By Amsal Woreta
Part I of II
Abstract
On 2nd January 2026, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed delivered a guest lecture at Addis Ababa University (AAU) titled “The Role of Intellectuals in National Prosperity,” as part of the university’s 75th anniversary celebrations. The event framed Abiy as an alumnus-intellectual speaking to academics about their responsibility for development, even as his government stands accused of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and mass displacement in Tigray, Amhara, Oromia, and other regions, including the use of starvation, sexual violence, and forced expulsions. This paper uses the AAU lecture as a focal case to analyze how universities in violent and authoritarian contexts become stages for “performances of intellectualism” that seek to launder power and manufacture moral legitimacy. It argues that hosting such a leader without reckoning with ongoing atrocities undermines the university’s ethical obligations to truth, vulnerable citizens, and its own community. Drawing on human-rights documentation, official discourse on the lecture, and scholarship on academic freedom and platforming, the paper concludes that AAU’s decision exemplifies a broader crisis in which universities risk being co-opted as instruments of regime legitimation rather than sites of critical, emancipatory inquiry. The paper further proposes concrete ethical conditions and institutional reforms that universities in violent contexts could adopt to resist such co-optation.
Introduction
On Addis Ababa University’s 75th anniversary, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, described in official communications as an alumnus of Ethiopia’s “premier higher education institution,” delivered a guest lecture on “The Role of Intellectuals in National Prosperity.” State and party-aligned media highlighted the event as an inspiring engagement between the country’s leader and over seven decades of academic achievement, stressing the indispensable role of universities and intellectuals in Ethiopia’s journey toward “prosperity.”
On Addis Ababa University’s 75th anniversary, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, described in official communications as an alumnus of Ethiopia’s “premier higher education institution,” delivered a guest lecture on “The Role of Intellectuals in National Prosperity.”
State and party-aligned media highlighted the event as an inspiring engagement between the country’s leader and over seven decades of academic achievement, stressing the indispensable role of universities and intellectuals in Ethiopia’s journey toward “prosperity.”
This celebratory narrative stands in sharp tension with the grave human-rights record of Abiy’s government, which has been implicated in large-scale massacres, ethnic cleansing, and mass displacement during the Tigray war and subsequent conflicts. In this context, Abiy’s appearance as a moral instructor of intellectuals raises a central question: when a leader presides over mass atrocities and communication blackouts that leave citizens screaming for help in silence, what does it mean for a public university to offer him a prestigious platform to define intellectual responsibility?
This paper takes Abiy’s 2026 AAU lecture as a case study to examine three linked problems: the use of universities as sites for regime performance and legitimation; the crisis of moral authority when accused perpetrators of mass violence address academic communities as ethical authorities; and the ethical responsibilities of universities facing invitations from powerful but abusive leaders. It argues that AAU’s decision reveals a pattern in which universities in violent, ethnically fragmented states risk becoming complicit in symbolic “laundering” of power, unless they assert a more confrontational ethic of truth, accountability, and solidarity with vulnerable citizens.
Universities occupy a dual role: they are spaces for free inquiry, including exposure to offensive or controversial arguments, and they are institutions that claim moral authority in shaping future leaders and norms. Debates over “platforming” and “no-platforming” capture this tension, as scholars argue whether universities have a duty to host even deeply immoral speakers in the name of academic freedom, or a duty to refuse them to protect vulnerable groups and uphold ethical standards.
Research on toxic leadership in academia stresses that allowing abusive or unethical leaders to remain in positions of authority sends a damaging message to students about acceptable behavior and leadership practices. When a university gives a ceremonial platform to a political leader credibly accused of mass human-rights abuses, the legitimacy stakes are even higher, because the institution is not only tolerating such a figure but publicly endorsing him as a model of intellectual and moral authority. This paper adopts a critical platforming lens: it asks not whether all controversial ideas should be discussed on campus, but whether a university should help to stage a carefully curated performance that recasts a violent ruler as a nation-building intellectual.
The argument builds on work that defends exposure to harmful ideas yet insists that universities must remain committed to following arguments wherever they lead, including toward condemnation of injustice. The key distinction is between critical engagement, where harmful claims are interrogated and challenged, and celebratory performance, where a speaker is placed beyond critique as a figure of honor. In the AAU case, the structure and framing of the event strongly indicate the latter rather than the former.
Background: Abiy Ahmed’s Rule and Mass Violence
Abiy Ahmed’s early years in office were marked by international acclaim and a Nobel Peace Prize for making peace with Eritrea, but subsequent years saw Ethiopia descend into one of the world’s deadliest contemporary conflicts. Human Rights Watch’s reporting on Ethiopia during the Tigray war documents government forces and allies committing forcible displacement, large-scale massacres, widespread sexual violence, indiscriminate shelling, pillage, and attacks on schools and hospitals in Tigray, leaving hundreds of thousands facing starvation. United Nations reporting similarly describes “extreme brutality,” including massacres of civilians, ethnically targeted detentions, and massive displacement from Tigray and neighboring regions.
Beyond Tigray, rights organizations and researchers detail patterns of massacres and displacement affecting Amhara, Oromo, Afar, Somali, Anuak, and other communities in the post-1991 ethno-federal order, with violence escalating under Abiy as diverse armed actors operate in a permissive or complicit state environment. In this period, Abiy’s government has repeatedly used telecommunications shutdowns during crises, cutting off vulnerable populations from calling for help and obstructing documentation of abuses while preserving state control over narratives and security. The result is a regime that, in practice, prioritizes regime survival and ethicized power struggles over the most basic protection of citizens from massacres, displacement, and famine.
The Addis Ababa University Lecture: Content and Framing
Addis Ababa University’s 75th anniversary celebrations were framed as a national milestone, highlighting AAU’s seven-and-a-half decades of contribution to teaching, research, and public service. Official coverage stressed the university’s identity as a hub for intellectual debate and social change, while casting Abiy as a distinguished alumnus returning to engage students and faculty on the role of intellectuals in national development.
Reports on the lecture emphasize several themes in Abiy’s message: that “ideas are the power of change” and that intellectuals are “agents of transformation”; that intellectuals must respect and value ideas, think deeply, read widely, and seek solutions to national challenges; and that universities should integrate teaching, research, and technology to accelerate Ethiopia’s journey toward prosperity. These claims present a normative ideal of the intellectual as problem-solving, reflective, and oriented toward national progress, while positioning Abiy as someone entitled to instruct academics on these responsibilities.
Crucially, the official narrative surrounding the event is one of harmony and shared purpose: the head of government, the country’s flagship university, and the idea of national prosperity are seamlessly woven together. There is no acknowledgement in these accounts of ongoing human-rights crises, displacement, or the university’s responsibilities toward communities suffering from state and non-state violence, suggesting a deliberate disconnection between intellectual discourse and material suffering.
Performing Intellectualism: Symbolic Functions of the Lecture
The AAU lecture functioned less as an exercise in free, critical debate and more as a carefully managed performance of intellectualism that seeks to recast Abiy as a visionary, reflective leader. By invoking concepts like deep thinking, respect for ideas, and intellectual responsibility, the speech performs a kind of moral self-laundering, suggesting that a leader who talks about reflection and problem-solving must be ethically serious and committed to the public good.
From a performative perspective, several symbolic elements stand out: the timing (a milestone anniversary), the location (Ethiopia’s oldest and most prestigious university), the role of the audience (academic leaders and students as silent witnesses), and the thematic content (intellectuals as agents of national prosperity). Each element elevates the Prime Minister’s appearance into a ritual of national and academic endorsement, where the university’s moral and intellectual capital is implicitly transferred to the leader through ceremony and symbolism.
For communities living under displacement, mass violence, and surveillance, this performance has another meaning: it signals that the very institutions that should speak hardest truths to power are willing instead to celebrate that power while their suffering remains unresolved. In this sense, the lecture is not only a performance to international or domestic elites, but also a painful message to victims that their pain can be bracketed out of elite intellectual life.
Universities, Complicity, and the Ethics of Platforming Abusive Leaders
The ethics of giving a platform to abusive leaders on campuses cannot be reduced to a simple binary of “free speech versus censorship.” Most serious accounts of academic freedom recognize that universities are also social institutions with obligations to safeguard vulnerable members, uphold integrity, and avoid complicity in injustice. Allowing a leader accused of grave abuse to use the university’s stage as a site for self-promotion raises deeper questions about institutional complicity and moral authority.
As work on toxic leadership in academic settings suggests, retaining or celebrating abusive leaders undermines the mental and emotional well-being of academic communities and contradicts the values universities claim to uphold. When the leader in question is not an internal dean, but the head of government associated with war crimes and crimes against humanity, the reputational and ethical stakes are multiplied, and students can reasonably perceive that power outweighs ethics in the institution’s decision-making.
At the same time, scholarships on controversial speakers emphasize that universities also have a duty to develop students’ capacity for robust disagreement rather than shielding them from every offensive view. The key ethical distinction is between hosting a leader in a genuinely contested forum—where he can be questioned, confronted with evidence, and held intellectually accountable—and staging an uncritical, honorific lecture that signals endorsement rather than interrogation. Evidence from official coverage of the AAU event points strongly toward the latter model, with no indication of structured critical engagement or representation of affected communities.
The Moral Authority Problem: Who Can Lecture “Intellectual Responsibility”?
The central normative paradox of the AAU lecture is that a leader whose government has repeatedly failed to protect citizens from massacres and displacement now lectures academics on their responsibility to solve national problems. For survivors and families of victims, this can appear as a form of moral inversion: the perpetrator or enabler of atrocities positions himself as the moral educator, while those who might challenge him are seated as respectful listeners.
Abiy’s rhetoric about intellectuals as agents of change is undermined by his own government’s record of silencing dissent, shutting down communications during crises, and criminalizing critical voices, including journalists and activists who attempt to expose abuses. In such a context, calling on intellectuals to think deeply and solve national challenges without acknowledging the regime’s role in producing those challenges risk turning the call into propaganda rather than a genuine invitation to critique and reimagination.
The problem is not that a flawed leader cannot, in principle, speak at a university; rather, it is that the combination of grave, ongoing abuses and a celebratory, uncritical platform erodes any credible claim to moral authority. The event suggests that intellectual responsibility is defined as aligning with the regime’s prosperity discourse, not as exposing uncomfortable truths about mass violence, displacement, and structural impunity.
Ethiopian Specificities: Ethnic Federalism, Violence, and Academic Silence
Ethiopia’s post-1991 ethno-federal system and long history of authoritarian rule create a specific environment in which universities operate under both formal and informal pressures from the state. Ethicized politics, security crackdowns, and politicization of university leadership have constrained academic freedom and made it costly for universities to confront the state on issues of mass violence and rights.
Under Abiy, the fusion of an Oromo-centered hegemony project with a prosperity-gospel rhetoric and authoritarian security practices has deepened these tensions, as universities are encouraged to align themselves with a national “prosperity” agenda while avoiding explicit discussion of atrocities and ethnic cleansing. In this setting, AAU’s choice to spotlight Abiy as a lecturer on intellectual responsibility reflects both structural constraints and strategic accommodation: the university’s leadership may perceive that public honoring of the Prime Minister is necessary for survival, funding, or influence.
Yet academic silence in the face of mass violence carries its own costs. For scholars and students from victimized communities, the university’s celebration of the very leader under whose watch they suffered massacres and displacement can feel like erasure or betrayal. Over time, such practices erode trust in the institution as a refuge for truth and solidaristic inquiry, pushing critical debate into exile or underground.
Editor’s Note : Views in the article do not necessarily reflect the views of borkena.com
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