Content: Opinion

  • Aviation’s Davids Must Get Their Due

    The almost two-decade-long Yamoussoukro decision has realised, and the African skies have been liberalised, at least between the 23 countries that are on board with the Single African Air Transport Market (SAATM). Despite some naysayers who believed doing as such will give way to big airlines squeezing the smaller ones, the decision has had a […]

  • Hunt for Illusive Public Trust

    The world does not lack for statistics. From economic growth to country livability, from crime rates to worker’s productivity, there remains little that has not been measured. Even the results are somewhat similar. Depending on the subject matter at hand, at the top or the bottom, one usually finds Nordic or African countries. Analysing those […]

  • Wages Too Soon to Ponder

    To any one person that has paid attention to Ethiopia’s economy, what is immediately apparent is that exploitive wages to employees – at the risk of sounding perverse – is one of the strengths of the economy. The state of Ethiopia’s labour force, not the fact that it is unproductive, but that employers could get […]

  • Informality, Product of Irksome Formality

    Ethiopia, akin to its developing counterparts, has a broad and lively underground economy. It does not contribute to the national coffer or gets regulated by the government. It is instead dictated by the rawest of market forces. It is the perfect example of the fact that supply will always thrive if there is adequate demand, […]

  • Pubescent Economy’s Growing Pains

    Rare as it may be, it is not utterly absurd to find an informed, informative, conversation in a minibus taxi about policies and lack of government services. It was a Monday, at 8pm, and I was on my way from Megenagna to my home. The taxi fare was five Birr – typical for that time […]

  • Battle of Economic Classes

    It does not do much to Ethiopians’ collective morale that individuals such as Jeff Bezos, chief executive officer of Amazon, Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft, and Warren Buffet, often termed “the greatest investor of all time”, all have wealth worth more than the East African nation’s annual gross domestic product (GDP). It gets worse. The […]

  • Love Thy Neighbour

    It took hours since coming into effect for the warring factions of South Sudan to break the cease-fire that was signed three days ago. The armed opposition accused the government forces, and vice-versa, of violating the ceasefire. It left the world to wonder if the humanitarian crisis the nation is engulfed in would not subside […]

  • Visas: Who Needs Them?

    Walls are built for either of two reasons: to keep people away or to confine them. Hungary has a barrier on the border it shares with Serbia and Croatia, built during the height of the European migrant crisis a couple of years ago, for the former purpose. North Korea, by contrast, uses the demilitarised zone […]

  • Migratory Tendencies

    Cable News Network (CNN) are proud of themselves. They reported on a, granted, unbelievable, shocking, story about the slave trade in Libya. Nima Elbagir, one of the broadcaster’s correspondents, and her team did the investigation only to come across migrants that fell into the hands of traffickers getting auctioned off as slaves. The world was […]

  • Robots, Pariah to FDI

    The age of the robots is upon us. Do not take my word for it. It was the think tank McKinsey Global Institute that undertook a study only to conclude 800 million jobs globally would be lost to robots by 2030. That many jobs constitute a third of the planet’s entire labour force. How this […]

  • Slippery Slope of Weak Institutions

    Mauritius has the best government, at least in Africa, according to the 2017 Ibrahim Index of African Governance. But that is only the most recent indicator, with the island nation of a little over a million people meriting its fair share of admirers. Another is the Economist Intelligence Unit which declared the country the only […]

  • Green Never Hurt Anybody

    Tuesday was almost literally a grey day. The morning hours, especially in many of Addis Abeba’s residential areas, saw skies covered in what at first may look like fog, but in reality was thick white smoke. It was a consequence of burnt refuse by residents who have taken to cleaning the city somewhat traditionally, just […]

  • Telecom Sovereignty

    I feel bad for the Ethiopian consumer on two fronts. For one thing, its purchasing power is pretty low and getting lower, if the measurement of the Birr against a basket of major currencies is anything to go by. Then there is the lack of adequate disposable incomes, with per capita income standing at a […]

  • Banks Have Feelings Too

    It is oft quipped that breweries and banks in Ethiopia are rarely starved for dough. Look at all those expensive, high production value commercials on TV. Or the lotteries banks dole out for those lucky few who use them as remittance channels. But why even go there, why not just look at their annual profits? […]

  • Make Way for Big Brother

    Few could be faulted for failing to see the cause of the public’s shock at learning of Abadula Gemeda’s (MP-OPDO), speaker of the parliament, tender of resignation. A resignation is not new under any circumstances, but a politician doing so, from a high-level post as Abadula’s, is almost unheard of. Not long after, Bereket Simon, […]

  • Dawn of Babies

    The Central Statistical Agency (CSA) is going to do a recount. But it is facing a problem. The Agency wants more accuracy and thus more gadgets like tablets and power banks. But complications in importing the items have forced the Agency to postpone the 2017 national census to 2018. The last time there was one, […]

  • Requiem for the Ethiopian Consumer

    They finally did it. There was speculation, and there were some legitimate reasons, but it still came as a shocker when the central bank eventually went ahead with the devaluation. The fateful day was October 10. National Bank of Ethiopia’s (NBE) Vice President, Yohannes Ayalew (PhD), called up the state’s lackeys to announce that 23 […]

  • Just Play the Game

    There should be no losers in a democracy, but during elections there are. Those people are the opposition. And in Ethiopia’s case, they are far worse off. The Democrats of the United States (US) may grumble that they do not have a majority in either the White House, the Senate or the Congress, but they […]

  • Live, Let Drive

    The most depressing Ethiopian TV ad is a mother’s interior monologue. She reminisces about her daughter, the daughter’s bright future and the tragedy that followed. Through the use of acutely unsettling audiovisuals, she recounts her daughter’s death in a car accident. The advertisement is sponsored by the Addis Abeba City Administration, Bloomberg Philanthropies and Vital […]

  • Long Live the Chancellor

    The world’s most sardonic TV satire, Saturday Night Live (SNL), loves German Chancellor Angela Merkel. The woman charged with spoofing her, Kate McKinnon, who also impersonates Justin Bieber and Jeff Sessions, usually attempts to depict a lady that is overworked and unfailingly correct. McKinnon’s impressions of her are funny, and spot on, simply because Merkel […]

  • Be Happy, Not

    Governments do not see people. They only see the statistics that represent them. They do not measure in terms of the individual, because in most cases there are too many individuals – a hundred million of them in Ethiopia’s case so far. What is quantified is the unique member in each sector – whether a […]

  • All It Takes to Anger Private Banks

    It was a crude moment for the Commercial Bank of Ethiopia (CBE) – the biggest bank in Ethiopia, whose assets are pushing on half a billion dollars – had to be assisted by the much smaller private banks to foot the bill for the Ethiopian Shipping Logistics Services Enterprises (ESLSE) to the Djibouti ports. The […]

  • One Down, 99 to Go

    The Ethiopian Calendar is weird. It presumes to count the number of years and days since the birth of Jesus Christ. But its New Year does not come on the religious figure’s birthday, which if Christians are to be believed, falls on Christmas. Instead, it takes place on the early days of September. The Ethiopian […]

  • Confessions of a Copy Editor

    Language is about as real as it gets. All we really have is communication, the means by which we express ourselves. It is not the real us that shows who we are but the manner with which we convey ourselves. Appearance is the key, as opposed to essence, because no one ever really gets a […]

  • Such Sketchy Ancestors We Possess

    The political storm that hit the United States, and the world at large, has never really subsided, although it has been two weeks since it struck. On August 12, 2017, in the American city of Charlottesville, a slew of far-right, anti-immigration, anti-diversity, neo-nazi white nationalist held a rally in support of a statue of Robert […]