Addis Abeba — A few weeks ago, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed delivered a lecture on the role of intellectuals in society as part of the celebrations marking Addis Ababa University's 75th anniversary. Delivered within an academic setting and addressed to scholars and students, the lecture, titled "Who is an intellectual?", represented a rare moment in which intellectual life was publicly acknowledged by the highest level of political authority. Such an intervention warrants careful and serious engagement, a fact reflected in the wide range of scholarly responses it has generated.
This article follows that engagement by situating the lecture within the broader political, ideological, and institutional context of contemporary Ethiopian governance. Rather than dismissing the initiative outright, it takes the intervention at face value while interrogating the conditions under which it emerged, particularly the governing record of the past seven years and its implications for intellectual life, academic freedom, and public discourse.
Intellectual life under conditions of protracted conflict
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Any assessment of the Prime Minister's appeal to intellectual responsibility must be grounded in the political realities that have shaped Ethiopia's recent history. Over the past seven years, governance has been characterized less by deliberative pluralism than by the conduct of sustained and highly destructive armed conflicts across multiple regions of the country. These conflicts have produced catastrophic human consequences, fractured social relations, and significantly undermined the institutional foundations necessary for independent intellectual inquiry.
Beyond their immediate humanitarian impact, these wars have restructured the terrain of public discourse. Intellectual life has been increasingly subordinated to the imperatives of conflict, with profound consequences for the autonomy, diversity, and ethical orientation of scholarly engagement.
War as an organizing framework for intellectual discourse
During this period, the state has consistently tolerated--and in many instances actively promoted--the instrumentalization of intellectuals as legitimizers of war. Rather than functioning as independent critics, analysts, or custodians of public reason, intellectuals have often been encouraged to assume the role of rationalizers of violence, producing narratives that demonize adversaries, normalize mass suffering, and supply moral or historical justifications for military campaigns.
Intellectuals who resisted this role, particularly those committed to critical, progressive, or peace-oriented perspectives, frequently faced delegitimization, harassment, professional exclusion, exile, or enforced silence. The cumulative effect has been a highly polarized intellectual environment in which dissent is equated with disloyalty, analytical complexity is treated as political ambiguity, and scholarly disagreement is reframed as antagonism toward the nation itself.
Within such a context, appeals to intellectual ethics and restraint cannot be examined in abstraction from the state's own role in constructing an environment that systematically constrains independent thought. The prevailing intellectual order has not emerged organically but has been shaped by political power under conditions where war functions as the dominant organizing principle of public discourse.
State power, anti-intellectualism, and the production of legitimating knowledge
Concurrently, the past several years have witnessed the rise of regime-aligned commentators and pseudo-intellectual figures whose primary function has been the legitimation of state violence. These actors have been elevated through access to media platforms and political proximity, often deploying the language of inevitability, necessity, and moral righteousness to sanitize atrocities and suppress ethical scrutiny.
This pattern reflects a deeper structural tendency toward anti-intellectualism within the governing project--one that prioritizes loyalty over methodological rigor, affirmation over critique, and moral certainty over analytical openness. In this setting, independent intellectual inquiry is perceived not as a public good but as a potential source of political instability.
Governance discourse has been heavily infused with prosperity-theology moralism, which substitutes theological conviction for political accountability."
Against this background, a university lecture that proceeds as though intellectual life operates under conditions of normalcy risks obscuring, rather than illuminating, the crisis facing academic and intellectual institutions.
Moralized governance and the theological framing of war
The intellectual consequences of this political order are further compounded by the ideological framework through which power has been justified. Governance discourse has been heavily infused with prosperity-theology moralism, which substitutes theological conviction for political accountability. Within this framework, war is not framed as a tragic failure of political negotiation but as a morally sanctioned trial, an instrument of purification, redemption, or historical destiny.
Such a worldview is structurally inhospitable to critical intellectual traditions. It delegitimizes structural and material analysis, moralizes dissent, and collapses complex political realities into binaries of righteousness and evil. In this discursive environment, intellectual critique is not merely contested on analytical grounds; it is rendered ethically suspect.
The normalization of this moralized war discourse has enabled a sophisticated propaganda apparatus oriented toward the production of consent. To address intellectuals in a university setting without directly confronting the corrosive effects of this discourse on scholarly life risks normalizing devastation and treating systemic rupture as continuity.
Objectivity, normativity, and intellectual responsibility
African intellectual traditions have historically been neither neutral nor detached. They emerged from anti-colonial struggles and have been animated by normative commitments to justice, dignity, and collective emancipation. In contexts characterized by mass violence, appeals to value neutrality are not only inadequate but also ethically evasive.
The responsibility of intellectuals under such conditions is not to suspend judgment but to resist the instrumentalization of knowledge in the service of violence and domination. Intellectual ethics, therefore, cannot be reduced to individual comportment; they must be situated within broader struggles over power, truth, and institutional autonomy.
Individual ethics and structural conditions
While virtues such as humility, restraint, and reflexivity are important, they are insufficient in the absence of enabling structural conditions. Academic freedom, institutional autonomy, legal protections for dissent, and plural public spheres are indispensable to the flourishing of intellectual life. Ethiopia's current intellectual crisis is thus less a failure of individual ethics than a failure of political and institutional architecture--an architecture profoundly shaped by prolonged conflict.
Moral reckoning and the question of good faith
The Prime Minister's lecture also raises questions of moral reckoning. The awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2019 generated widespread expectations of a transformative, peace-oriented political trajectory. The subsequent descent into large-scale and widely documented warfare has rendered that moment a source of both national and international disillusionment.
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Any engagement with intellectuals conducted in good faith would therefore require an explicit reckoning with this rupture--acknowledging not only unmet expectations but also the material and moral consequences of policy choices made since that moment.
Dialogue, critique, and the limits of symbolic gestures
None of the above negates the importance of dialogue. On the contrary, it underscores its necessity. The Prime Minister's initiative should not be dismissed outright; it should be engaged critically and redirected toward an inclusive, honest, and ethically grounded national conversation. Dialogue, however, cannot be sustained on selective memory or institutional denial.
Conclusion
Ethiopia's crisis is not one of intellectual scarcity, but of political conditions that have subordinated critical thought to war and ethical reasoning to power. Any serious discussion of the role of intellectuals must begin with a candid acknowledgment of the damage inflicted on intellectual life by years of conflict, repression, and propaganda, followed by a concrete commitment to rebuilding the institutional foundations of critical inquiry.
Absent such a reckoning, appeals to intellectual responsibility, however eloquent, will remain symbolically significant yet substantively inadequate. AS
Editor's Note: Jawar Mohammed is a political analyst and deputy chairman of the Oromo Federalist Congress (OFC).
