Ethiopia's Nobel Winner Can't Rest on His Laurels
No clampdown on communications can conceal the fact that Ethiopia’s prime minister, Abiy Ahmed, is struggling to calm his own people.
Poor communication.
Photographer: Michael Tewelde/AFP via Getty ImagesIt’s not a good look on a Nobel Peace laureate. As protests raged in Ethiopia’s most populous region over the killing of a pop star, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed ordered an internet blackout, preventing the rest of his country — and the wider world — from getting a complete picture of what was going on in Oromia.
This isn’t the first time Abiy, who collected his Nobel last year, has shut down the internet in Ethiopia. There were four such blackouts last year, more often than any other nation in sub-Saharan Africa. On the most bizarre of these occasions, the government cited exam cheating as the reason.