April 6, 2026
Yonas Biru, PhD
The Ethiopian Prime Minister, Abiy Ahmed, is known for grandiose development announcements that border on delusion and collide violently with the crushing weight of the nation’s economic reality.
When a government systematically curates false narratives and silences critics who point to basic indicators, it does more than mislead—it disables the very feedback mechanisms necessary for sound policy. Optimism can inspire, but official delusion, when repeated and institutionalized, becomes a form of governance that condemns millions to avoidable suffering.
Institutionalized Official Delusion
In 2019, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed he promised with “100% certainty” that by 2030, Ethiopia would be Africa’s development beacon. By 2036, he projected, Ethiopia would become Africa’s largest economy, presumably surpassing Nigeria, Egypt, and South Africa. Addressing the Ethiopian Parliament, he enthralled: “We will achieve this — no one will stop us!” By 2050, he envisions Ethiopia as one of the world’s two superpowers, audaciously eclipsing either the US or China.
In July 2022, I wrote in. published article: “The sooner we lay to rest PM Abiy’s delusion that Ethiopia will be one of the two most powerful nations in the world sermon… the better for Ethiopia.” In 2024, the Prime Minister publicly repeated his plan to make Ethiopia a global superpower by 2050.
The Prime Minister understands the Ethiopian social psychology of “Axum this, Adwa that, Lalibela ኡኡ and ገዳንም አትርሱ” that perpetually pursues a miraculous divine intervention to restore the nation to its glorious era of Axumite civilization. A large swath of the political elite is prone to fall for the Prime Minister’s delusional narrative as God’s deliverance of Ethiopia to the apex of the global hierarchical totem pole. This is precisely why the Prime Minister often says: Our economic growth is beyond our wildest expectation. እግዚአብሄርን ከማመስገን ሌላ ምንም ማለት አይቻልም.
Yet the economic fundamentals tell a different story. The disconnect between the Prime Minister’s delusion and the hard reality is striking when viewed through the lens of basic services—the most fundamental indicators of development.
In 2024, only 13–14% of Ethiopians had access to safely managed drinking water. By comparison, the Sub-Saharan Africa average is 30%, and the world average is 74%. Even more telling, per capita electricity consumption remains below 100 kWh per year, one of the lowest levels in the world and far below what is required for meaningful industrialization. For context, the Sub-Saharan Africa average is ~500 kWh, the world average is 3,500–3,800 kWh, and in the US (the country Ethiopia’s Prime Minister aspires to rival in 2050) it is 12,300–12,700 kWh.
Furthermore, in 2024, 68.7% of Ethiopians were classified as multidimensionally poor, far above the Sub-Saharan Africa average of 48.4%. An additional 18.4% are vulnerable to multidimensional poverty—meaning that even slight economic deterioration could push the incidence to 87.1%. The health sector is equally underdeveloped. Ethiopia has approximately 0.11 physicians per 1,000 people, far below the Sub-Saharan Africa average of 1.3 physicians per 1,000 people.
Ethiopia is also a nation where over the last four years only 5.1% of high school students pass national college entrance exams. The national average hides a massive gap between a small, privileged minority and the vast majority of students. In 2025, over 1,200 public secondary schools did not have a single student score above the 50% passing mark.
Ongoing wars in regions like Amhara and Tigray have been devastating. Over 9 million children are out of school, thousands of schools have been damaged or closed, and many students have lost two full years of instruction. The number of students even sitting for the exam dropped from nearly 900,000 in 2022 to just over 580,000 in 2025, as many were unable to register.
The defining feature of Ethiopia’s economy is not that of a country on the cusp of global superpower status; it is an economy struggling to achieve far more basic and urgent goals: ensuring food security, lifting the majority of its population out of extreme poverty, improving access to clean water and electricity, and strengthening public health and education services.
By comparison, China’s publicly stated 2035 and 2050 aspirations offer a telling perspective. Over the past 40 years, China’s GDP grew at an average of 10% per year, lifting more than 800 million people out of poverty. Today, China is an upper-middle-income country in terms of GDP per capita and aims to become “a medium-level developed country by 2035” and “a global superpower by 2050.”
The Prime Minister’s supporters argue that his statements are aspirational political rhetoric intended to inspire the population. This might hold true had he not been simultaneously creating and curating false narratives about current realities. Cultivation of outright delusional narratives as development goals is counterproductive rather than merely optimistic. Let us look at some examples.
Ethiopia as a Wheat Exporting Country
In June 2021, the Prime Minister announced Ethiopia would achieve wheat self-sufficiency within a year and would begin exporting wheat shortly thereafter. In 2022, he escalated the claim, declaring that Ethiopia had achieved wheat self-sufficiency and announced plans to export wheat to neighboring countries. By 2023, the government reported Ethiopia had become “Africa’s emerging wheat exporter.”
In a June 8, 2025, interview with the Ethiopian News Agency, the Prime Minister said:
“When I first took office, Ethiopia was spending close to 1 billion USD annually on wheat imports. In the past three years, that figure has dropped to zero… Ethiopia is currently hosting over one million refugees from neighboring countries. The wheat brought in to support these refugees is often misinterpreted. It should be understood as part of a global humanitarian effort, not an indication of domestic shortage.”
His statement was a bold lie. Here is the reality. In 2024, wheat imports to Ethiopia amounted to 1.4 million metric tons—ten times higher than its exports, which stood at 150,000 metric tons. The estimate for 2025 imports is 1.3 million metric tons, and there is no recorded export.
Contrary to the government’s misleading propaganda to its people, its joint estimate with the UN estimated that about 15.8 million people were facing hunger and needed food assistance in 2024. Different international bodies give slightly different estimates for 2025, but they are broadly consistent. For example, the European Civil Protection and Humanitarian Aid Operations (ECHO) estimates that about 18.9 million people in Ethiopia needed humanitarian assistance in 2025, which includes food aid as a major component of needs. For 2026, FAO’s emergency assessment is that around 15.8 million people in Ethiopia are facing acute hunger.
The Ethiopia-Djibouti Natural Gas Pipeline
In September 2022, the government announced the discovery of an estimated 7 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. Ethiopians at home and in the diaspora (including government opponents) believed the finding was a game changer. The plan was to build an Ethiopia-Djibouti pipeline to transport natural gas from Ogaden (Calub and Hilala), liquefy it in Djibouti, and export it to Asian markets.
At the time, I argued the cost of extraction of natural gas is very high and the 7 trillion cubic feet discovery was not large enough to justify the billions of dollars of investment needed to build pipelines and a liquefying outlet. I was attacked both by government supporters at home and opposition forces in the diaspora for raining on their parade. In 2025, the government officially abandoned its plan to build the Ethiopia-Djibouti pipeline.
The $2.5 Billion Gode Oil Refinery
The $2.5 billion Gode Oil Refinery was officially launched by the Prime Minister in October 2025. A foundation stone ceremony was held in the town of Gode, located in Ethiopia’s Somali Regional State. The developer is China’s Golden Concord Group (GCL) in partnership with the sovereign wealth fund Ethiopian Investment Holdings (EIH). The initiative was touted to process 3.5 million tons of fuel annually (approximately 70,000 barrels per day). The first of two construction phases was targeted for completion within 24 months.
The refinery faces a series of deeply interconnected structural challenges. First and foremost is the lack of a commercially viable upstream resource base. Simply put, the refinery is designed to process crude oil from the Hilala oil field in the Ogaden Basin. However, this field has a long history of failed potential. The reserves are estimated to hold only 13.6 million barrels of associated liquids, a tiny amount for a 70,000 barrel per day refinery.
In short, the “upstream resource base” required to feed the refinery does not yet exist in a proven, commercially viable form. Decades of exploration led by foreign companies like Tenneco, Petronas, and various Chinese firms have explored the Ogaden Basin since the 1970s with limited commercial success. While China’s GCL oversaw “limited crude output” in 2018, large-scale commercial production and exports have never materialized.
There are also severe infrastructure gaps. Chief among them is that even if oil were found, getting it to the refinery and getting the refined products to market is a monumental challenge. There is also the cost constraint: the cost of domestically refined fuel is inherently expensive, negating the goal of reducing import costs.
The bottom line is that construction on the $2.5 billion Gode Oil Refinery has not yet begun, despite its announcement six months ago and the government’s exceptionally ambitious timeline. The project has only reached the groundbreaking or foundation stone ceremony stage, which, while a necessary symbolic first step, falls far short of active construction. The project is stalled at the ceremonial phase. It is part of the pattern: sign MOU, delay, renegotiate, and abandon course.
MOU to Build a $2.5 Billion Fertilizer Project
In 2025, Ethiopia signed a $2.5 billion MOU with Nigerian billionaire Aliko Dangote to build a 3-million-ton-per-year fertilizer-producing complex in Gode, Somali Region. The project depends on natural gas from the Calub and Hilala fields, supplied via a dedicated pipeline operated by China’s GCL Group.
As noted above, six years ago, the government announced a pipeline to Djibouti to export natural gas, projected to earn $8 billion per year. China’s GCL Group was charged with executing the plan. The plan was aborted after the company failed to meet financing and development conditions. Gone with it was the $8 billion per year projected export revenue. The Dangote fertilizer announcement fails to address the structural challenge of the natural gas constraint.
The Summer Irrigated Wheat Initiative
The discrepancy between official government announcements and independent observations is a central theme in recent analyses of Ethiopia’s agricultural policy.
The summer irrigated wheat initiative was launched around 2019. The government initially targeted several hundred thousand hectares, rapidly scaling the rhetoric to 1 million hectares and beyond.
By early 2024, government officials claimed that over 1.3 to 2 million hectares were under summer irrigation. International monitors note that the reported aggregate figures do not match the physical reality on the ground. International observers argue that local officials often report inflated figures to meet quotas set by the central government, leading to a phenomenon where hectares exist on paper but not in the soil.
Conclusion
Across every major sector – energy, agriculture, industry, and education – a consistent pattern emerges: grand announcements followed by stalled execution, inflated claims contradicted by hard data, and ambitious targets divorced from economic fundamentals. The wheat self-sufficiency narrative collapses under import figures ten times higher than exports. The natural gas pipeline was abandoned after years of fanfare. The Gode refinery remains little more than a foundation stone six months after its launch. The fertilizer project rests on gas that has yet to flow. And the irrigated wheat hectares exist more on official ledgers than on the nation’s landscape.
Ethiopia today is a nation caught between two realities: the auspicious official narrative of rapid modernization and global superpower status, and the harsh economic and social realities affecting tens of millions of its citizens. Without grounding policy in measurable progress and tangible outcomes, ambitious declarations prevent the nation from confronting hard realities and pursuing robust, strategic solutions.
Editor’s Note : Views in the article do not necessarily reflect the views of borkena.com
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