The Prayer and the Broom

When a Prime Minister’s Confessor Becomes His Critic

By Sewasew Teklemariam  |  The Ethiopian Tribune

There is a particular kind of testimony that carries more weight than any opposition press release, any diaspora podcast, any hashtag campaign: the testimony of the man who used to be in the room. Dr Yonas Zewdu was in the room. For years he sat, by his own account, close enough to Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s inner counsel to hear the prophecies before the cameras did, to watch the ministers panic before the public did, and to be told over dinner, no less that the false prophets peddling their revelations on Ethiopian media would not be tolerated “as long as I am here.” He has now told EMS, in an interview that runs a brisk nineteen minutes and manages to unsettle rather more than that, that he no longer believes it.

One does not have to reach for melodrama to find the sentence that will outlive the segment. Asked, in effect, to explain why so many Ethiopians have taken to calling this the “Pentecostal government,” Dr Zewdu obliged with the precision of a man who has rehearsed the thought many times in private and is only now permitting himself to say it aloud: if the Prime Minister’s office extended clemency to Sebhat Nega on the grounds of advanced age a decision Dr Yonas Zewdu concedes was the Prime Minister’s prerogative and beyond serious challenge then why does Tadios Fantu, a historian who held no office, commanded no militia, and wielded nothing more dangerous than a thesis, continue to languish in prison? “He spoke the ideas he believed in,” Zewdu said of Fantu, with the weary clarity of a man stating the obvious to an audience that has been told, for years, that the obvious is somehow controversial. It is a neat inversion of Ethiopian justice as currently practised: those who did much and are old are forgiven; those who did little and are merely inconvenient remain behind bars. Fantu’s crime, so far as this newspaper can discern, was to write history rather than to make it disappear.

The instinct to reach for comparison is, in this case, irresistible, and Dr Yonas Zewdu himself no stranger to theology has done half the work already by invoking the Gabriel Church folded into Haile Selassie’s palace compound, a monarch’s God visibly co-located with a monarch’s throne. But the Ethiopian case is hardly unique in the modern era, and it is worth setting alongside its cousins. Vladimir Putin’s Russia has spent two decades braiding the Russian Orthodox Church into the machinery of the state so thoroughly that Patriarch Kirill now blesses wars the Gospel he preaches would struggle to endorse. Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Turkey converted Hagia Sophia back into a mosque with the theatrical timing of a man who understood exactly what message a building sends when a head of state chooses which prayers it will host. Narendra Modi’s India has allowed the line between Hindu nationalism and state ceremony to blur to the point that a Prime Minister can lay a temple’s foundation stone on television and call it statesmanship rather than liturgy. Poland’s Law and Justice party spent its years in office governing in such close embrace with the Catholic hierarchy that judges, textbooks and reproductive law all came to bear the fingerprints of the confessional. In each case the defenders said the same thing Ethiopia’s defenders now say: that personal faith and public office are separable, that washing feet or blessing tanks or laying foundation stones is merely the private conscience of a public man. In each case, eventually, the citizens who did not share that particular conscience discovered they were governed by it anyway.

What distinguishes Dr Zewdu’s account from a mere catalogue of grievances is that he locates the critique inside the theology rather than outside it. He does not argue, as a secularist might, that religion has no business near the National Palace. He argues, as a believer, that this religion practised this way, in this palace fails its own test. “By their fruits you shall know them,” he reminds his interviewer, before observing that the fruit on offer includes bulldozed neighbourhoods in Kazanchis, preceded, he says, by sermons in which poverty itself was cast as a demon to be exorcised and its residents as “witches” whose eviction was less a housing policy than a cleansing. A prophecy about a broom, delivered in a prayer circle before an appointment to municipal office, becomes in Dr Zewdu’s retelling not colourful anecdote but operative doctrine: a divine mandate to sweep, applied literally to the homes of people who had lived in a neighbourhood for forty years and were given three weeks to leave it.

It is here that Dr Zewdu’s testimony does something few opposition interviews manage: it refuses the comfort of pure accusation and insists on self-implication. He was there, he says, for the messages before and during the Tigray war the “God told me this” utterances that, in his account, steadied nerves that ought instead to have been listening to intelligence briefings. He was in Harbu the morning after it fell. He walked through Mai Tsebri and Debark and counted the fallen. He spent twenty days afterward too sick to rise from bed, not from any injury but from the accumulated weight of what a theology of certainty does when it is handed the machinery of a modern army. “Some of us need to be questioned,” he says of his own circle, and it is to his credit that he does not exempt himself from the sentence.

Whether Dr Zewdu’s account changes anything for Tadios Fantu still in his cell, still a historian, still guilty of nothing more severe than accuracy remains to be seen. Governments that have married their faith to their statecraft rarely divorce it because a former advisor gave a candid interview to an opposition channel; Moscow did not disestablish the Church because a dissident found the arrangement uncomfortable, and Ankara has not reconsidered Hagia Sophia because critics found the symbolism heavy-handed. But testimony of this kind performs a different function. It removes, permanently, the government’s ability to claim it did not know what its critics meant. Dr Zewdu was in the room. He heard the message about the broom. And now, so have we.