Abstract:
The study focuses on Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s inaugural speech delivered on Monday 2 April 2018. The aim of the study was analyzing the rhetorical proofs of Abiy’s speech during his Inauguration ceremony in Ethiopian parliament.The researcher employed qualitative research design to analyze the speech of the Prime Minister.The researcher used full English transcript of Abiy Ahmed’s inaugural speech as the main source of data. The technique of data Collection in this research was note-taking. The data were gathered from the utterance employed in Abiy Ahmed’s first inaugural address. The findings indicate that the three Aristotle’s rhetorical proofs (ethos, pathos and logos) were used in his first inaugural specch. In ethos, he established his intelligence, goodwill and virtuous character by utilizing ethical proof. The most ethical part of his speech were the appeal to Mehatma Gandhi ethics, recalling the four past historical battles, acknowledgement to former Prime Minister Hailemariyam Desalegn and religious reference. In pathos, he showed his emotional anger, friendship, fear, admiration and confidence by using emotional appeals. The most important part of the emotional appeals were referring corruption, appreciating the struggle of women, looking political parties as his brothers and sisters. In logos, Abiy Ahmed supported his arguments by using logical reasoning. He employed enthymeme and examples to convince the audience emotionally and logically. The speech text logically approached the audience on the issues of inauguration day as historical day, Ethiopia as a fertile womb, Grand Renaissance Dam as symbol of unity, nation and nationalities as heroes and Gada system as the local democracy which practice in Ethiopia for the long time. Finally, Reseacher suggests that the future researcher to analyze visual and audio of the speech to examine if Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed hadled his bodily movements, tone of voice and rhythm in delivering his inaugural speech.