Abiy Ahmed’s real product is not reform. It is grandeur.

He sells Ethiopia as a civilization rising, a regional giant reclaiming its place, a state too large for ordinary constraints. Ports, prestige, unity, megaprojects, sovereign destiny — the language is always oversized. Even his failures are narrated as proof of historic burden. The pitch never gets smaller. Only the country does.

Beneath the theatre, Ethiopia looks less like a rising power than a state accumulating fragility. Its wars did not produce national cohesion. Its elections did not resolve legitimacy. Its rhetoric of unity did not tame ethnic fracture. Its economic ambition did not erase the everyday experience of inflation, distrust, fatigue, and coercion. The system survives, but survival is not the same thing as strength.

This is the central trick of Abiy’s politics: instability is converted into mythology. A crisis becomes a test of destiny. A backlash becomes evidence of jealous enemies. A failed gamble becomes an unfinished chapter in a heroic national story. The scale of the language protects the scale of the ego. And the more brittle the ground becomes, the more grandiose the speech has to be.

That is why the regional posture matters. Leaders who cannot fully settle the political question at home often seek a larger stage abroad. The promise of historic reach, symbolic victories, and geopolitical prestige becomes a substitute for institutional coherence. It gives supporters a horizon to stare at while the floor underneath them keeps cracking.

History is full of leaders who tried to overcome domestic fracture with civilizational drama. The pattern is old: when cohesion is weak, spectacle grows. When legitimacy thins, destiny thickens. When reality disappoints, the map becomes a fantasy board.

But states do not live on symbolism forever. They live on competence, restraint, trust, and durable institutions. Ethiopia today does not look safer because of the scale of Abiy’s imagination. It looks like a country being asked to absorb the cost of it.

Grandeur can win headlines. It can animate crowds. It can temporarily silence doubt. But eventually citizens inherit not the speech, but the structure left behind. And if the structure is brittle, no amount of historic language can prevent the reckoning.

Abiy Ahmed sells grandeur. Ethiopia increasingly inherits fragility.