by Ghidewon Abay Asmerom
There is an old Tigrigna saying that says: “a butterfly covers the earth without covering its behind“. (ጽምብላሊዕ መዓኰራ ዘይከደነት ምድሪ ኸደነት). It describes the unique confidence of those who believe that wide wings excuse exposed failures. The spectacle is impressive, the motion dramatic, but the essentials remain unattended. In modern Ethiopia, this has been elevated from proverb to doctrine. Its chief theorist is Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed.
In Hawassa, standing before Ethiopia’s airborne units, Abiy announced the arrival of a new age. Ethiopia, he declared, now possesses an “elite force” armed with kamikaze drones, ready to police the Horn of Africa’s coastline, from Somalia to Massawa in Eritrea. Africa, he insisted, should rejoice. One imagines applause echoing across the Red Sea, boats pausing mid-voyage in gratitude.
It was not a speech so much as a live demonstration of strategic hallucination.
When Myth Replaces Government
Some leaders govern with policy. Others govern with spectacle. And then there are those who govern by narration, men who confuse storytelling with statecraft and mistake applause for authority. Ethiopia today is ruled not by institutions, but by an imagination untethered from consequence. What follows is not an argument about ambition gone wrong, but a case study in how narcissism, and myth-making can be elevated into a governing philosophy, with catastrophic results.
Abiy Ahmed does not merely lead Ethiopia; he narrates it, like a bedtime story told by a man who has mistaken the mirror for a map. Narcissism, in his case, is not an affliction but a vocation, elevated into a full-blown doctrine of governance powered by delusions of grandeur. He addresses Ethiopians not as citizens with agency, but as children seated cross-legged before a storyteller, expected to nod along as myths are passed off as policy.
He arrived promising peace. Then prosperity. Then transformation. Ethiopia, he assured them, would soon become one of the world’s two superpowers, an impressive destiny for a country struggling to keep its regions from tearing each other apart. When peace failed to arrive, he promised abundance. When abundance failed, he promised destiny. Each unmet pledge was not corrected, but replaced with a grander tale, told with greater confidence and fewer facts. Reality, however, has been an uncooperative audience.
Cosmic Rhetoric, Earthbound Failurees
As conditions on the ground deteriorated, Abiy’s imagination took flight, literally. At one moment he has spoken not just of reforming Ethiopia, but of reaching beyond the moon, of ascending toward the constellations of Cassiopeia and Cepheus, the Queen and King of Aethiopia, celestial figures he appears keen to audition for. One can almost picture him gazing skyward, plotting his coronation among the stars, while the country beneath him fractures quietly out of frame.
His rhetoric increasingly reflects a pattern of messianic self-construction combined with political escapism. Upon assuming power, he authorized state-sanctioned documentaries and musical productions that explicitly likened him to Moses—a providential figure tasked with delivering Ethiopians from the bondage of poverty and national suffering. This was not incidental symbolism; it was a deliberate cultivation of salvific authority designed to substitute personal myth for institutional legitimacy.
The governing pattern that followed is now unmistakable. As policy failures accumulated and state capacity eroded, rhetoric escalated. When governance became difficult, discourse shifted upward—from the material to the metaphysical, from accountability to destiny. When institutions weakened, imagination expanded to fill the void. And when scrutiny intensified, the leader removed himself rhetorically from the realm of responsibility altogether, positioning himself above the state rather than accountable to it—leaving the consequences of governance to be borne by the population below.
This is not visionary leadership; it is performance art with a national budget. Ethiopia is not governed so much as serenaded, lulled by promises of greatness while its crises are waved away as temporary interruptions in an epic tale. Nations, however, are not built on allegory, and citizens do not eat mythology.
A leader who confuses storytelling with statecraft eventually runs out of listeners. And when the myths collapse under the weight of lived experience, what remains is not wonder, but exhaustion—an entire country left staring upward, wondering how their ruler reached for the stars while losing the ground beneath his feet.
Ethiopia today cannot secure peace in Tigray, Amhara, Oromia, or Benishangul-Gumuz. Entire regions remain militarized. Millions are displaced. Famine is managed by denial. Yet somehow, the Prime Minister has discovered surplus capacity to patrol seas his country does not border, defend coastlines that belong to other sovereign states, and eliminate “maritime terrorism” without a navy. This is not ambition; it is fantasy with a microphone.
However, history Has a long memory! History, unfortunately for Abiy, keeps receipts. Ethiopia’s airborne units have been here before—declared elite, celebrated loudly, and deployed confidently. At Nakfa, October 1976, during the siege of that historic city, the mythology arrived first. The reality followed shortly after, usually in body bags. EPLF fighters did not need drones to dismantle these formations; discipline, terrain, and patience proved sufficient. The lesson was clear: elite is not something you announce—it is something you survive. But Abiy has solved the problem. This time, there are drones.
Apparently, kamikaze drones are to airborne units what seasoning is to spoiled food: a final flourish that transforms the inedible into gourmet. Never mind doctrine. Never mind logistics. Never mind morale. Never mind the inconvenient detail that elite forces generally require legitimacy, coherence, and a state not at war with itself. Technology, we are told, will do the thinking.
When a Lake Becomes an Ocean
The Prime Minister went further. Ethiopia, he declared, will be a “shield” for Africa. A “pillar.” A “protector.” This is impressive language from a man who cannot travel twenty kilometers outside Addis Ababa without a convoy that resembles a moving checkpoint. It is difficult to suppress admiration for a leader who struggles to manage a neighborhood but volunteers to supervise the continent.
There is, of course, the minor inconvenience of geography. Ethiopia has no coastline. No navy. No maritime tradition. No legal mandate, under international law, regional agreements, or common sense, to operate in the waters of Somalia, Eritrea, Djibouti, or anywhere beyond its own landlocked borders. Yet Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, speaking confidently from the shores of Lake Hawassa, appeared serenely unbothered by these trivialities.
One suspects a simple cartographic misunderstanding. Perhaps in Abiy’s imagination, Lake Hawassa is the Red Sea. Water is water, after all. Salt, fresh, mere seasoning. Depth, scale, currents, shipping lanes, sovereignty, details for pedants. Visionaries do not drown themselves in facts.
The magnitude of the confusion is almost admirable. The stretch of sea Abiy casually volunteered to “secure” spans hundreds of thousands of square kilometers: the Red Sea from Massawa to Djibouti alone runs over 700 kilometers, before one even reaches Somalia’s nearly 3,000-kilometer coastline, the Gulf of Aden, and the open Indian Ocean, some of the most strategically sensitive waters on the planet, patrolled by actual navies with actual ships.
Lake Hawassa, by contrast, covers about 90 square kilometers. It is shallow enough to wade into, calm enough to paddle across, and entirely landlocked—much like the country whose leader now imagines himself the maritime custodian of half the Horn of Africa.
Delusion as Policy
But why let arithmetic interfere with destiny? Why let maps spoil a perfectly good hallucination? In Abiy’s performance politics, oceans shrink to ponds, borders dissolve on command, and sovereignty becomes an optional courtesy extended—or ignored—at will. Reality is invited only when it applauds.
This is not strategic vision. It is geopolitical cosplay: a landlocked leader role-playing admiral, a government struggling to control its hinterlands volunteering to supervise the world’s shipping lanes. It would be comic if it were not so destabilizing.
When a man mistakes a lake for a sea, and a speech for power, the problem is no longer exaggeration—it is delusion elevated to policy.
As with all great imperial projects, this one is wrapped in the language of peace. Ethiopia’s military expansion, Abiy assures us, is designed to “prevent instability before it emerges.” It is a generous formulation, and the same sentence every empire has uttered shortly before destabilizing everything in sight.
Africa, according to Abiy, should celebrate. Africa, however, has developed a healthy allergy to leaders who confuse militarization with wisdom and spectacle with legitimacy. The continent knows that when someone announces themselves as a continental guardian, it is usually because they cannot face the mirror at home.
And that is the core of the problem. Abiy’s performance is not about drones, coasts, or peace. It is about escape, escape from internal collapse, unresolved wars, broken institutions, and exhausted credibility. When reality becomes unbearable, fantasy expands.
The butterfly spreads its wings wider, hoping no one looks its behind.
Conclusion
Reality is stubborn. Oceans do not submit to speeches. Coastlines do not recognize hallucinations. And regions already on edge do not benefit from leaders who mistake delusion for destiny.
The Horn of Africa does not need a self-appointed shield flying in from inland lakes. It needs leaders grounded in law, humility, and restraint. Until Abiy Ahmed abandons the butterfly doctrine and confronts what remains exposed beneath the wings, his grand declarations will remain exactly what they are—not strategy, not leadership, but performance art staged at the edge of collapse.
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