Hailemariam Desalegn
Hailemariam Desalegn was prime minister of Ethiopia from September 2012, when Meles Zenawi died in a Brussels hospital after twenty-one years and the deputy of two years became the first head of government in the country's history who was neither an emperor, a soldier nor a Tigrayan, to February 2018, when he resigned, the first Ethiopian leader to leave office alive and voluntarily, saying he wanted to be part of the solution to the unrest. That was the Oromo protests that had begun in November 2015 over the master plan to expand Addis Ababa into Oromia's farmland and spread to the Amhara, in which the security forces killed at least six hundred and sixty-nine by the government's own count. There were the two states of emergency of 2016 and 2018 that had not ended them. The ruling front chose Abiy Ahmed six weeks later. He was born in Boloso Sore in the Wolayta zone of the south in 1965, a member of a small people and of a Protestant church, studied civil engineering at Addis Ababa and sanitary engineering at Tampere in Finland. He taught at the Arba Minch Water Technology Institute and became its dean. He joined the southern party of the ruling front in the 1990s, becoming president of the Southern Nations region in 2001 and Meles's chief whip, adviser and, from 2010, deputy prime minister and foreign minister. The six years were the growth of ten per cent a year on state investment, the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam rising on the Blue Nile against Egypt's objections. There were the Addis light rail and the railway to Djibouti built by China, the industrial parks that were to make Ethiopia the next Bangladesh. There was the election of 2015 in which the front and its allies won every one of five hundred and forty-seven seats, the drought of 2015-16 that put ten million on food aid without a famine. There were the arrests of journalists and bloggers under the anti-terrorism law. All of it was Meles's system run by a committee with him as chairman, which was the point of him. He chaired the African Union in 2013-14. He has since led election observation missions for the AU and the Carter Center. He has kept out of the war in Tigray that his successor fought, in which the front he had led was broken.
- Lived: 1965 CE – ?
- Nationality: Ethiopian
- Roles: prime minister, engineer, politician
