A proposed executive presidency could inaugurate the peaceful limits of power – or constitutionalize its permanence under another name
By Mohamud A. Ahmed – Cagaweyne
Jigjiga, Ethiopia
This article is neither a declaration of support for Dr. Abiy Ahmed nor an argument for his removal. I write neither from the gallery of loyalists, where every government decision is applauded before it is understood, nor from the barricades of permanent opposition, where every development is condemned before its consequences are known. I write as an Ethiopian citizen attempting to measure power through observation, public evidence, and the direction of recent events.
That distinction matters in a political culture increasingly divided between those who treat criticism as betrayal and those who treat fairness as collaboration. A leader’s accomplishments do not cancel his failures, just as his failures do not render every subsequent proposal fraudulent. Citizenship requires a more difficult discipline: the willingness to examine each development on its merits, to praise what may advance the country, to challenge what may endanger it and to postpone final judgment when the evidence remains incomplete.
The constitutional question emerging from Ethiopia’s National Dialogue demands precisely that discipline. It is too consequential to be approached through personal loyalty, ethnic suspicion or inherited hostility. The issue is not whether one admires or distrusts Dr. Abiy Ahmed. It is whether the proposed restructuring of executive power could help Ethiopia replace indefinite rule and violent succession with a peaceful, enforceable constitutional order.
Ethiopia has changed governments through palace intrigue, military revolution, armed insurrection, and negotiated political collapse. What it has rarely accomplished is the most ordinary miracle of constitutional democracy: allowing power to pass peacefully from one leader to another because the law says that time is over.
That historical failure should frame the debate surrounding Dr. Abiy Ahmed’s proposal to limit executive tenure and the National Dialogue’s recommendation to reorganize Ethiopia’s system of government. The recently concluded Dialogue endorsed merging the ceremonial presidency and powerful premiership into a single executive presidency. Under the favored model, the prime minister’s office would disappear, and a president serving as both head of state and head of government would be selected by Parliament rather than directly elected by the public. The anticipated presidency would be limited to two terms.
The proposal has immediately encountered Ethiopia’s most abundant political resource: suspicion. Critics fear that Dr. Abiy Ahmed is not limiting power but redesigning it, exchanging the title of prime minister for a more commanding presidency and restarting the constitutional clock in his own favor. Some see a republic preparing the legal wardrobe of a monarch.
These anxieties deserve examination. But they should not be permitted to suffocate the possibility of reform before its constitutional language has even been written.
Dr. Abiy Ahmed was born on August 15, 1976. At 50, he is proposing an arrangement that could place a formal expiration date upon an executive office that is presently not subject to a constitutional term limit. Ethiopia’s current president is limited to two six-year terms, but the prime minister, who exercises actual executive authority, may remain in office as long as the governing party retains a parliamentary majority.
For a country shaped by rulers who treated departure as defeat and succession as personal extinction, the introduction of a binding limit upon the real seat of power would not be a minor administrative correction. It would represent a civilizational adjustment in Ethiopia’s understanding of government.
A leader’s willingness to discuss the legal termination of his own authority should not be mocked merely because the proposal may also benefit him. Political reforms often emerge from mixed motives. The relevant question is not whether Dr. Abiy Ahmed possesses ambition. Every national leader does. The question is whether that ambition can be confined within institutions strong enough to survive its author.
The National Dialogue’s recommended structure retains an important parliamentary foundation. Citizens would elect representatives, and the party or coalition commanding Parliament would select the executive president. The arrangement would therefore not resemble the American presidential system, in which the executive derives an independent national mandate from a direct election. It would be closer to a parliamentary executive carrying the title and symbolic stature of a president.
That distinction matters. Dr. Abiy Ahmed’s authority would continue to originate in Parliament rather than in a personal plebiscite. In the June 2026 election, the Prosperity Party won 438 of the 501 seats for which results were announced, giving it an overwhelming majority. The incoming assembly is expected to convene in October and return Dr. Abiy Ahmed to national leadership.
The election was imperfect. Tigray did not participate, insecurity disrupted voting in parts of Amhara and Oromia, and opposition organizations alleged repression and unequal political conditions. Yet imperfection does not make an election meaningless. If Ethiopia declares every incomplete electoral process illegitimate, armed conflict will continue preventing elections from becoming complete, and that incompleteness will then be offered as justification for more armed conflict.
That is a trap from which no ballot can escape.
The wiser course is to recognize the parliamentary mandate while insisting that it be used to widen, rather than constrict, the democratic field. Dr. Abiy Ahmed should be allowed to govern through the majority his party secured. Opposition parties should be allowed to organize, campaign, and criticize without intimidation. Armed groups should be offered credible avenues into peaceful political competition, but no organization should retain violence as an alternative electoral mechanism.
This is why Ethiopians should consider giving Dr. Abiy Ahmed the benefit of the doubt.
The phrase does not mean blind trust. It means allowing a proposed reform to prove itself through law before condemning it through assumption. It means acknowledging that a constitutional path, though imperfect, is preferable to another generation attempting to negotiate political succession through funerals.
Karl Popper argued that democracy’s essential virtue is not that it always selects wise rulers, but that it permits citizens to remove governments without bloodshed. Ethiopia has spent too long asking who deserves to rule and too little time constructing a reliable answer to the more important question: How must every ruler eventually leave?
A two-term executive presidency could provide that answer. If properly designed, it could normalize succession, encourage political parties to cultivate new leadership and force governments to understand public office as borrowed time. Dr. Abiy Ahmed could leave Ethiopia something more durable than buildings, military victories or development statistics: the precedent that even a powerful Ethiopian leader becomes constitutionally replaceable. That would be a formidable legacy.
Dr. Abiy Ahmed must also not be judged primarily as an Oromo leader presumed to be advancing an exclusively Oromo agenda. Such ethnic reductionism reproduces the very political pathology Ethiopia must overcome. Every Ethiopian who reaches national office comes from an ethnic community. Origin should become neither permanent evidence of guilt nor automatic entitlement to loyalty.
An Amhara, Oromo, Tigrayan, Somali, or Sidama leader does not cease to possess ancestry upon assuming national office. The constitutional obligation is not to become ethnically invisible, but to rise above ethnic partiality.
Dr. Abiy Ahmed should therefore be judged by the quality and fairness of his government: whether it protects every community, respects the federal covenant, expands opportunity, preserves regional autonomy, and applies the law without ethnic preference. If a policy unfairly advantages one constituency, critics should demonstrate the imbalance with evidence. But condemning Dr. Abiy Ahmed merely because he is Oromo transforms citizenship into inherited suspicion and makes national leadership impossible.
Ethiopia cannot escape ethicized power by ethicizing every evaluation of power. The relevant question is not where a leader comes from, but whether justice reaches citizens who do not come from where the leader does.
The same discipline must govern Dr. Abiy Ahmed’s supporters. Defending every government decision because an Oromo leads the country is as corrosive as opposing every decision for that reason. Ethnic loyalty cannot replace public accountability, just as ethnic resentment cannot replace political analysis. Dr. Abiy Ahmed should receive neither ethnic immunity nor ethnic indictment. He should receive a national assessment.
Such an assessment must acknowledge significant achievements. Dr. Abiy Ahmed inherited a rigid political order and initially widened public space, released political prisoners, welcomed exiled organizations, and attempted to reorganize a governing coalition that had become increasingly unable to respond to popular discontent. The Pretoria Agreement ended the full-scale Tigray war and demonstrated that even after catastrophic violence, negotiation remained possible. Major economic reforms and infrastructure ambitions have sought to reposition Ethiopia as a more dynamic regional power.
These accomplishments do not erase the suffering of recent years. The Tigray war, the incomplete implementation of Pretoria, conflict in Amhara, insurgency in Oromia, political detention and pressure upon independent media remain part of the record. But democratic judgment requires weighing an entire record rather than selecting only the portion that confirms an existing allegiance.
The government is not solely responsible for Ethiopia’s violence. Armed movements have killed civilians, displaced communities, obstructed public life, and attempted to secure through force what they have not demonstrated through ballots. No democratic principle requires the state to remain passive before armed attack. At the same time, the state’s constitutional legitimacy imposes the higher obligation: security operations must distinguish civilians from combatants, detention must follow law, and collective punishment can never be disguised as national protection.
Peace requires reciprocal renunciation. Insurgents must abandon the mythology of liberating citizens by denying them ordinary life. The government must demonstrate that surrendering the gun opens political space rather than merely exposing former opponents to imprisonment. The ballot cannot replace the bullet on only one side.
The National Dialogue offers a platform for this transition. More than 4,000 delegates participated in discussions addressing governance, federalism, identity, land, peace, and constitutional structure. The process was not universally accepted, and important opposition and armed actors remained outside it. But exclusion alone does not render every conclusion worthless, particularly where invitations were reportedly extended and declined.
A national dialogue should be judged not by whether it satisfies an imaginary standard of perfect inclusion, but by whether its recommendations can improve political life. The appropriate response to shortcomings is enlargement and correction, not automatic demolition.
The incoming Parliament should therefore treat the Dialogue’s recommendations as a constitutional foundation rather than a finished commandment. Complete proposals and dissenting positions should be published. Independent jurists, regional governments, opposition parties and civil society should be allowed to scrutinize the draft amendments. Citizens must understand what powers are being consolidated, what protections are being created, and when the new term limit begins.
That final question is unavoidable.
If Dr. Abiy Ahmed becomes the first executive president, will his previous service as prime minister count? Will the anticipated October mandate constitute the first term under the new order? Could the creation of a legally distinct presidency allow two additional full terms after years already spent exercising executive power?
There are reasonable arguments on both sides. A new office ordinarily begins with a new constitutional clock. But changing the title of the executive does not erase the political reality that the same person has exercised national power since 2018. The answer must be written plainly, debated publicly, and accepted before political advantage hardens ambiguity into crisis.
Clarity would strengthen Dr. Abiy Ahmed rather than weaken him. A visible and irrevocable departure date would answer those who describe the proposed presidency as a disguised coronation. It would convert a promise into an institution and ambition into legacy.
The new presidency must also be balanced by serious safeguards. Parliament should retain a clearly defined mechanism for withdrawing confidence. Emergency declarations should expire unless renewed legislatively. Senior appointments should receive meaningful scrutiny. Public expenditure, particularly within the security establishment, should be audited. Constitutional adjudicators must possess sufficient independence to interpret executive power without fearing the executive.
These are not arguments against Dr. Abiy Ahmed. They are protections for his reform. A constitutional design dependent upon the goodness of its first occupant will not survive a less restrained successor.
Ethiopia must now choose between two forms of skepticism. One assumes that every reform is deception and therefore returns politics to the battlefield. The other recognizes that leaders are fallible and therefore builds institutions capable of limiting them. The first skepticism produces permanent conflict. The second produces constitutional government.
Dr. Abiy Ahmed should be given the opportunity to pursue the second path.
If the proposed system establishes a genuine two-term limit, protects political competition, and preserves federal autonomy, Ethiopians should support it even if they distrust the person initiating it. A nation cannot postpone peaceful succession until it discovers a universally beloved leader. Such a person does not exist, and waiting for one is merely another way of waiting forever.
If Dr. Abiy Ahmed manipulates the term count, disables competitors, subordinates constitutional interpretation or treats parliamentary selection as coronation, public suspicion will have been vindicated. But Ethiopia should permit the constitutional test before delivering the historical verdict.
The benefit of the doubt is not absolution. It is a final space between certainty and condemnation, a chance for conduct to answer suspicion.
Let Dr. Abiy Ahmed govern through the parliamentary mandate his party has secured. Let critics speak without becoming enemies of the state. Let opposition parties compete without maintaining armed wings. Let unfinished peace agreements be implemented. Let every community judge national leadership by justice and performance rather than ancestry. Above all, let the new Constitution specify when power ends.
Ethiopia does not need citizens to trust Dr. Abiy Ahmed without reservation. It needs Dr. Abiy Ahmed to help construct an order in which personal trust is no longer necessary because tenure is limited, opposition is protected, and succession is certain.
The defining question is not whether Dr. Abiy Ahmed wishes to become a king. It is whether Dr. Abiy Ahmed can help build a presidency in which no Ethiopian leader, regardless of popularity, ambition, or ethnicity, can ever become one.
Ethiopians should give Dr. Abiy Ahmed the benefit of the doubt, provided that his promise of limited government is converted into clear, enforceable constitutional law.
Mohamud A. Ahmed – Cagaweyne Is a columnist, political and security analyst, and researcher at Greenlight Advisors Group – Somali Region Of Ethiopia. He can be reached at : +251 900 644 648 or +254 759717898
Editor’s Note: Views in the article do not necessarily reflect the views of borkena.com
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