Famine and Foreigners: Ethiopia Since Live Aid. By Peter Gill.

SO PREDICTABLE was the result of the recent general election in Ethiopia that the announcement that Meles Zenawi, the prime minister, had been returned to office seemed almost comically triumphant. His ruling Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) won 499 out of 547 parliamentary seats—with all but two others going to EPRDF-allied parties—and all but one of 1,904 council seats in regional elections. The voter turnout was a vertiginous 93.4%. This was one-party rule with a vengeance: the triumph of repression, the squashing of dissenting voices and the shutting down of independent media.

Yet many in the West had high hopes for the clever and resourceful Mr Zenawi, who came to power nearly 20 years ago. Once a mate of Britain’s former prime minister Tony Blair, for instance, Mr Zenawi sat on Mr Blair’s Commission for Africa which in 2005 outlined a comprehensive approach to solving Africa’s many problems. Mr Zenawi was supposed to be the brightest example of a new generation of leaders who were going to combine good governance with making poverty history. In fact, as this year’s election proved, there is precious little of the former, and as Peter Gill’s well-written and accessible book shows, still an awful lot of poverty.

Despite the fact that Mr Gill almost bends over backwards to be fair to Mr Zenawi, there is no escaping the fact that Ethiopia remains almost as fragile and underdeveloped as it was when an Irish musician, Bob Geldof, set up the first global pop concert, Live Aid, to help the drought-benighted nation 25 years ago, on July 13th 1985. A country that became best known for famine, when Mr Gill first covered it as a television reporter, Ethiopia remains uncomfortably close to the brink every time the rains fail.

The core of the book covers Mr Gill’s return to the areas he had reported on during the famine a quarter of a century earlier. Depressingly, he finds few grounds for optimism. Aid has rarely helped much. In one chapter he returns to the impoverished region of South Wollo. In 2005 nearly 800,000 people had been put on a “safety net” food-for-work scheme, aimed at helping them achieve self-sufficiency. After three years barely 2% had done so. Despite billions of dollars in aid money, Ethiopia’s agricultural economy after years of Mr Zenawi’s rule is, he concludes, “in a state of almost permanent crisis”.

Mr Gill touches on the reasons for this state of affairs, even if he never marshals them into a coherent indictment of Mr Zenawi and the clique of former Marxist guerrillas who surround him. An ideological attachment to the “peasantry” means that landholdings are still far too small for people to make money from. A preference for state economic control means private enterprise is discouraged, especially in the mobile-phone sector that is booming elsewhere in Africa. The result is no jobs. Political repression discourages any constructive criticism. The most menacing problem, Ethiopia’s rapidly growing population, is almost never discussed.

Mr Gill suggests that Mr Zenawi may yet be saved by China. That would be a shame for Ethiopia. The Chinese might be building a lot of roads, but it is not at all evident that they are helping to tackle the issues of land and population. Mr Gill generously concludes that Ethiopia has made “modest but real progress” under Mr Zenawi. In fact, most of the book points to the opposite conclusion.