By Professor Ezekiel Gebissa
Historical accounts of leaders exhibiting signs of burnout, stress, and even mental breakdown expressed in troubling behaviors of leaders abound. Roman emperors Tiberius, Caligula, and Nero were reportedly engaged in senseless cruelty and lurid acts of sexual perversity. Egyptian pharaohs, Ottoman sultans, Asian monarchs, and European kings are said to have been involved in violence, sexual orgies, and histrionic delusions. Leaders are known to act erratically, unpredictably, and dangerously while holding immense destructive power, but rarely were they described as suffering from mental health conditions.
In recent decades, however, mental health professionals have used biographical accounts to diagnose past leaders retrospectively. Some have been found to have psychotic conditions and personality disorders, including paranoid delusions, manic depression, and schizophrenia. Retrospective diagnoses have also given psychiatric names to behavioral traits observed in modern dictators. For instance, researchers who studied Joseph Stalin found that manifested a psychopathic personality with prominent elements of narcissism, sadism, and paranoia. In the same way, Hitler is said to have had “narcissistic megalomania.”
The recent rise of authoritarian leaders in democratic countries and their unusual behavior in office have fueled remote diagnosis of leaders. In the United States, thirty-seven psychiatrists published The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump amid increasing speculation that the president might have psychological disorders. Numerous books have since been published, casting doubt on the president’s mental fitness based on reports of administration officials who worked closely with the president. John F. Kelly, chief of staff from 2017 to 2019, considered the president “insecure, egotistical, and a pathological liar,” reinforcing the suspicion that the psychiatrists have harbored about the mental health of the president.
The African political scene has its share of leaders with bizarre behaviors and eccentric styles of rule in the 1960s and 1970s. In Psychoses of Power, Samuel Decalo studied the personal and career motivations and governing styles of Uganda’s Idi Amin, Central African Republic’s Jean-Bédel Bokassa, and Equatorial Guinea’s Francisco Macías Nguema.
Unlike Africa’s autocratic leaders, who otherwise demonstrate caution and pragmatism, Decalo found out that the triumvirate exhibited psychotic behavior devoid of any regard for the consequences for the states they governed. Rather, they sought to restructure the social order “to better conform with each tyrant’s personal self-image or perverted vision of the world.”
Since assuming power in April 2018, Abiy Ahmed, the incumbent Ethiopian prime minister, has taken drastic measures to restructure the state to his liking and exhibited unusual behaviors comparable to his erstwhile African forerunners. He makes baseless claims, lies shamelessly, and brags compulsively. Abiy delivers speeches normalizing civil conflict, trivializing gender-based violence, and justifying the deaths of innocents with callous indifference. He lacks sympathy for human suffering and acts in ways that do not comport with the dignity of the august office he holds. His idiosyncracies have caused many to question his sanity. Writing in Ethiopia Insight anonymously, Mistir Sew has asserted that the “Ethiopian leader has some worrying traits,” concluding that he exhibits signs of a grandiose narcissistic personality disorder.
In general, leaders operate within expected realms of conduct, demonstrating statecraft, respecting evolved traditions of governing, and behaving in ways that are considered appropriate to the office they hold. When they deviate, it is possible to make evaluative conclusions about the personality, behavior, and actions of leaders without resorting to remote diagnosis of pathological or subclinical conditions. Psychologists classify leaders’ actions that are “principally motivated by their own egomaniacal needs and beliefs, superseding the needs and interests of the constituents and institutions they lead” as narcissistic leadership, distinguishing it from narcissistic personality disorder or trait narcissism. In this article, I examine Abiy Ahmed’s leadership, highlighting his public behaviors that deviate from the conventional framework of governing and exercising and maintaining power based on findings of recent studies of idiosyncratic leaders that have emerged in the global public sphere.
Self-Selecting for Power
The aphorism that “power corrupts” holds that good people are not immune to the corrupting influence of power. The remedy was to design a political system that makes power-holders accountable to popular and institutional checks. In the past dozen years, however, leaders who acquired power through democratic elections have challenged the efficacy of a system of checks and balances, raising the possibility that individual leaders can corrupt the system. In Corruptible: Who Gets Power and How It Changes Us, Brian Klaas argues that the burning issue today is that the people who are drawn to power “are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it.” Their distinctive is that they tend to self-select into positions of power and are more likely than the average person to seek and obtain power.
It is public knowledge that Abiy Ahmed became prime minister after he was elected as chairperson of the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF). But Abiy’s story is one of self-selection. He asserts that his mother told him when he was seven years old that he would be the seventh king of Ethiopia. He also tells a story of his teachers selecting him to grade the work of students above his grade because of his maturity above his age, reinforcing his mother’s prediction. Parents are invariably well-wishers for their children. In Abiy’s case, a parent’s wish became his life’s goal. He pursued the infantile goal of becoming a king with unqualified certainty. He did not seek to provide any rationale for what he wanted to accomplish as prime minister.
Driven by an immature self-view, Abiy devoted his life to making his mother’s wishes come true. Binyam Twolde, his coworker at the Intelligence Network Security Agency (INSA), says Abiy Ahmed “dedicated his life fully to making his mother’s dream come true. Nothing else mattered to him. Everything he did was meant to be a stepping stone to becoming prime minister. He worked to achieve this goal as if he would be dead if he didn’t become prime minister.” Throughout his life, he pursued an infantile self-view that never matured through inquiry and considered choice.
Self-selection is also evident in many of Abiy’s self-description. He became prime minister following a popular unrest that had engulfed the country for several years. However, the prime minister does not believe he owes his position to the popular demand for change that forced the selection of a new party leader. He tells his friends that his rise to power was solely the product of his own efforts. Milkessa Midhega, a former EPRDF official, recalled in a television interview that Abiy summoned him to his office and told him: “I attained this office through my own singular effort. No one helped me along the way. Now, I have renovated the office to reflect my work ethic. No force would be able to drag me out of this office until I have completed implanting my vision of transforming this country.” Those who know the horse trade and intra-party maneuvers confirm that Abiy has done a good job of self-selecting for the job.
Once the self-selection put him at the helm, Abiy made a habit of pronouncing that he was the first of a kind among Ethiopia’s leaders, suggesting he was selected for the task of singularly transforming Ethiopia. In a 2018 meeting with Ethiopians in Minneapolis, he described himself as the first Ethiopian leader to mingle with citizens freely, discuss issues, and answer their questions, adding, “The government in power is one that any citizen can admonish and correct when problems arise. You’ve just witnessed history today by making a prime minister sit down and grill him with questions. This is unprecedented in our history.” In fact, history remembers the late Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, who always traveled to rural Ethiopia to meet with and listen to farmers and pastoralists of the lowlands whom he considered his power base. Abiy resented Meles’ long shadow in Ethiopian politics. By claiming his interaction with the members of the diaspora was unprecedented, Abiy was asserting that his place was second to none. It was an escape hatch from Meles’ shadow.
On occasions, his self-selection for a messianic mission of transforming Ethiopia rose to absurd levels of comparison with historical figures who have changed the course of history. During the Tigray war, hearing commotion among his supporters, he sought to pull a victory out of the jaws of defeat by recounting a Biblical story about a fierce storm that almost swamped the boat Jesus and his disciples were on: “Jesus was in sleeping at the back of the boat. The disciples woke him up, shouting, Teacher, don’t you care if we drown?” Jesus was on the boat with them.” And you say, “Where was the prime minister when Dessie and Kombolcha fell? For those of you, we ask the prime minister’s whereabouts; he is on the boat.” The analogy implies that his followers had little faith in their leader, who was in a fight with them. It was a case that divulged Abiy’s disintegrated ego that needed constant shoring up.
Read the full article: Machiavellian or Megalomaniac?: Abiy Ahmed on the Public Stage
Professor Ezekiel Gebissa
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Ezekiel Gebissa is a professor of History and African study at Kettering University in Flint, Michigan. He can be reached at: [email protected]
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