“Abiy believes that public spaces and monuments create the image of the Ethiopian state which he wants to project to his citizens and to the world,” says a former adviser. In the run-up to elections last year, in which the ruling party won over 90% of the seats contested, state media broadcast drone footage of the revamped city at the top of the evening news. Glossy promotional videos depict the renovation scheme as a symbol of national unity. “If you can change Addis, definitely you can change Ethiopia,” he remarked in an early interview.
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Last year Meskel Square, the historic central plaza, was lavishly refurbished at a cost of more than $73m-a striking sum in a country in the midst of a civil war.įor Abiy, who has cracked down on dissent and imprisoned opponents, refashioning the capital is a political project as well as an aesthetic one.
Public thoroughfares have been splashed with colour and adorned with flowers and murals. The city’s existing infrastructure is also getting a facelift. “These days you see new changes every week,” gushes Gebre Sifer, a retired pastor visiting the library. The swishest of these, set on nearby Mount Entoto, boasts hiking trails, adventure sports, boutique restaurants and a luxury resort. Several more parks and green spaces are germinating. Next door a science museum and an amphitheatre are going up. Earlier this year a massive public library opened. Menelik II’s nearby palace has already been converted into the first of several new exhibition centres. The new park is one of a dizzying array of grands projets in the pipeline. Now Abiy Ahmed, prime minister since 2018, is setting out to do so again-even as an atrocity-filled war with Tigrayan rebels has disgraced his regime and called the country’s future into question. From the racist master-plans of the Italian occupation, to the Haussmannian demolition schemes of the eprdf years, each government has sought to recast the city in its own image. Its buildings, streets and public spaces are etched with the legacies of empire, war and revolution.
Successive rulers have treated it as a “modernist monument for the rest of Ethiopia”, writes Elleni Centime Zeleke, author of “Ethiopia in Theory”.
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