Editorial Foreword

on Professor Girma Berhanu’s

The Theatre of Power

Caligula, Abiy Ahmed, and the Politics of Personalisation

Professor Girma Berhanu returns to our pages with an essay that begins, disarmingly, in insomnia — a documentary on Caligula watched to three in the morning, and the recognition, unbidden and by his own account unsettling, of a pattern he has spent the better part of a decade trying to name. Readers who have followed his contributions will know the shape of that preoccupation. In The Many Faces of Abiy Ahmed, written when much of the world was still applauding a freshly minted Nobel laureate, he recorded an early and rather lonely disquiet. What follows here is not a departure from that argument so much as its deepening through an older mirror.

The device is the historical analogy, and the Professor is scrupulous about its limits. He does not claim that a modern prime minister governing under a constitution, however contested, is a Roman autocrat reborn; he insists, in as many words, that the comparison is “an analytical analogy rather than an assertion of historical equivalence.” He is equally careful with the sources on which the Caligula portrait rests — Suetonius and Cassius Dio filtered through Winterling and through Barrett and Yardley — noting that the ancient record is itself a construction shaped by bias and literary convention. This is the intellectual honesty that distinguishes the piece from the cruder equivalences — Hitler, Nero, Idi Amin — that circulate freely on social media and explain very little. Berhanu has reached for those figures before and found them wanting; here he explains why Caligula, of all the tyrants on offer, fits the contour he is tracing: the personalisation of power, the leader as performance, the state remade in the image of a single man’s sense of destiny.

The argument’s spine is well sourced. Tom Gardner’s The Abiy Project supplies the figures on the corridor developments; Achille Mbembe’s necropolitics furnishes the interpretive lens for a polity in which large populations are left exposed to violence and deprivation. Where the essay ventures onto contested ground it says so plainly. It treats the death of Simegnew Bekele — found shot in his car in July 2018 — as the established and still-unexplained fact it is, while flagging the persistent rumours about the Prime Minister’s family and his father’s death as speculation unsupported by credible evidence. We reproduce the piece in exactly that spirit: the distinction between the documented and the merely alleged is the Professor’s, and it is one this publication holds to.

The essay arrives at a pointed moment. Fighting has again broken out in the north, in fresh breach of arrangements meant to have ended it, and Berhanu writes with reports of a strike on a monastery still fresh — the human and cultural costs he catalogues are not historical but current. Yet his closing move is the one worth dwelling on. The real danger, he argues, is not the temperament of any single ruler but the system that permits personal rule to proceed unchecked: Caligula matters less as a “mad emperor” than as a case study in what follows when power is concentrated and accountability disappears. That is the durable thesis beneath the provocation, and it is why the analogy, for all its deliberate imperfection, earns its place.

Synopsis

In The Theatre of Power: Caligula, Abiy Ahmed, and the Politics of Personalisation, Professor Girma Berhanu uses the reign of the Roman emperor Caligula as an analytical lens through which to examine the premiership of Abiy Ahmed. Prompted by a late-night documentary, and drawing on the assessment of a senior former Ethiopian minister who independently arrives at the same comparison, Berhanu argues that the most revealing parallel between the two is neither cruelty nor extravagance in isolation but the personalisation of power — the substitution of a leader’s vision, image and sense of destiny for durable institutions.

He develops the case across several movements. The first traces the rise of personal rule, reading Medemer less as a governing programme than as an exercise in political branding, and identifying three competing personas — Abiy the Preacher, Abiy the Actor, and Abiy the Prince — whose contradictions expose the tension between democratic rhetoric and highly personalised authority. The second examines the marginalisation of rivals and the machinery of fear, pairing Caligula’s public spectacles of suffering with the quieter, institutionalised violence of the Ethiopian state, and treating the unexplained death of GERD engineer Simegnew Bekele as emblematic of a broader disappearance of independent figures from public life. The third turns to financial extravagance and symbolism, setting Caligula’s monumentalism beside the corridor projects, parks and urban demolitions catalogued in Tom Gardner’s The Abiy Project, and reading both as spectacle pursued while populations endure hardship.

Throughout, Berhanu is careful to bound his own argument: the comparison is an analogy, not an equivalence; the ancient sources are contested; and destructive leadership should not be reduced to armchair psychiatric diagnosis. Invoking Mbembe’s necropolitics, he closes on the essay’s central and most portable claim — that the lesson of Caligula is systemic rather than personal. The gravest risk lies not in any individual ruler’s temperament but in political orders that leave concentrated power without effective checks, a warning he reads as acutely relevant to Ethiopia’s present instability.

The views expressed are the author’s own. The Ethiopian Tribune publishes the essay as analysis and welcomes reasoned dissent.