Meles Zenawi
Meles Zenawi spent seventeen years in the field as a Marxist guerrilla and twenty-one in office as the man Western governments called on for Africa, and the two halves are more continuous than either side liked to admit. He left medical school in 1975 to join the Tigrayan rebellion against the military government, in a movement whose early programme was Albanian communism and whose founding grievance was the marginalisation of a northern province. Over sixteen years he turned it into the most effective insurgent army in Africa, took the alliance that formed around it to the outskirts of the capital, and entered it in May 1991 as the Soviet-supplied government collapsed with its patron. What he built was a federation on paper and a single party in practice. The 1994 constitution divided Ethiopia into states drawn on ethnic lines, each with a nominal right of secession, which was a genuine answer to a century of Amhara-centred rule and also a way of dividing every possible opposition; he let Eritrea go by referendum, leaving Ethiopia landlocked. The economics were his own: heavy state investment in roads, dams, railways and universities, land kept in state ownership so that farmers could not sell and migrate, and growth rates near double figures for a decade. He wrote at length arguing that the developmental state, not the market, was what poor countries needed, and he was taken seriously abroad. The politics were narrower every year. The 2005 election, the only genuinely open one, produced an opposition surge, a disputed count, protests and about two hundred demonstrators shot dead; the opposition leadership was imprisoned and the party won 99.6 per cent of the seats five years later. He sent the army into Somalia in 2006 at American urging, fought a border war with Eritrea that killed tens of thousands over a few hundred square kilometres, and jailed journalists under anti-terrorism law. He died in office in 2012, and the ethnic federation he designed held for six years after him before it began tearing the country apart.
- Lived: 1955 CE – 2012 CE
- Nationality: Ethiopian
- Roles: head_of_government, politician
