ETHIOPIA: Getachew’s New Position & more – 17th April 2025

Salaam salaam from BA! This is the Rorshok Ethiopia Update from the 17th of April twenty twenty-five. A quick summary of what's going down in Ethiopia.

Let’s begin with news of an appointment. Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed has appointed Getachew Reda, the former president of the Tigray region’s interim administration, as his East African Affairs Advisor, only a week after Getachew’s resignation.

Getachew used to be a prominent figure in the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (or TPLF) until his fallout with Party Chairman Debre-Tsion Gebre-Michael and other party leaders. He was also a staunch opponent of PM Abiy during the Tigray war but will now work alongside him.

Recall that Getachew was the TPLF’s lead negotiator in the Pretoria agreement, which ended the war between the TPLF and the federal government. Prior to Abiy’s rise to power, Getachew served as the Minister of Government Communication Affairs.

Even though this appointment was the most relevant, it wasn’t the only one.

On Thursday the 10th, PM Abiy named Berhanu Tsegaye, who has worked as the Minister of Justice and who is currently Ethiopia’s ambassador in Djibouti, as the state minister of foreign affairs.

PM Abiy also appointed the former president of Mekelle University as an advising state minister in the Ministry of Education.

After making these appointments, PM Abiy headed to Vietnam for a state visit. Nguyen Minh Hang, Vietnam’s Deputy Foreign Minister, welcomed him as he arrived in the Southeast Asian country on Monday the 14th. This visit makes Abiy the first Ethiopian leader to visit Vietnam since the two countries officially established diplomatic relations in the nineteen-seventies. According to Vietnamese media, Pham Minh Chinh, Vietnam’s PM, initiated the visit.

Abiy visited Toyo Solar, a solar panel manufacturing plant, before attending the fourth Partnership for Green Growth Summit or P4G in the country on Thursday the 17th.

Additionally, PM Abiy signed numerous agreements, including a deal on civil aviation, which will allow Ethiopian Airlines to fly directly from Addis to Hanoi; Ethiopia and Vietnam also agreed to cooperate in education and trade. PM Abiy sat down with the Secretary of Vietnam’s Communist Party; the two discussed building inter-party relations, economy, trade, and diplomacy.

Back in Ethiopia, the Human Rights advocacy organization Amnesty International released a report on Monday the 14th, urging the Ethiopian government to immediately suspend the Corridor Development Project (or CDP), which began over a year ago.

Amnesty International said that late last year, the government had forcefully evicted hundreds of residents of the subcities of Addis Lemi-Kura and Bole to accommodate the CDP, which the executive says is improving the city’s aesthetics and residents’ quality of life. The organization said the forced evictions might constitute a breach of human rights and wants the government to suspend the CDP, not only in Addis, but in cities across the country, at least until a human rights impact assessment is conducted.

Speaking of the capital, Purpose Black, a company that had pledged to build and deliver houses in Addis for a modest one point five million birr, which is around ten thousand US dollars, is going to have its machinery auctioned.

The company has all but failed in its promises, its executives are either under arrest or not in Ethiopia. On top of this, a bank is now going to auction the machinery it gave as collateral for loans, with thirteen vehicles and machinery each worth millions of birr up for grabs. Seven months ago, the government pressed charges against the CEO and other executives for fraud and corruption.

Meanwhile, on Thursday the 10th, the state minister of transport said that it has decided to ban motorcycles and three-wheeled vehicles that run on gas at a launch program of a private company that produces electric bikes and three-wheeled vehicles locally.

He said that Ethiopia spends billions of birr importing low-quality gas and that switching to electric vehicles or EVs will help save money and protect the environment. He added that the country has already become the largest in terms of EV use in Africa and that there are currently over a hundred thousand electric vehicles in the country. He also mentioned that Ethiopia has lithium and lead ion reserves that are used to make batteries for these vehicles.

The state minister also called on the private sector to help build charging stations, saying that thousands of stations need to be built to meet current demands.

In other news, on Tuesday the 15th, the House of Peoples’ Representatives reviewed the Ministry of Education’s eight-month performance report, and members urged the Ministry to improve teachers’ living standards.

The members blame the lack of improvement in teachers’ lives for the decline in the quality of education. They called on the Ministry to increase teachers’ salaries and benefits, with one member, who also happens to be an associate professor, saying that he earns only 13,000 birr, which is ninety-nine US dollars a month, compared to 40,000 birr, more than three hundred dollars, eight years ago.

The Ministry admitted that education quality is shockingly low, with about eighty-five percent of schools considered sub-standard.

The House was in the news again as it passed two proclamations on Thursday the 17th. The first is an amendment to the mass media proclamation. Even though the executive says the amendment will ensure media outlets’ transparency, media organizations are not in favor, citing increased government control.

The other proclamation that passed is a bill establishing a water resource administration council, which did not go through a lot of discussion or controversy, unlike the mass media bill.

Next up, The Ethiopian Deposit Insurance Fund said in a press conference on Tuesday the 15th that over the past nine months, it has collected over five billion birr, which is more than thirty-five million US dollars, in premiums from financial institutions.

The fund was established to pay back bank customers’ deposits in case a bank went bankrupt. Member banks are required to pay 0.3% of their total deposits to the fund.

On another note, representatives of the Ethio Engineering Group, a state-owned company that produces and assembles heavy machineries, said in their report to the Parliament that they have been operating at seventeen percent of its full capacity on average over the past five years, and at twenty-seven percent, since the beginning of the current fiscal year. They said that their low performance was due to the company’s inability to access foreign currency, stating that it only managed to get three percent of the total foreign currency it planned to get over the past three years.

House members said that even though banks are selling foreign currency, the company has been unable to get loans from banks because it isn’t presenting a reliable audit report.

Another government entity that MPs criticize is the Investment Commission, which has failed to attract and retain foreign investment. The Commission held a press conference on Thursday the 10th and announced that the business forum Invest Ethiopia will be held for the third time this May.

During the press conference, the Commissioner said that after the government opened the doors for foreign investors to engage in retail and wholesale trade last year, forty foreign companies have obtained a permit so far, allowing them to buy coffee, poultry, livestock and other products from the local market for export.

Companies interested must still fulfill the Commission’s requirements of having earned a minimum of five hundred thousand US dollars on average over the past three years and agree to sell five hundred thousand US dollars worth of their products within their first year.

Aaand that’s it for this week! Thank you for joining us!

Did you know that the Rorshok Ethiopia Update is just one of many? We’ve got country updates, and non-county updates, including the Arctic Update, about the area north of the Arctic Circle, the Multilateral Update, about the world’s major multilateral institutions, and the Ocean Update, about the 70% of the world covered in salt water.

To check out the full list of updates, follow the link in the show notes!

Ciao!