From Leader to Exterminator: Abiy’s Descent into Fascist Speech

by Emanuel Tekle

A leader comparing his political opponents to “lice” is not using strong rhetoric—he is using dehumanization. And history shows that dehumanizing language is often the first step toward justifying violence and repression. Hitler and the Nazis first categorized the Jews (communists, gypsies, Slavic peoples, homosexuals, as well) as “vermin”, before next embarking on an intense hate-filled propaganda that ultimately ended in what they called “the final solution”. In Rwanda, too, the Hutu extremists of the Interhamwe were frequently referring to the Tutsis as “cockroaches” that must be exterminated. No prerson has the right to dehumanize its critics. In any political order, opposition is not an infestation to be cleansed but a vital part of civic life and accountability. 

Leaders who speak of citizens as pests undermine human dignity and violate the spirit of international human-rights law. Such attitudes raise serious questions about their fitness to serve in any global humanitarian or peace-focused organization, where respect for every human life is the most basic requirement.

Dehumanization is not leadership. It is a warning sign—and the world should treat it as such.

The religious hypocrisy of such language only deepens the offense. A man who claims Pentecostal devotion, who speaks of salvation and divine creation, cannot invoke the doctrine that humans are made in the image of God and in the next breath describe them as insects to be crushed. It is an insult not only to the people he vilifies but to the faith he professes. It dishonors both his parents’ traditions: Islam and Christianity, and exposes a leader spiraling into the same delirium of moral superiority that once justified the worst crimes in Ethiopia’s imperial past.

International observers have taken note, and rightly so. Dehumanizing language is not a domestic misstep; it is a global alarm. In genocide-prevention frameworks, metaphors of infestation, cleansing, and purification are recognized as the earliest and most reliable indicators that a political elite is preparing the public psyche for escalated violence. A leader who refers to segments of the population as lice cannot hope to be taken seriously as a guardian of human rights or as a credible figure in regional peace efforts. He has disqualified himself from that moral universe.

The consequences at home are equally corrosive. Citizens who dissent become enemies, enemies become contaminants, and contaminants are imagined as obstacles to be removed rather than people to be governed. Violence, under such a worldview, becomes not a failure of leadership but an act of purification. Supporters feel licensed to harass, threaten, or attack those whom the leader has already stripped of dignity. Institutions fracture under the weight of this rhetoric, because once some citizens are declared pests, the legitimacy of equal citizenship evaporates.

This is more than dangerous language—it is a warning about the worldview governing Ethiopia today. It reveals a leader who sees power not as stewardship but as a crusade, who interprets disagreement not as politics but as pathology. A nation cannot survive the long-term rule of a man who believes parts of his own population are insects.

Ethiopia deserves better. It deserves leaders who understand that words are not weapons to be hurled at citizens but commitments made to them. It deserves a political culture in which human beings are not reduced to vermin for the sake of applause or intimidation. It deserves a government that sees all its people as human—fully, irrevocably human.

Dehumanization is not leadership. It is a signal. And if the world has learned anything from its blood-soaked past, it is that such signals must be recognized before they become atrocities. Abiy Ahmed’s words must be treated for what they are: not bluster, not metaphor, but a red line crossed. The moral obligation now is to confront this rhetoric with clarity, to expose its danger, and to refuse to let Ethiopia slide into the familiar abyss that such language has opened elsewhere.

Never again begins with naming the danger in time.