Meles Zenawi is the first to die of the quartet of former rebels whom the West in the late 1990s branded “a new breed” of African leaders.

The term suggested they were different in style and substance from the leaders they had overthrown and their seniors on the continent.

With the benefit of hindsight, the term also signalled the capture of a new generation of radical African leaders by the West.

Soon enough, the quartet became the “darlings” of the West. And, with one exception, they continue to be key allies of the West, albeit in an uneasier relationship than in the past.

The term was used often by the administration of US president Bill Clinton to describe America’s newest allies on the continent.

These were President Isaias Afwerki of Eritrea, Ethiopia’s now deceased premier Meles Zenawi, then vice president and defence minister Paul Kagame of Rwanda and President Yoweri Museveni of Uganda.

At the time, Isaias, Meles, Kagame and Museveni were young compared with other African leaders. For example, Kenya’s president Daniel arap Moi was 72 and had ruled the country for 18 years.

Isaias, Meles, Kagame and Museveni ran clean governments and enjoyed the unreserved support of their people.

They developed credible socio-economic programmes and were clear where and how Western loans and grants would be best used, something that made it easier for Western governments to work with them.

And within a short time they started reversing the negative social indicators that marked their countries, expanding education, improving basic healthcare and helping lift up their agrarian economies.

The quartet was not powerful only within their borders. Their influence extended into the conference rooms of regional groupings.

In the 2006 biography, The Mediator, about time as the chief mediator of the North-South Sudan conflict, Kenya’s General Lazaro Sumbeiywo tells the story of a July 1997 meeting of the Intergovernmental Authority on Development in Nairobi, attended by Sudan’s President Omar al-Bashir and Sudan People’s Liberation Movement leader John Garang, as well as Isaias, Meles and Museveni.

After several hours behind closed doors, the Igad leaders emerged, with none talking to the other.

Sumbeiywo later learnt that the “new breed” leaders had threatened to invade Sudan if Bashir did not negotiate. Moi then took Bashir to his office, Sumbeiywo writes, and told him, “These young men mean what they are saying. They will do this to you.” Bashir relented and agreed to start negotiations with the SPLM.

One reason the quartet gave for overthrowing their predecessors was the oppression citizens suffered at the hands of those regimes.

And in the early years of the quartet’s rule, ordinary Eritreans, Ethiopians, Rwandans and Ugandans enjoyed more freedoms than they had for decades.

The new leaders maintained the state-owned broadcasters but also allowed privately owned independent papers to publish what they saw fit.

But after the September 11, 2001 attacks in New York, all four put in the squeeze. Public debate on important issues was discouraged, or stifled.

The independent media started being encouraged to toe the line, or were simply shut down. The oppressive habits of the old regimes came back.

In Ethiopia, the peak of this oppression was the May 2005 elections. Opposition parties had recognised that united they had a better chance at successfully challenging the hold on power of the governing Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front party.

After all, the EPRDF is a coalition of several political parties. The alliance received a major boost when National Assembly and local government results for the capital Addis Ababa showed a clean sweep by the opposition, including unseating a key Meles ally, current Communications Minister Bereket Simon.

But when opposition supporters protested the results in other parts of the country, the oppressive side of Meles emerged.

The police shot protesters on the streets of Addis Ababa and elsewhere. Opposition leaders were put under house arrest, others went into exile.

When the electoral board dismissed many of the formal recounts of some National Assembly results that the opposition had asked for, more protests took place. And the police responded with bullets.

There were even reports of snipers shooting at protesters. In the end, a government investigation found 193 people were killed. Thousands were arrested.

There was some protest from Western capitals. But by then Meles was a key ally in the United States’ war on terror and the protests did not persist.

In later years, Ethiopia allowed the US Central Intelligence Agency to interrogate terror suspects in secret prisons.

Both Ethiopia and the CIA denied this happened but several of those suspects have talked about their interrogations since their release. Ethiopia is also believed to be a base for drones the US military uses in its attacks on suspected terrorist bases in the region.

Many of the policies Meles oversaw and implemented will be carried on after his death. His coalition, the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front, has an absolute majority in the National Assembly. Many of the people he worked with during his 21-year rule of Ethiopia, remain in government.

Meles seemed to be preparing the transition to a new leadership in 2015, the year of Ethiopia’s next election, which Meles had announced he would not be contesting.

In September 2010, he named someone 10 years his junior as deputy prime minister and foreign affairs minister. Hailemariam Desalegn Boshe was serving as the government whip in the National Assembly at the time.

As deputy PM, Hailemariam was an understudy of Meles. Equally significant, he took over the foreign affairs portfolio from Seyoum Mesfin, who had held that post since 1991, the year Meles came to power.

Seyoum and other Cabinet ministers were posted to various capitals around the world as ambassadors in the September 2010 changes. They had been in government for a long time and it seems they were being given a soft landing.

Now that Meles is gone, it is unclear whether the easing out of the old guard will continue without resistance. It is also unclear whether Meles’s and Seyoum’s efforts to strengthen relations with China will continue to be supported in the EPRDF, or whether other foreign powers will seek to influence a new policy direction.

Tom Maliti is a Nairobi-based journalist who has been covering African affairs for more than a decade