that began in November 2020 killed hundreds of thousands of people by most credible estimates, displaced millions, and saw sexual violence used as a weapon on a scale human rights investigators documented in painful detail. The Pretoria Cessation of Hostilities Agreement of November 2022 was a fragile pause, not a peace. Since 2023, the Fano armed movement has waged an insurgency across Amhara, and federal forces have been accused by rights groups of drone strikes, arbitrary detention and mass killings of civilians. Mothers in Gondar and Bahir Dar have buried sons and daughters while the government spoke about "law and order." Young men in the countryside are caught between an armed group that hangs its enemies from trees and a state that hangs suspicion on everyone.

This is the country where the cabinet now goes on maneuvers. This is the moment Abiy chose to celebrate discipline.

Let us be fair to the prime minister. Military training is not a crime. Plenty of civilian leaders in plenty of countries have done national service or learned basic first aid, weapons safety and crisis drills. Discipline, punctuality and physical endurance are good qualities in public servants. Ethiopia's civil service has been criticized for slowness and corruption for decades, and nobody serious denies that its institutions need stronger leadership.

But there is a difference between a leader who wants a disciplined bureaucracy and a leader who wants a bureaucracy that thinks like an army. The first is reform. The second is militarization. Democracies have always been most nervous about the second, for good reason. The founding idea of modern constitutional government is that the armed forces serve the state, and the state answers to the people through parliament, courts and a free press. When the boundary between the uniform and the civilian office starts to dissolve, the first casualty is accountability. Ministers who have sweated beside generals find it harder to say no to them. Officials who have been "trained" in obedience find it harder to question orders.

We have seen where this road leads across our continent. Mali, Burkina Faso, Guinea and Niger all began with promises of discipline, sovereignty and national renewal. Each ended with men in uniform ruling without elections, with journalists in exile and with their promised renewal reduced to a slogan on a billboard. Ethiopians do not need to be told that the next step after parading ministers in fatigues is never a clean one.

Abiy won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2019 for ending a long standoff with Eritrea. That prize now sits uncomfortably beside the record of his government's wars. The Nobel Committee did not give him a license to militarize his cabinet. It gave him a responsibility to be the continent's peacemaker. Peacemakers do not need their finance ministers to practice combat drills. They need courts that work, parliaments that ask hard questions, and an army that is accountable to the people's representatives rather than to a single political personality.

So what should Ethiopians demand?

First, transparency. The government should publish the purpose, duration, budget and participant list of this training. If it is a national service program, it should be written into law and debated in parliament. If it is a political exercise, Ethiopians deserve to know that too. Secret loyalty programs are the signature of regimes that fear their own citizens.

Second, the House of Federation and the House of People's Representatives should summon the ministers involved and ask them, on the record, what their duties are during this training and who will handle their ministries while they are away. Speaker Muferiat Kamil in particular holds a constitutional role that depends on independence from the executive. Parliament's credibility is on the line.

Third, the civilian chain of command must be made explicit. The armed forces must remain under the constitutional authority of elected civilian leadership, and that authority must be exercised through transparent legal channels. No minister should be able to take orders from a battlefield commander without a legal basis, and no soldier should be pulled into political theater.

Fourth, the African Union and its Peace and Security Council must stop treating Ethiopia's crises as Addis Ababa's internal business. Headquartered in Addis, the AU has an obligation to the 120 million Ethiopians whose government is at war with parts of its own population. Silence from the continent's most important institution is not neutrality. It is abandonment.

Some countries show us a better path. Botswana has built one of Africa's most stable democracies on a model of professional, apolitical institutions and a strong, independent judiciary. Mauritius has combined competitive elections with market-friendly governance and high levels of public trust. Senegal, after years of tension, proved in 2024 that a peaceful democratic transfer of power is possible when citizens and institutions insist on it. None of these success stories was built on ministers in camouflage. They were built on rule of law, on civil servants who answer to the law rather than to a personality, and on citizens who never accepted that discipline and dictatorship were the same thing.

That is the lesson Ethiopia's leaders should learn. Strong states are built by strong institutions and honest elections, not by parading the cabinet through mud.

Ethiopians, this is your country. Your sons are the ones in the field. Your taxes pay for the training camps, the drones and the funerals. You have every right to ask why the people you elected to serve you are learning to march, and who taught them that obedience is a virtue higher than the law.

Do not let this become normal. Demand that your MPs ask the questions this week, not next year. Demand that the ministers explain their absence to the public. Demand that the AU stop hiding behind its own headquarters. And demand, loudly and repeatedly, that your government spend its energy on ending the wars it started and the ones it failed to stop, not on turning its cabinet into a costume parade.

Ethiopia's future will not be decided on a training ground in Hurso. It will be decided by whether its citizens remember that they, not the uniform, are the source of every legitimate power in this country.

Based on reporting by ACSS-EMAIL