Plagiarism in Abiy Ahmed’s PhD Thesis: How will Addis Ababa University handle this?
Alex de Waal, Jan Nyssen, Gebrekirstos Gebreselassie, Boud Roukema and Rundassa Eshete
Ever since Abiy Ahmed was awarded his PhD degree at the
There is now sufficient evidence to demand Addis Ababa University to re-examine Abiy’s thesis; it is adequate to suspend or revoke a doctorate. In comparable cases, universities have revoked doctoral degrees on the basis of plagiarism. Addis Ababa University
Another approach would be to suspend the award of the PhD degree pending major revision, re-submission and re-examination.
Because decision makers have a tendency to exploit their academic degrees to boost their legitimacy in the eyes of the public, dissertations have come under scrutiny. Crowd sourcing in Germany, for example (
With the appointment of Abiy Ahmed as Prime Minister in 2018, Ethiopia has increased its reliance on PhD holders for high-level political roles. Ethiopia’s Minister of Defense, Abraham Belay, for example, proudly employs the Twitter handle @AbrahamPostDoc.
We looked at
Standard plagiarism detection tools identify similarities between the text submitted and other texts available online. In a thesis largely reporting results of fieldwork, the most likely places to look for this are the theoretical and literature review sections. If a section on fieldwork findings is plagiarized, it would likely be copied from unpublished reports or student theses, which, because they are not availed online, are not detected by plagiarism detection tools.
We conducted the plagiarism check on Chapter 2, which is the literature review, filling 41 of the 150 pages of the thesis.
“Although Ethiopia is one administrative unit, inter and intra-regional border demarcation has had economic implications pertaining to resource appropriation, mobilization and distribution”
was rewritten to:
“Although Ethiopia is one administrative unit, inter and intra-regional border demarcation has had development implications with regards to resource appropriation, mobilization and distribution” (see Annex B).
Overall, there is plagiarism on every single page of Chapter 2 of Abiy Ahmed’s PhD thesis, ranging from one detected plagiarized paragraph up to entire pages. Several scholars will recognize that their writings have been very extensively copied.
A Turnitin score of 62% and occurrence of plagiarism on 41 out of 41 pages of Chapter 2 are very high figures. A PhD supervisor should not allow a thesis to go forward for examination with this score, on the reasonable expectation that a reputable university would reject it outright.
When two texts are identical or very similar, the question arises as to who is copying from whom. The date of publication is a good guide: almost always the later piece is copied from the earlier one. However, it’s important to cross-check. In principle, a writer could produce a draft and put it aside for some years, during which time it was plagiarized by someone else who publishes before the original author gets around to finalizing and publishing. In each of the cases highlighted in
It is beyond our personal capacity to carry out a wide scrutiny of PhD theses produced at Ethiopian universities. Informal contacts with colleagues at those universities hinted that plagiarism was observable in MSc theses by Ethiopian politicians.
Academic institutions have the obligation to revoke a degree in cases of significant falsification of data or plagiarism.
Violation of academic standards isn’t a minor misdemeanor. The academic world depends upon the bona fides of examiners and peer reviewers. If a hitherto-reputable university awards degrees for reasons other than academic excellence, its reputation and the value of its degrees is debased.
The question of the legitimacy of Abiy Ahmed’s academic credentials is first and foremost an issue of credibility for all graduates and faculty of Addis Ababa University and other Ethiopian universities.
Alex de Waal is Executive Director of the World Peace Foundation
Gebrekirstos G. Gebremeskel is founder and chief editor of Tghat.com, which is dedicated to chronicling the war on Tigray. His PhD research focuses on the application of machine learning systems and their impact on society.
Jan Nyssenis a physical geographer, and professor of geography emeritus at Ghent University.
Boud Roukema is a professor of cosmology at Nicolaus Copernicus University. He obtained his PhD in 1993 at the Australian National University.