The year was 1988. The Derg regime still held power, and Ethiopia stood at a crossroads. That year, as a Public Relations Officer at the “Ethiopian Works National Control Committee” I wrote my first article about what I then called “the cancer in our system”—the pervasive, normalized practice of using public position for private gain. Little did I know that this would become my life’s work, or that 36 years later, I would be writing not about progress, but about regression; not about healing, but about metastasis.

In the Reporter newspaper alone, I have published approximately one hundred and eighty articles. Among these, about 30 focused specifically on political criticism, with titles that still ring in my ears: “Briber and Bribery,” “Calling a Thief a Thief,” “What Should the EPRDF Do?” and “How to Protect Our National Wealth from the Corrupt?” Each piece was written with the hope that naming the disease might begin the cure. Each was crafted with the belief that exposure leads to reform.

Yet here we stand at the tail end of 2025, and the bitter truth must be spoken: the situation has not improved. In fact, it has evolved, mutated, and spread. The social stigma of corruption—once concentrated in political circles—has now permeated every layer of Ethiopian society. The moral decline I warned about has become our national reality.

The Expanding Stain

What began as political corruption has become societal corruption. The disease has spread from politicians to religious leaders, from government officials to intellectuals, from brokers to journalists, from doctors to teachers. We are witnessing what sociologists call “normalization of deviance”—when unethical behavior becomes so common that it ceases to shock, and instead becomes expected, even accepted.

The broker who demands a percentage simply for connecting citizens to services they’re entitled to receive. The journalist who writes favorable coverage in exchange for access or favors. The doctor who prioritizes patients based on connections rather than need. The teacher who trades grades for gifts. The religious leader who leverages spiritual authority for material gain.

We are all swimming in these polluted waters. As the Amharic proverb says, “አንድ ፍጥረት ከሌላ ፍጥረት ይጠጣል,” loosely translated as “One creature drinks from another.” We have created an ecosystem of mutual exploitation where everyone is both victim and perpetrator, both exploited and exploiting.

Understanding the disease: What exactly is conflict of interest? Beyond Simple Corruption

Many people confuse conflict of interest with corruption. They are related, but distinct. Corruption is the overt act—the bribe taken, the favor granted. Conflict of interest is the condition that makes corruption possible, likely, even inevitable. It is the situation in which a person in a position of trust has competing professional and personal interests.

The formal definition: A conflict of interest arises when an individual or organization is involved in multiple interests, one of which could possibly corrupt the motivation or decision-making of the individual or organization.

But let me simplify it with an Ethiopian context: Conflict of interest occurs when you use your authority or position to serve your personal interest instead of the public interest or the entrusted responsibility.

The Ethiopian Contextualization

In our culture, with our strong emphasis on family and community, conflict of interest takes unique forms that we often fail to recognize as problematic.

Consider the nepotism dilemma: When is hiring a relative an act of family responsibility, and when is it a betrayal of public trust? Consider our gift culture: When does a gift become a bribe? How does our tradition of gift-giving during holidays and celebrations create expectations of reciprocity in professional contexts? Consider community obligation: How do we balance our duty to our specific ethnic, religious, or regional community with our duty to the nation as a whole?

These are not abstract questions. They are daily realities for every Ethiopian in a position of authority or influence.

The many faces of the disease: Sector-by-sector analysis

Politics and Government: Where It Began

My earliest articles focused here, and for good reason. When political leaders model self-serving behavior, it sends a signal that permeates the entire society.

Consider a hypothetical but all-too-real scenario: A regional administration needs to purchase one hundred vehicles for its transportation department. The tender process begins. One company, owned by the cousin of the head of the procurement committee, submits a bid. Their vehicles are of lower quality and higher price than competitors. The committee, under subtle pressure, finds ways to disqualify other bidders on technicalities. The cousin’s company wins.

The consequences cascade: The region receives inferior vehicles that break down frequently. Maintenance costs skyrocket. Public transportation suffers. Citizens lose trust in government. The message spreads: success comes through connections, not competence.

This isn’t just a stolen contract—it’s stolen public trust, stolen development opportunities, and a stolen future.

Journalism and Media: The Watchdogs Who Stopped Watching

I write this as a journalist of nearly four decades, with pain in my heart. Our profession, meant to be society’s conscience, has become compromised.

There are levels to this compromise. The first is the overt bribe: a journalist receives money or gifts to write a favorable story or kill an unfavorable one. This is increasingly rare because it’s too obvious.

More common is the access trade: the journalist who cultivates relationships with powerful figures, writes favorable coverage, and receives exclusive access in return. The journalist becomes a PR agent rather than a truth-teller.

Most subtle—and most damaging—is the career calculus: when journalists shape their reporting based on what will advance their careers, please their editors, or avoid controversy. Truth becomes secondary to careerism.

I have seen colleagues who started with fire in their bellies slowly become “practical.” They learn which truths can be told and which must be whispered. They learn that some officials are “untouchable.” They learn that some stories have consequences not just for their subjects, but for their careers. This slow erosion of principle is perhaps more dangerous than outright corruption, because it happens with the complicity of the journalist’s own rationalizations.

Religious Institutions: Trading Spiritual Capital

Perhaps most heartbreaking has been watching this disease infect our religious institutions. When faith becomes a commodity, something sacred dies.

Consider the religious leader who travels abroad “on interfaith dialogue” but spends more time fundraising for his personal projects than building bridges. Or the local religious figure who convinces followers to donate to a “school” or “clinic” that never materializes, or that benefits his family disproportionately.

The damage here is multidimensional. It corrupts genuine faith. It exploits the most vulnerable—the poor who give from their poverty. It creates cynicism about all religious institutions. It undermines the moral foundation society needs to combat corruption elsewhere.

Healthcare: When Healing Becomes Business

The Hippocratic Oath begins: “First, do no harm.” Yet in our healthcare system, conflicts of interest are causing profound harm.

Consider a surgeon who owns shares in a private diagnostic clinic. When patients come to him, he disproportionately refers them to “his” clinic for tests, even when less expensive options exist. Or consider the pharmaceutical representative who provides “educational grants” to doctors who prescribe their medications most frequently.

The consequences are measured in human suffering. Patients pay more for care. Medical decisions are influenced by profit, not patient need. Public trust in healthcare erodes. The brain drain accelerates as ethical doctors flee the compromised system.

Education: Corrupting the Next Generation

If we poison education, we poison the future. Yet conflicts of interest have become endemic in our schools and universities.

A teacher gives better grades to students whose parents provide gifts or favors. A university professor requires students to purchase his privately published textbook at inflated prices. An administrator admits students based on family connections rather than merit.

Each instance teaches the next generation that merit doesn’t matter, that rules are for the powerless, that success comes through manipulation, not effort, that the system is rigged. We are literally teaching our children to be corrupt, then wondering why society becomes more corrupt.

Business and Commerce: The Illusion of “Just Business”

In the private sector, conflicts of interest are often dismissed as “just business” or “smart strategy.” But they distort markets and harm economic development.

Consider the contractor cartel: Business owners in the same industry sit on government tender boards. They rotate winning bids among themselves, keeping prices artificially high and quality artificially low. New, innovative companies cannot compete because the system is rigged.

The economic cost is staggering: higher costs for government projects, poor quality infrastructure, stifled innovation and entrepreneurship, reduced foreign investment as investors avoid corrupt markets.

The social and economic cost: Beyond morality to survival

The Poverty Connection

Some may ask: “Why focus on ethics when we have poverty to fight?” This misunderstands the relationship. Conflict of interest isn’t just an ethical issue—it’s a primary cause of poverty.

Let’s quantify what we lose.

Financially, the World Bank estimates that corruption costs countries up to five percent of GDP. If we take a certain country, with a GDP of approximately one hundred twenty-six billion dollars, that’s over six billion dollars annually—enough to build thousands of schools, hospitals, and roads.

Consider the opportunity cost: When contracts go to connected but incompetent companies, projects fail, funds are wasted, and development stalls. A road that should last twenty years crumbles in five. A school building leaks. A hospital lacks essential equipment.

Consider the brain drain: Our best and brightest leave not just for higher salaries, but for systems where merit matters. Every doctor, engineer, or entrepreneur who leaves represents lost potential for national development.

The Social Fabric Torn

Beyond economics, conflict of interest destroys something equally precious: social cohesion.

Ethiopian culture has traditionally valued community—the concept of living together. But normalized self-interest transforms society from a community into a collection of competitors. The elderly proverb “አንዱ እጅ ሌላውን እጅን ያጥባል” (one hand washes the other) becomes perverted from mutual support to mutual backscratching.

Young people growing up in this system learn that ethics are for losers. They see that the successful are those who game the system. They internalize that public service means private gain. We are creating generations of cynics who will perpetuate and worsen the problem.

The psychology of complicity: Why good people do nothing

The Normalization Trap

One of the most perplexing questions is: Why do essentially good people participate in or tolerate this system?

The answer lies in psychological adaptation

No one starts by accepting a major bribe. It begins with small “gifts,” then slightly larger favors, until what was once unthinkable becomes normal. “Everyone else is doing it” becomes a powerful rationalization. When corruption is everywhere, not participating can feel like disadvantaging yourself and your family.

In our culture, family obligations are powerful. When relatives expect you to use your position to help them, resisting feels like betrayal of familial duty. With economic pressures mounting, many feel they have no choice. The public servant earning an inadequate salary rationalizes that “supplementing” income through favors is necessary for survival.

The Bystander Effect

Equally important is why observers do nothing.

There is a diffusion of responsibility: “Someone else will address it” or “It’s not my problem specifically.” There is fear of retaliation: Speaking up can cost jobs, opportunities, even safety. There is a feeling of futility: “The system is too big to change” leads to resignation. And there is comfort with the devil known: Even a corrupt system provides predictability, while change brings uncertainty.

International perspectives: What can we learn?

Case Studies in Reform

While Ethiopia’s situation is serious, other nations have faced similar challenges and made progress.

Consider Botswana, once one of Africa’s poorest countries, now ranking among the least corrupt on the continent. Key factors included consistent political will from leadership, independent anti-corruption agencies with real power, a cultural emphasis on “Botho” (respect for community), and transparent management of diamond revenues.

Consider Georgia and its traffic police miracle. In the early two-thousands, Georgia’s traffic police were notoriously corrupt. Reform involved firing the entire traffic police force—sixteen thousand officers—and rebuilding from scratch with higher pay and strict oversight, creating a culture where taking bribes became socially unacceptable. Public trust in police rose from five percent to eighty-three percent in five years.

Consider Rwanda’s use of technology through the Irembo platform, which digitizes government services, reducing opportunities for petty corruption by minimizing human interaction in service delivery.

The Ethiopian Context: What Works Here?

International examples must be adapted to Ethiopian realities.

We must leverage our cultural strengths such as  keeping your honor/dignity to make corruption shameful, employing religious institutions as moral educators, utilizing community structures like idirs and maheber or peer accountability.

We must take practical first steps: beginning with sectors where public anger is highest, likely land administration and traffic police; creating protected whistleblower mechanisms; implementing transparent e-governance for high-corruption services; paying living wages to reduce “survival corruption.”

A path forward: Concrete steps for Ethiopia

Immediate Actions

We need a national diagnosis: an independent, transparent audit of conflict of interest in five key sectors: procurement, land administration, customs, judiciary, and education.

We need a leadership declaration: Political, religious, and business leaders must publicly commit to and model ethical behavior. Symbolic acts matter: leaders publicly declaring assets, refusing inappropriate gifts.

We need public education: a national conversation about what constitutes conflict of interest, using relatable examples from daily life.

Medium-Term Reforms

We must strengthen the legal framework: clarifying conflict of interest laws with specific examples and realistic penalties.

We must establish institutional guards: an independent Office of Public Ethics with investigative power, protected whistleblower channels, mandatory conflict of interest declarations for public officials.

We must implement systemic changes: increasing public servant salaries to reduce economic pressure for corruption, digitizing high-risk services like permits and licenses, creating merit-based promotion systems in the civil service.

Long-Term Cultural Shift

We must integrate ethics education from primary school through university, tailored to the Ethiopian context.

We must create a social reward system with public recognition for ethical behavior through awards, honors, and media coverage.

We must foster intergenerational dialogue: structured conversations between elders who remember different norms and the youth about rebuilding ethical foundations.

We must encourage religious reformation: religious institutions must clean their own houses and lead by example.

Final thoughts

In 1988, when I wrote my first article on this subject, I was young enough to believe that exposing truth would lead to change. At thirty-six years older, I am wiser but not cynical. I have seen enough to know change is difficult, but I have also seen enough to know it is possible.

This is not just about laws or systems. It’s about who we are as Ethiopians. It’s about reclaiming our heritage of integrity. Our ancestors built Lalibela and Harar not for personal glory but for divine glory. Our scholars preserved knowledge through centuries not for personal gain but for collective enlightenment. Our farmers share water according to ancient rules of equity, not selfishness.

The disease of self-interest has infected us, but it has not killed our essence. I have seen taxi drivers return lost phones. I have seen neighbors care for orphans. I have seen teachers buying supplies for poor students from their meager salaries. The ethical Ethiopia still exists—it’s just being suffocated by the normalized corruption.

We must choose. We can continue down this path where everyone takes a little, and together we lose everything. Or we can begin, person by person, institution by institution, to rebuild an Ethiopia where position means service, where authority means responsibility, where success means contribution.

The conflict of interest epidemic will not be cured by a single law or a dramatic event. It will be cured by millions of small decisions: the official who refuses the inappropriate gift, the journalist who reports truth despite pressure, the religious leader who models humility, the businessperson who competes fairly, the teacher who grades honestly, the citizen who demands better.

I am in the evening of my life and career. I may not see the Ethiopia I have written toward for so long. But I write this for the young journalists, the future officials, the next generation who must decide what Ethiopia they will build. The question is not whether we can eliminate all conflict of interest—human nature guarantees we cannot. The question is whether we will normalize it or fight it.

After 36 years and one hundred eighty articles, my message remains the same, but now more urgent: Choose to fight. Start today. Start with yourself. Our children’s future depends on it.

Teshome Berhanu Kemal is a veteran journalist, researcher, and prolific author who has contributed to Ethiopian public discourse since 1988. His scholarly research on Islamic civilization, peaceful coexistence, and religious tolerance has been presented at both local and international forums.

 Contributed by Teshome Berhanu Kemal

The venue was filled to capacity, the crowd dominated by Rastafarians, easily recognizable by their dreadlocks and the Ethiopian tricolor woven into headbands, scarves, and clothing. As is often the case in such gatherings, the atmosphere brimmed with optimism and gratitude, a shared celebration of Ethiopian identity and, by extension, African belonging. For Ethiopia’s friends from the Caribbean coastlands, that extension is seamless: Ethiopian, African, and diasporic identities collapse into one. Africa, in their imagination, is not merely a continent but a global community—a people bound together by shared history, pain, aspiration, and an enduring belief in Pan-Africanism.

The evening began generously. Beer was free, courtesy of BGI Ethiopia, and as I took my first sip of a cold Castle, I absorbed the mood of the room—anticipatory, reflective, alive. The album’s title, Andromeda, immediately invited contemplation. Wasn’t Andromeda a constellation, light-years away? A quick search confirmed that it is, in fact, the nearest galaxy to our Milky Way, a vast neighbor in which our solar system is little more than a footnote.

The implications are humbling. The light we see from the Andromeda Galaxy today began its journey long before Earth existed. In the face of such immensities—of time, space, and distance—human achievement feels suddenly modest. We are, for all our technological prowess, infinitesimal actors in an incomprehensibly vast cosmic drama.

Yet the word Andromeda carries more than astronomical meaning. It is also rooted in Greek mythology, where Andromeda is a princess—strikingly described as Ethiopian. According to the myth, she is punished by jealous gods and cast into exile, despite her beauty and nobility. Unlike many tragic figures in Greek lore, however, Andromeda ultimately escapes destruction. Her story ends not in ruin but in transcendence, immortalized in the heavens. It is a narrative of suffering followed by cosmic redemption—a motif that resonates deeply with African and diasporic histories.

The first speaker of the evening was Getnet, an astrophysicist and the author of a book also titled Andromeda. He spoke of the galaxy not only in scientific terms but through the lens of ancient Ethiopian knowledge systems, emphasizing the sophistication of astronomy and astrology in early Ethiopian civilization. He lamented the erosion of indigenous knowledge and the absence of archives that might have preserved it. Once, he noted, ordinary people read the skies with the naked eye, interpreting celestial movements with confidence and nuance. Today, much of that wisdom has faded from collective memory.

Getnet also pointed out that the myth of Princess Andromeda exists within Ethiopian traditions as well, no less complex than its Greek counterpart. Reclaiming such narratives, he argued, is not an exercise in nostalgia but an act of cultural recovery.

When Sydney Salmon finally took the stage, the intellectual threads of the evening found their emotional center. He explained that Getnet’s book inspired him to name the album Andromeda. The convergence of cosmic science and ancestral myth had, he said, sparked a realization he could no longer ignore.

For Salmon—part of the Jamaican Rastafarian community that settled in Shashamane during the long-anticipated return to Ethiopia—the album’s title carried profound significance. In a world scarred by injustice and shaped by systems that have stripped humanity of its virtues, Andromeda represents a new consciousness. It gestures toward the possibility of renewal: a new heaven and a new earth, a moral correction of historical wrongs, and a reimagining of how humans relate to one another.

The audience received this vision with unrestrained enthusiasm. There are moments, rare but unmistakable, when life briefly steps outside the monotony of routine and reveals a deeper meaning. This was one of them. Beyond the daily grind, beyond material pursuits and competitive self-interest, there exists a higher purpose—one rooted in shared humanity rather than endless rivalry.

That evening, reggae music fulfilled its loftiest calling. It became a vehicle for reflection, a catalyst for collective hope, and a bridge between myth, science, and lived experience. The album’s cover—Salmon peering through a telescope into the vastness of space—felt less like artistic flourish than an invitation: to look beyond the visible, to imagine futures not yet within reach, and to believe that unseen possibilities may still be drawing closer.

Contributed by Bereket Balcha

The phrase “like it or lump it” (resign yourself to it) possibly derives from lump, which once meant to gulp down a bitter medicine… antibiotic. My effort to retrieve the earlier flash went nowhere. From the frying pan to the fire, my pop-eyed observation of a kid enjoying a macchiato with his probable granddad—a vision of simple satiety—only brought back my childhood neighbors’ call “Nu buna tetu.” I used to accompany my mother, carrying her cap and saucer, often wondering if the cap was too big for coffee. It worked out, though: after some nagging, I’d get a generous flow from the second and third rounds into the saucer. I never forget that grey-circled, artistic cap. I checked myself: “What is new?” This, in itself, only made me angry.

 Just last week, I’d confessed to a cousin that I’d developed a coffee addiction, blaming those kiddy days. Well, a man’s heavy throat-clearing yanked my attention from the lost marvel and sent it straight to Japan. I had a friend, a true friend in need who was there on a testing day, who lived near Japan, closer to Bole. I had to use the fixed rotary phone at an all-wooden shack shop after visiting his rented place. This was when mobile fever hit town, when a 1990s Ericsson was soon dubbed the duster due to its ridiculous size. I had no mobile then; few had that luxury or privilege. Approaching the shop, a girl was busy brand shopping paracetamol, the attendant showing off his sales knack with new brands. I had to stop that nonsense.

Turning a corner, I met a woman from my old Geez class. An elementary school teacher, she was never boring. One day, she lamented never quenching her thirst for mathematics, the pure elation of solving equations. Yet, she found solace in the successful completion of her two sons as Engineers; talking about it made her face glow. This woman reminds me of AI, embodying the essence of mothers and fathers to the nth degree, even though the creators’ certainty hovers around one percent. It’s a new infrastructure—this Amharic teacher and her Engineering sons—we have to navigate, or we’ll look uneducated, like the US Education Minister calling AI an A first. I avoided a long-time friend’s house, eager to get home and write. A good student, hard worker, integrity intact. A man who grinds his coffee with a pestle and mortar, never bothered with an email, let alone the social media hassle. We recalled mocking a friend long ago who awkwardly asked if Brezhnev was dead when told about Andropov—forgetting Chernenko in between.

Between us, it’s as if nothing has changed since then. I wondered what he’d say if I told him the idea slipped and I was chasing it angrily. This teacher later lamented the not-too-long-lasting friendship prevailing among today’s kids. Walking on, I thought of my geologist friend I used to mock for looking for something that somebody has not put. Now, though, I was digging in my own mind for something that was there a minute ago. Bitter.

 I love working with Geologists, and I hate it. I don’t know why the Ministry of Mining sees me as a living artifact. If not for the billions I saved, I truly witnessed millions thrown into empty pits by consumables purchase-driven drilling based on maps drawn because gold mining was seen as a gamble requiring only heart, not mind. This idiotic mindset is now being promoted by the CEO on social media. I remember a US drilling supervisor leaving the site immediately, terrified of putting that horror on his CV. I also remember cultural prospectors, illiterate, pointing out alluvial deposits, burdens waiting improved cut-off grades.

The geologist, out in the field with their geophysics and geochemistry tools, is often bossed by men who never used a geological hammer, led by someone with all the world’s answers from the latest science, asserting the heart precedes the mind—a claim dumb enough to wake Mark Twain for a definition of stupidity wrapped in senility, a folly that wasted millions. This reminded me of Plato and Eyoel Muluwork, a rare gem of a Geologist who could assay massive data.

Geological exploration is not a sudden gold rush, it’s a slow-burn, multi-phase grind where failure is literally buried. You start with Regional Reconnaissance, the lumpen intellectual phase: squinting at maps for a sulfurous hint of anomaly—the “lump it” part. Then Prospecting, the boots-on-the-ground hustle.

Real geologists with geological hammers chip away, rock-hounding, collecting float, looking for gossan (weathered ore) that promises bigger things. The Geologist is a herculean figure, alone, needing people skills because their only company is silence and the occasional local pointing out the anomalies. Next is Detailed Exploration—geophysics and geochemistry roll in: the seismic sorcerers and assay acrobats. Finally, Drilling—the terrifying, high-stakes sinkhole of millions to prove the ore body is real, not a CEO’s fever dream.

A country never achieves proper economic breakthrough without foundational resources like coal and iron ore, or base metals like copper. Gold is the flash, the curse—neither foundational motivator nor stable hygiene factor (look at Africa’s conflict zones). The geologist’s essence is this combined expertise: the field geologist spotting the anomaly and the academic modeling the ore body. Their isolation demands AAU prioritize people skills—neither geophysics nor a geological hammer saves you from a sulfurous disposition or a community you can’t talk to.

My anger now aimed at writing: how friends sometimes made me look a buffoon. I was reminiscing about AAU, Tikur Anbessa, Beyene Merid, Kes Timhert Bet with Yeneta Dawit—I’m a nostalgia buff. I focused on AAU, forgetting the spark. I was in a mini-bus taxi with its “weyeyet” (discussion). Years ago, passing AAU, I bored a young campus kid with old stories. His eyebrow kept raising amidst his disinterest. I excused my memory lapse, suggesting I might have the opposite of progeria (old in childhood), not Alzheimer’s. We need pieces about Addis mini-buses and weyeyet. I thought of unbridled pieces from a decade ago. Now, I questioned if today deserved writing at all. Two neighbors gave genuine responses: one returned a published piece as behind time, boasted his kids loathed reading, didn’t have time to waste.

The other bird’s-eye-viewed it, emphasizing the editing needed, proving I was not only out of time but also a bit disturbed. I remembered Eudora Welty and Nathaniel Hawthorne: Welty reminding me to turn every encounter into writing, Hawthorne bearing poverty by reading Shakespeare. The idea got lost anyway. I arrived home to a Ministry of Health text advising against using antibiotics without professional advice. This reminded me of my piece shared with friends, even the reigning comedian’s joke—a piece for the Ethiopian Reporter if they dared run it.

The antibiotic message soothed me, bringing back my second-year teacher for life, Meera Kaushik. She brought the substance into her management/leadership class to explain the Hygiene Factor Theory, giving me cognitive gymnastics. She asserted that the use and effect of antibiotics is short or adrift of hygienic function: they don’t motivate healing, they prevent pain, letting the body’s natural drive do the work. The curing is the body’s natural response. This capsule wisdom is the plot. The issue is the cost and time to administer the drug—expenditure on merely stopping dissatisfaction (Hygiene), not creating satisfaction (Motivation). This is “like it or lump it.”

Think of Clarence Hemingway, Ernest’s father, whose suicide was tied to disregarding antibiotics—not lack of success (Motivation), but unmanaged pain and despair (Hygiene). My classmates from high school bookkeeping streams didn’t care; I was left with her assertions like Don Quixote with passages, advised by a friend to only study the notes for the exam. This later connected to interdisciplinary discourse at Asni Gallery.

My presentation at the Zerfeshiwal alumni group, where I was requested to speak in English without preparation, came after a period where my tongue faculty at work was lost. Work was cut into check boxes; no meetings, minutes forbidden. Science led the company, left to a ghost science group. Raising science issues meant trouble. Individuality was mocked. George Orwell territory. The supreme leader mocked new ideas, calling people like me new idea idiots. He never laughed since he was twelve, his scathing attacks on reports insulting his rule, destroying a company with virtue, with mocks like “this idea is not low enough to be told a mouth like yours”—arrogance devised to siphon energy to make subordinates his tools. No wonder his preaching on ignorance targeted the educated.

My presentation story: A project for solar-paneled lamps in rural Ethiopia. The key: maintenance was exiged to be carried out solely by people who absolutely never leave the community. They had to be the utter washouts deemed so by the community. No wonder hygiene never reminded me of AAU’s special dish for sport stars, the teff flour in the injera sauce causing a student protest (instigated by interest groups and the grapevine).

 AAU desperately needs guidance and counseling—neither students remaining ID numbers nor classrooms instead of lecture halls. I learned from TOT that students need to be trained as teachers, amplifying the respect for teaching. Gen Z’s problem talking to strangers shows a lack of life-call training. Hygiene never reminded me of my own class, Seid, a teacher with his bamboo stick checking us on Mondays. Not even the deaf pensioner in Addis, keeping the road from Tekle Haimanot neat, whose hustle against waste was never tolerated by officials, unlike Nicholas Gogol’s Inspector General reminiscence.

The AAU Charter’s future: neither massive resources poured into hygiene factors (kludgeocracy management, teff flour protests, bureaucratic rataplan) nor their neglect. Too much pain kills motivation (Cognitive Athletics). The Acting President’s structural promise is hygiene factor recognition: cleaning the wound, not running the race. We must not devolve into Zugzwang nor Ayn Rand’s nightmare of theft-wired homo sapiens. The osseous theft and filiopietistic politicians are the contaminants forcing energy expenditure just to maintain non-pain.

The AAU Charter must shift: from torpid pretense to teaching students to engineer themselves through rigor—that is Motivation. 

Orwell’s warning about mocking individuality and ghost science groups is the ultimate hygiene breakdown. The utter washouts used in the solar lamp project, a system requiring people who absolutely never leave their community to handle maintenance, is a twisted version of positive deviance—a hygiene fix achieved by low expectation, not high motivation. This is the opposite deviance we must note: successful outcomes achieved by anti-conventional, negative means. 

AAU must reject this. It needs counseling and guidance to ensure students neither remain ID numbers nor fall into the lumpen intellectual class. Gen Z’s lack of people skills is critical for the isolated geologist.

The way out is the Jerry Sternin model: find the positive deviants. Not the change artist whose wisdom leaves with them. Not TBU (True but Useless) conventional wisdom. But finding small, successful “deviant” practices already working and amplifying them. The focus must be neither on the systemic failure that produces opposite deviance (like the utter washouts succeeding in maintenance due to their forced local immobility) nor solely on the overwhelming hygiene needs, but on isolating the local success stories (positive deviance) within the academic system.

The AAU charter needs to transition from psittacism to Lacedaemonian discipline, forging the mind until it is turned to steel. The waste of the brilliant surgeon due to machtpolitik is a catastrophic hygiene failure that nullifies his talent (motivator). We have to stop squandering intellectual revenue, neither in sardanapalian sloth nor kludgeocracy. We have to produce minds that offer solutions, not more logomachy. That’s the tea.

The door stays closed because I am the door, but the lock must be steel, not Jell-O.

Contributed by Tadesse Tsegaye

The World Bank Group is partnering with the African Development Bank and other partners on Mission 300, an ambitious initiative to connect 300 million people to electricity in Sub-Saharan Africa by 2030 and accelerate development and poverty reduction. At the same time, it is an unprecedented opportunity to make people, businesses, and communities more resilient to economic and other shocks and crises that will likely intensify in the coming decades.

New electricity connections will significantly improve people’s well-being, access to healthcare and education, and other basic needs, such as drinkable water and sanitation. Electricity saves time and improves health outcomes for women and girls by powering clean cooking technology that reduces exposure to extreme heat and local air pollution. It also generates new jobs, boosts productivity, and unlocks new opportunities through connectivity.

And access to electricity will boost the resilience of people who are among the most vulnerable to natural disasters and extreme weather events. In Africa, where more than two-thirds of the post-harvest food supply is lost, electric pumps, new food processing, and conservation equipment will help communities increase and preserve food supply and diversify incomes, making them less vulnerable to severe floods or droughts. As temperatures rise and heat waves become more frequent, power fans and cooling devices can help prevent heat-related illnesses and deaths and improve labor productivity.

Combined with digital technologies, greater energy access reduces harm to communities and saves lives. During droughts, flooding, or hurricanes, early warnings are critical. Reliable communication helps people know what to expect and what to do (for example, evacuate or shelter in place before a hurricane; plant more drought-resistant crops when low rainfall is expected). When disasters hit, governments and emergency services must coordinate action and collect data and information to target their support to communities. The ability for people and firms to respond and recover quickly—whether to charge a phone, use solar-powered radios and lighting, access money, or receive government support—is dependent on energy access. Mission 300 will contribute to modernizing the energy sector, which offers a key opportunity to use data and connectivity to better anticipate and respond to weather-related shocks as part of digitalization efforts.

Mission 300 will close the energy gap by making energy infrastructure more resilient. Estimates show that damages caused by extreme weather events across Sub-Saharan Africa cost the power sector up to USD 1.5 billion annually, burdening already budget-constrained governments and utilities. Efforts to boost energy access will be worthless if essential energy infrastructure doesn’t keep up, and the power goes out. Unreliable electricity delivery and frequent interruptions heavily impact people, firms, and entire economies. Power outages force firms and critical infrastructure to rely on expensive and polluting backup generators, decreasing productivity, entrepreneurship, and employment and reducing competitiveness and job opportunities. A study conducted in 23 African countries shows that even one percent increase in electricity outages would result in substantial productivity losses, averaging 3.5 percent, for businesses across the region. 

Mission 300 will integrate extreme weather risks as part of power-system planning and grid and off-grid solutions. In Ethiopia, Tanzania, Zambia, and Kenya, recurring and intensifying droughts have already put tremendous pressure on power systems and hydropower supply, dramatically affecting agricultural productivity and food security. In West Africa, many countries face the double threat of frequent heatwaves, which can strain electricity infrastructure and create fire-prone conditions, and flooding, which can submerge transformers and substations and sweep away distribution lines.

By adding off-grid renewable solutions, Mission 300 will enhance the resilience of power systems and reach communities that previous technologies could not. For example, distributed renewable energy (DRE), such as mini-grids or standalone solar, will increase connections in underserved areas and boost their resilience. Eight out of 10 people without electricity today live in fragile, remote, or conflict-affected regions, and DRE technologies are the cheapest and easiest way to connect them. At the same time, DRE solutions are portable, can be quickly deployed or restored after an extreme weather event, and can serve as backup power during outages.

In Nigeria, the DARES project will help over 17 million Nigerians gain access to clean and efficient electricity using distributed renewable energy solutions, replacing over 250,000 polluting and expensive diesel generators. It will not only address immediate energy needs but also strengthen the long-term resilience of Nigerian communities by reducing vulnerability to power cuts. Among the many beneficiaries, Garba Buwa recalls the difficulties his hospital faced due to unreliable electricity. His facility now enjoys clean and reliable electricity, ensuring the survival of mothers and newborns, and providing sufficient lighting for surgeries.

Energy access changes people’s lives. It improves health and quality of life and helps create jobs and livelihoods that lift people out of poverty. It also saves lives and allows people to better withstand and recover from shocks, building more-resilient communities and vibrant economies. For a woman named Meskerem, living in the remote village of Tum the connection to a solar mini-grid provided through the Ethiopia Electrification Program  has enabled her to run a small grocery store, have the capacity to refrigerate and package her products, and cook with an electric stove and oven. The income from her business has had a ripple effect, allowing her to buy a computer for her children that’s helping to improve their education.

Mobilizing public and private finance to respond to much-needed adaptation needs in a sustainable and cost-efficient way will be key to accelerating smart development. By scaling investment, Mission 300 is a critical foundation for bridging the energy access and adaptation gaps, paving the way for better jobs, and more prosperous and resilient communities across Africa.

Céline Ramstein is a Senior Energy Economist at the World Bank. Stéphane Hallegatte is Chief Climate Economist at the World Bank.

Contributed by Céline Ramstein & Stéphane Hallegatte

The Great Ethiopian Run vibe hit, though. George Leonard: running is the purest sport, unchecked intensity, flirting with the literal end. That same emulous drive, the querist unsatisfied, is the mind’s demand for intellectual steel.

Then, the idea for next week, a non-negotiable page. The Acting President of AAU news dropped—tears, a genuine emotional reflex, not just cant, a promise for structural work. Walking on that pushed road covered with greens, thronged by people walking on purpose.

Struggling for the right words, the tension demanded a linguistic swerve. Neither Romances nor Slavic, but the Germanic entanglements—structural severity. German: pure architecture of paranoia. Every new declension, a terrifying move toward self-diagnosis. It gives you the Übermensch, which only makes the real self feel like a structural flop. But Goethe’s return from writing was supreme. A crucial Gretchenfrage. The bardolatry of Shakespeare. Sturm und Drang—storm and stress. That ultimate flex: architecture is frozen music (Schelling gets the credit, though).

The Russian temptation: depth of soul, pure Dostoevsky, endless, subterranean guilt. A friend’s warning: not the grammar, but the psychic invasion—fear the language reveals something awful, something you cannot un-know. The mind’s ultimate hypochondria. Nietzsche’s flex: amor fati, the joyful acceptance of one’s fate.

Then, the Chinese twist. The ultimate structural riddle. Idiographic, a complete rejection of the phonetic, Western mind. It demands the utter stillness of the Beckettian void just to decode. The final, non-negotiable “L” of my college career, acknowledging that Western structural thinking is a flop when confronted with something truly other.

This whole self-analysis mélange, this pursuit of an Alibi Ake, coincided with needing to doodle for the Ethiopian Reporter. Peak cringe—the purest, most uncut distillation of hypochondria, labeling a non-pathological state. Ultimate cognitive consonance built on ultimate dissonance.

I muttered about the lumpen intellectual class. The AAU charter, its raison d’être, must be taken to the nth degree now. Meera Kaushik, the Psychology lecture hall—Lobsang Rampa morphing into the Briggs-Myers nonsense—the vulgarization of Jungian archetypes. This MBTI, this flattening of behavior, annihilates individuality. It’s the engine of modern hypochondria, giving an Alibi Ake for every structural flop. The haughty CEO claiming Maslow’s top echelon while killing institutional memory. That labeling is the most graphic thing imaginable—the annihilation of the soul in favor of the synthetic profile.

This structural absurdity peaked in the court case—a bureaucratic rataplan. First Instance Court, Supreme Court, then back to the First Instance Court. A circular, self-eating judicial process—the definition of Zugzwang, where trying to find a resolution returns you to the start, but weaker. The ultimate structural flop.

Mid. My day job was Ayn Rand’s nightmare—a piece of furniture in a fake public entity, run by a theft-wired homo sapiens, a man of osseous theft. Next gig: a poly cat who looked perpetually intoxicated, a vibe that followed me to my latest employer and which I still see on filiopietistic politicians who bring havoc. That vulgar, predatory gaze on newly employed teens was savage.

Then came the Daily Monitor article, a stemwinder of impending chaos: China’s beef consumption jumping from four to forty kilos per capita. The US, the sardanapalian winner, at seven hundred. But the rhadamanthine footnote: twenty kilos of agricultural product for one of beef, compared to four for chicken.

China wasn’t just eating; it was a sulfurous message about global resources. Korea and Algeria, struggling with farmable land scarcity—a ceteris paribus condition mirroring China’s challenge. The ultimate slap: the Egyptian embassy had ten hydrologists. Me, in the water sector, and I’d never heard the word! My friend’s stories of sand-filled sacks against the Awash were just popcorn chatter, neither grand allocution nor water policy, just frantic effort.

The obsession, the need to sublime the frustration of those employers, finally paid off. A fieldwork gig at an international company. I was leaving the gelatinous swamp, running towards something. That’s the tea.

Mid. How long ago was this? The Eskimos have a word for this jumbled sense of time, this googol chiffer abracadabra. Decades, maybe. Time is a repetend.

I’d just made the jump, riding high on the sublimation of neurotic energy. Working with expatriates, BBC and WorldSpace satellite days. I was emulous, keen to talk International Issues, the big, messy, global logomachy. But the vibe? Savage. They were non possumus—not interested, zero engagement. All ears for local FMs, news from their own specific geography.

I flipped to Ethiopian radio. A truly Beckettian joke. The news wasn’t from Addis Ababa, but from the house right next to my family’s. The place that sold simple, honest dairy now dealt in Abesha Areke, 100 percent alky. The news: a duel. Neither swords nor osseous logic, but bottles. Two long-time customers—a perfect projection of my own shaky mental state—feuding over who could finish a bottle. The promoter footed the bill. They finished, shook hands, went home to sleep forever and a day. Both dead. Police rounded everyone up.

Not a good start to my new international life. The world was talking beef and hydrology, and my home news was about two guys who sublimated their entire frustrating existence into a final, fatal toast. Lesson learned: the most important, truly emulous competition is often right where you started. That’s the tea.

Mid. The new entity was a dizzying dose of cognitive dissonance. The local tragedy of the fatal Abesha Areke duel, then thrust into the international void where the true logomachy was just trying to understand the accent. A global census in one coffee break. The Englishman: Geordie accent, bare, osseous linguistic structure of an “I’m goin’ home.” Others throwing down Scouse and Yorkshire—a veritable logomachy of regional English. A personal non possumus almost issued on my own comprehension.

The Scottish presence. A witty, waggish, jock fountainhead—a naturalized Swede, Glaswegian. Married purely for a rhadamanthine (inflexible) life insurance policy requirement. Grim. He had a sulfurous disposition, an ill-starred aberration to women, a toxic vibe that was a projection of the chaos he saw. A walking metaphor for hit-or-miss R&D, a Band-Aid solution against the cryptic alphabet soup of diseases that required their own abracadabra to pronounce. His language, when the usual four-letter word failed, relied on substitute epithets.

The Aussies. Alveolar flapping of their four-letter word was practically a second language. One, the funniest person I know, a master of comedic sublimation. The other: high-school genius, Tasmanian blood, a true lumpen intellectual in spirit. Diabetes, fresh needle pricks, a total ogre until whatever he took finally sedated him. Residing in Thailand for tax reasons, an economic non possumus to the Australian tax authority.

The ultimate takeaway: the sheer, inescapable global emulous chaos. Everyone running a hustle, neither linguistic nor financial nor tragically personal, but all of the above. All engaged in their own frantic, high-stakes Cognitive Athletics. The world was a mess, and the only common language was the explicit or implicit breaking of a rule. That’s the tea.

Mid. Let’s talk about the charter again. Not the paper kind, but the raw, brutal contract of self-improvement. The international clamor was a circus, but among the local staff was a young, fire-breathing medical doctor. Savage.

Two things fascinated me: his academic books—a palpable, almost violent personal charter of excellence. Second, his repeated, expensive trips to Cairo. This coincided with my own temporary sophomania—delusion of intellectual superiority—fueled by Tsegaye and Najib Mahfouz’s Nobel. Mahfouz’s refusal to fly made Cairo an exigible topic.

But the doctor? He was non possumus on my cultural chatter. His realpolitik was simple: saving his monthly income for those Cairo trips to take the US medical exams. His goal was an American charter—his via dolorosa, and Cairo was a necessary checkpoint.

The grim reality broke through: he told me stories of young men trekking the entire length of the River Abay (Blue Nile) to Cairo, only to be repeatedly deported. A modern ordeal. The river, our supposed national pride, became a trap. These trekkers, driven by the same emulous desperation to escape local stasis, were met with deportation. They embodied the ultimate failure of sublimation: energy channeled into a massive, suicidal effort, projected back, empty-handed.

The doctor fought through books; they fought through exhaustion. The Egyptian embassy might have its hydrologists counting drops for power politics, but for these men, the river was a trail of broken hope. The irony: one Ethiopian flying repeatedly to a new system, others walking to be rejected by the old system’s gatekeepers. The charter remained a cruel ignis fatuus—a delusional, flickering light just out of reach. That’s the tea.

Mid. The constant push-pull, the international clamor versus the stark, Beckettian local tragedy, forced one question: Was all this movement—the Abay trekkers, the Doctor flying to Cairo—hope, nor desperate flight from stasis, but both? Savage.

The Doctor, the one with the personal charter of academic excellence, was the ultimate enigma. Non possumus on geopolitics, he was all in on mental health. Was this the projection of his own internal chaos—the immense pressure of those American medical exams? His fixation on mental illness—maybe a form of folie à deux with the overwhelming US medical system he was trying to break into. The high stakes fed his sophomania. The chilling factoid: maybe a third of hospital beds in the States occupied by mental health patients. His via dolorosa wasn’t just Cairo, but the knowledge that his prize might be a different kind of confinement.

This contrast between effort and outcome defined the era. The brilliant surgical student. First water talent, a future aide-mémoire for the nation. Assigned to a remote area of tribal feud. Grim. His surgical brilliance, the exigible expertise, lost—a casualty of administrative machtpolitik, a system so morally polluted it failed to retain its most valuable somatotype. A failure of the national charter, a colossal jactitation waiting to happen. The system had issued a non possumus on his existence.

The Scandinavians—extremes from Greenland to Latin America. A south Swedish pack devoured by the Northerners, who were closer to Denmark, complaining of their rustic unsophistication. The extreme north group, led by someone who waited six years for a younger brother, never stopped talking since. A land where sunlight is deficient, with a culture of internal alky lighting. Utter disgust to all paper and systems, from an extremely non-religious country. A management system good for subcontracts yet blind to bigger pictures.

A herculean so imaginative a walking testimonial for the word workaholic, Monday to Monday. Danish. A non-speaking type, always sitting on the same chair, but craved to be listened to. Almost spent his whole life in Greenland, a huge influence.

An Italian has been to 36 countries, communicating in his baby Italian. Amazing soul, hyper attitude to work. Vowed not to get involved again after being mistreated. His neighbors in Italy: Paolo Rossi, a football lion, and a no-big-name cyclist riding 30,000 kilometers a year, earning 1/30,000 percent of the footballer’s income.

At one time, a Viking group conquered the English-dominated area, and things shifted: food from meat to fish (not mother’s meatballs). Management polarized, “they” and “us.” No room for diverse views, papers, systems, and English.

During a function, one of them started talking about raw meat, saying too much ends up as a boulder in a crusher, a nonstop sickness. I was pissed off because its source was our boss, and it spread among “themselves.” “Us and them.” I told him to stop the nonsense. I countered with the “diamonds of gastronomy” in black truffles and the “pearls of the kitchen” in white truffles, selling for over USD 2,000 a pound, a parallel to how people crave raw meat. After all, it wasn’t a luxury everyone could afford, just like Surströmming of the northern Swedish cuisine, a packed fermented fish that could fell a nearby person with its smell.

Then Boers from South Africa took over, with their rolls in the tongues and “ehs” in blends of Dutch and Aussie English. Unmixing packs, many with hangovers from apartheid, the quintessence of hard work. Then some mixed and black, with humors I cannot imagine anywhere. A fraternity of paragons who changed my attitude about people forever. The hangover from the long overdue “one settler one bullet” years of struggle, the lost generation, was still lingering.

Once at a function, one of them raised the issue of “My country’s backwardness.” I started to explain, going back to the 16th century, traveling to Japan, as we share akin inwardness at the same time, as to our contacts to the outside world. He squawked with an extended guffaw. I made a discourse about the 16th century, adding that no matter what, we looked backward in the other’s eyes, we are able to guard our identity with all its virtues and essences. It was more than enough.

I continued with the meaning of “Boor” and “Boer.” I continued with the Hottentots, a gibberish equivalent of the Khoikhoi, a name meant “men among men,” the hard luck they had being in contact with the Dutch settlers of the Cape of Good Hope, sooner or later losing most of their land. The Bushmen rubbish imposed from other values on another civilization. This explains Ethiopia’s “backwardness”, without the need to mention internal conflicts.

Later on, a blustering insolent, a leadership genius, notorious for his iffy twists, stinger tongue and torrents of lies, an American, came  turning the human landscape one and the same – his fifth wheel. Fubared, four letter worded up beyond all recognition, all collective diverse memory, and thoughts about self and others, the same kind of language yet so difficult to talk to one another. A circular organizational higgledy-piggledy structure, torments in a sharp sword suspended by a single thin thread on everyone.

Uneasy days. No one waits their turn to make a point, preferring their stellar, different way, trashing everything so no one speaks next time in their presence, garnished with 24-carat insults. They never see anything positive from anyone; no idea is new. Meetings turn into gleaning his ruffian negative digs, seeking only vices, repeating what he said and trashed, ending up in a dramaticule of claques among the sycophants, jesters, and hecklers, a wolfish, hectoring pack among the rank and file. If someone dares to speak their mind or behaves in a certain way, a new culture prevails to decipher that someone as though it were from the supreme leader’s uniquely shaped head, a despotic attrition. Things get off-color, ending up in a nonstop show of a heebie-jeebies, slavery-era management.

Nothing is anything other than its culture—a family, a community, a company, or, for that matter, a country. As the air is filled with a star-studded bedroom war of gals, doxies, and tootsies, detailed battle plans, whose “all’s well that ends well” in garbologists’ breaking news, along with hopes, whose star is rising for somebody and whose for nobody, at the same time corrupting thousands of minds, confusing offices as daylight imposters, breastaurants, turning the company compound into a daily tabloid. A catechization nightmare of work, reward, love, support, success, failure, manhood, and womanhood. A dominating doxy hue from dusky to ivory, setting the scenery—a muggy encompass of a dyno fuddy-duddy garnished with dotards and flower people.

Close to year 2000, the bank of England, brought to the market a portion of its gold reserve. It was immediately followed by an unprecedented price fall. The gesture brought its gold reserve value by half, as it was reported. The same holds true to a doxie to the market as to womanhood, as it is to men.

This student’s fate, his intellectual desuetude, hit me harder than the Abay trekkers. Not scarcity; waste.

Once, tired of the absence of national emulous obsession, I suggested we adopt “the Japan way.” Their first university curriculum, I claimed, was built around mechanical engineering—building things. Ours? Governance—the endless theory of rule, the logomachy of control. A philosophical turning point, my own little academic anagnorisis.

Our academic priorities were flawed, potentially ahistorical—based on a filiopietistic reverence for theory over application. The new charter must tilt away from the torpid pretense of governing the abstract and towards teaching students how to engineer themselves through the rigor of doing. This is the only way the AAU charter becomes a genuine engine for Cognitive Athletics, a Lacedaemonian discipline, not just another source of Sardanapalian sloth or a stage for tragic aberration. The charter is the permission slip; self-discovery is the mission.

The critique demands rigor. We cannot accept the sardanapalian luxury of wasted resources. The institution cannot wallow in wasteful sloth, squandering national intellectual revenue. We must avoid becoming a system defined by psittacism—mindless repetition of curriculum—resulting in external polish but no intrinsic value. Our students, our most valuable osseous (bony, foundational) structure, are becoming aliterate—able to read but choosing not to. The true fear: the Ministry of Education could be included in this systemic flop. Richard Williams’s notable absence from Wimbledon. Our Minister of Education assuming the role of father-trainer, building Cognitive Athleticism. Running, the metaphor: sweat, blisters, sublimation, forging the desire to train until every fiber of one’s mind is turned to steel.

What AAU needs to keep is that core donnish curiosity. What it must avoid is becoming a kludgeocracy—a clumsy, ugly structure—or sinking into filiopietistic reverence for tradition that resists all change. The struggle is also internal. My own mind engaged in a logomachy, sorting genuine commitment from sulfurous language. The sulfurous can be profane language or a leader’s fiery, emotional personality, but it always implies a volatility that must be managed.

The whole national vibe, the ambition for structural rigor, is hinged on a simple idea: AAU must become a crucible of sublimation, not a projection screen for failure. Think of institutions like Colombia, Oxford, or Sorbonne: they define the cutting edge because they force energy into rigorous, productive output. That’s sublimation. The alternative—casting our internal inadequacies onto the system, like that bureaucratic rataplan court case—is the failure of projection. AAU needs to be about being, not being not.

The core mission, much like the Danish workaholic’s discipline, must be to reject the sardanapalian sloth of wasted intellectual resources. We’re sitting on a massive issue of hydrology, a resource too crucial to be treated with kludgeocracy management or merely whispered about in a non possumus fashion. We need students who can engineer themselves through doing, who are first water talent in addressing complex issues like hydrology, capable of intellectual traction in the global arena. The current situation, where a brilliant surgeon is wasted on administrative machtpolitik, or where young men risk their lives trekking the Abay, is the ultimate structural flop—a colossal failure to sublime national energy.

AAU’s charter is the permission slip to transition from a filiopietistic repetition of theory (psittacism) to a Lacedaemonian discipline of applied excellence, a true engine for Cognitive Athletics. It must forge the mind until it is turned to steel, ensuring that the national intellectual revenue—the hydrology of talent—is not squandered in desuetude. The aim is to produce minds that offer solutions, not more logomachy about the problem.

Contributed by Tadesse Tsegaye

Curious about their origin, I asked the attendant. Egypt, he said. The high-quality oranges beside them? Also Egypt. The answer caught me off guard. I hadn’t realized Ethiopia imported fruits from Egypt at a scale large enough for them to appear consistently on supermarket shelves in Addis.

That small discovery led me down an unexpected rabbit hole.

It turns out Egypt is not just a source of grapes and oranges—it is a global agricultural heavyweight. The country’s exports have grown steadily year after year. According to figures cited by Egypt’s Ministry of Agriculture and the World Bank, in 2023, Egypt’s agricultural exports reached USD 8.8 billion. As of November 2024, exports had surpassed USD 9.2 billion, with a target of USD 12 billion for 2025. By global standards, what Egypt ships to Ethiopia is only a drop in a very large bucket.

But behind this success lies an uncomfortable contradiction.

A report drawing on the Multi-Regional Input–Output Database notes that every EUR one million of fruit and vegetable exports from the Middle East consumes about 1.8 million cubic meters of water. Applied to Egypt, that amounts to roughly 18 billion cubic meters of water annually—nearly a third of the country’s share of the Nile.

Cairo’s rhetoric treats any upstream development as an existential threat to Egypt’s access to the Nile — the language often implies that a single drop lost would imperil the nation’s livelihood. Yet Egypt is also exporting large volumes of water-intensive crops. Egypt accounts for 38 percent of global orange exports, valued at more than USD 660 million, and eight percent of global onion exports. By contrast, Ethiopia—though improving—struggles to produce even small surpluses for export.

How does a country that insists it is existentially threatened by upstream water use manage to export such vast quantities of water-thirsty produce? How does this reconcile with the alarm it sounds whenever Ethiopia builds or operates the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam?

This is not to dismiss legitimate concerns over water security. Nor is it to deny the complexity of transboundary resource management. But the rhetoric from Cairo often paints Egypt solely as a victim—fragile, endangered, perpetually on the verge of thirst—while its booming agricultural export sector tells a different story.

Both nations could benefit from a different narrative: one of mutual interest rather than mutual suspicion.

Imagine an arrangement in which Ethiopia supplies surplus hydropower to Egypt while Egypt expands market opportunities for its agricultural exports in Ethiopia. These are simple examples, but they hint at something larger: the possibility of a genuinely symbiotic relationship, built on trust rather than fear, reciprocity rather than rivalry.

The first step is to stop treating every issue as a zero-sum fight over a finite resource. Nations, like individuals, too often fixate on perceived slights and external enemies, ignoring the internal inefficiencies and policy failures that shape their own fortunes.

Constructive diplomacy requires the principles familiar to any negotiation expert: separate people from the problem, focus on interests rather than entrenched positions, generate options before drawing red lines, and evaluate proposals using objective criteria.

Jack Ma once remarked, “You cannot unify everyone’s thoughts. But you can unify everyone through a common goal.” For Ethiopia and Egypt, that goal need not be utopian. It can be as pragmatic as stability, prosperity, and shared growth.

The Nile has carried civilizations for millennia. It should not drown two modern nations in outdated rhetoric. There is, and always has been, enough to go around—if only the region’s leaders choose cooperation over conflict.

Contributed by Bereket Balcha

Back then, they verbed everything. Now, we just vibe. I pushed down my beard, the mood barometer, then instantly pushed it up, the Derg-era official’s signal. Pure tension. My mind was tense. Immediately, Ayele Mammo and his mando came to mind. That little trouble. How tense must its strings be for those terrible majors and minors? It brought back Bizunesh and Mahmud. That little monster shoved their voices. A digging, taking-far vibe. We bought a mando once, tried to fiddle; it was in vain. Selling it was also in vain. The shop owner was sus. A painter bought it as an objet d’art. I’d been all for the saxophone as a kid. The answer’s here. That little trouble brought back a decade-old note.

Every Thursday, after school, we awaited the majestic, whirling percussion of the ground forces’ marsh band drawing closer to Mexico Square. Water from the fountain sprinkled us. Nothing else was so lively engaging. The unannounced live band stage performances, mainly from the municipality, complemented by the police and ground forces, in the very early years of the revolution—a kind of out-of-town vibe at Meskel then Abyot square—at least once a month. Spinning around the marching column, joining the vortex of ululating company, mostly kids, we’d be falling, rolling, standing up like nothing happened. Angry men like cats chasing us away. We hysterically tried to identify the scintillating gizmos—silver or gold? A kind of cloud nine. Clarinet, flute, trumpets, alto and tenor Saxes, French Horn, Tuba, the sliding majorettes of the trombones, the mightiness of the sousaphones, the drum majors’ batons. Our fanfare wrapped up at the Ministry of Defense, national flag lowering, ear-splitting anthem, Great Spirit of togetherness. That childhood public function is unthinkable now. It hits different now.

Negadras Tessema Eshete’s disk was the only one in town for decades. The first massive problem of music performance on stage in Ethiopia was convincing the audience it was a show. It ended up almost the standard. Hager Fikir and Eyoel Yohannes set the standard for local instrument orchestration. Beshah W/Mariam is worth mentioning. Aselefech Ashine’s tear-jerking lamentation why they never understood Eyoel’s essence, the what ifs. The echo of Narcis’ immortal pieces at the National Theatre brings tears. Mind you, the Police Symphony Orchestra was chased from the stage by the audience those days. Telela. I can’t non-think of my childhood without her. It must be the violin for her—Minilik and Melkamu included—as my fear for Muluken is Drums, noted from his irreplaceable early music, even the under- or utilized recent voice marvel Haileyesus Girma failed to copy. Minilik left the National Theatre—a landslide felt.

In an interview before his death, he never regretted leaving the National Orchestra, but the news of overseas vocalists and their lifestyle interfered in what he called his unwise decision. It boils him with rage (yangebegibegnal). Tilahun’s sax-shoved voice behind the Imperial Guard orchestration, a bit out of beat or their utter sightlessness for improvisation; a strong opinion on the same from Muluken caused a massive dust. Kuku Sebsebe told me about Ashenafi Kebede’s reading of her voice—how it makes or breaks vocalists. Just like Major Girma Hadgu’s vibing out the great hit Endet Yiresal after checking the do re mi fa so illiterate Mahmud. Abubeker Asheke’s unique flavor. The appearance of the new always hits every preceding band. Mulatu Astatke’s marvel. Their response yesterday determined their future.

It’s about going to the instrument, making it enviously possessive, not the keyboard bringing its imitation to you. I talked to Johnny, guitarist of National Theatre Orchestra B. Girma Chibssa and Ali Birra couldn’t believe my wailing lamentation for Ibex: Fekade’s and Johnny Mitiku’s smokey sax, Jovani’s Base, Tesfaye’s Drum, Selam’s lead, Dereje’s keys. No wonder Selam, a college contemporary, never excused the man he thought was the cause of the disbandment of that color, that said adieu with reminiscence what was going on with Mahmud’s “Mela Mela.” Hailu Mergia’s raw organ fiddle, Yohannes’s Trumpet, Temare’s drum from Walias, with awkward “Huket” on a guitar—era-defining pieces despite arguments over music making. I had a chance to sit and talk with Bahiru Kegne, taught a sea of impromptu in situ creations with a voice shoved by the single-string Mesenko. The receipt for the money I paid to study Mesenko, which never happened, is kept as a relic. No wonder the inability of Roha Band to tame Tewdros Tadesse’s fame, or the fusion leading to fission, band members seeing eye to eye in the comfort of working at the Hilton, giving in to the Ketefa ghost bands that brought music making to ghost studios. Stage performance became a distant memory, making studio concoctions stars with names. Who doubts the star is AI from now on?

As I was to wrap up, two girls came to my mind. Asnakech Werku and… An insignia out of the ordinary, distant in catapulting one with recollection with riveting depth, a once-in-years-to-appear treasure, spot-on expansive illustration of the land’s beauty quintessence all the way through stunning melody. Merry Armede. Asked in a monthly Menen interview whether she loved someone with the same fiery breath her songs stir up sensual passion. She said firmly: of course, once, with a boy from the same neighborhood. True love never runs smooth. He changed his inkling. She did all she could, but in vain, turning the towering go-in-off-the-deep-end passion to rage. Inky dinky Merry sent a threatening message: if she couldn’t bring him back, she would beat the living daylights out of him with a knife. He changed his mind not, yet his address. Was it only hugging, snuggling, kissing, petting? What turned her to pornocracy alias pornography or X-rated blues in her songs? Ambrose Philips authored the illustrious palindrome “Lewd did I live, evil I did dwel.” Mae West claimed: “I do all my best work in bed.”

Then, a twist to football. Ethiopian football saw few talents like Bitew Abre from Dire Dawa and Mathias Hailemariam. What could have turned out if their talent was supplemented with Nigussie Gebre’s dedication. Just a whiff of politics. Emperor Haileselassie never tolerated the scent of “party politics” as it was to grow from differences in opinions on issues among Mekonen Endalkachew, Mekonen Habtewold and Tsehafe Tiezaz Woldeghiorgis. The tension in a word school came to me, the first day they took me. The older sense of the déjà vu kicks in: exactly as I knew where I was heading, I was chased. Like the Habesha chicken for a slaughter. Vis a vis the tension at Kes Timhirt Bet, mind you, I was an unimpeachable prince in my Cartier, a heart of interest with a gratis pass. Why was my splendor coming to its ending? Napoleon’s instantaneous from the sublime to the ridiculous. A day might have started and finished with breakfast, or playing with a ball. Or else a hand-in-a-shorts-pocket, toffee-nosed turnout at a band’s dummy run at Sombrero. Que buena! Just candela or loco. Possibly Birhan Tea Room. Solomon Burke’s Cry me kind of blues. Or trumping for the spirit via jazz time by Getachew Mekuria’s house, our neighbor, witnessing an insignia of out of the ordinary. Or a bit of tra-comedy theatrics at the Bono Wuha water kiosk with its snake-like queues. The insera-carrying girls’ hullabaloos laced up with bitter fights. Tugs of the day’s belligerent life’s initiation bravado. As identifying English alphabets grew to “show me this or that” without textbooks. Grade three brought the first English textbook. A fight broke out between me and Awolken. After being chased for days, we were allowed to return, but ordered to sit right on the front row classroom floor. Awolken reported the instruction to his family; they changed his school. I sat there for a while.

Whenever I think of days, Teacher Gebre comes to mind. Grade one. He used to struggle writing days from the Gregorian calendar. Weeks don’t bring the brazen literary output of Didymus of Alexandria, nicknamed Chalkenteros (Brazen Guts). He wrote 3,500 to 4,000 books—about three a week. Yet only fragments survive. Lope de Vega with his 1,500 plays doesn’t come close. Yet, on our English text book an image of an emaciated boy was denoted as “Week” and thanks the hustle followed from my fight in the class room, right to grade six Weak was Week. How our reading started with “Cholewa wuro” to “yemiakatil Fikir.” The running on the stairs me and Tibebe a friend, to get our hand on the most sought after books at Womezeker. Abe Gubegna’s provocatively titled books, his exiles stories. 3A. It was the year songs involving surly but slowly carried HIM’s names started to be frowned upon. “Tetamaj Arbegna,” “HIM Hawarya,” “Haile Mariam Mammo.” This is how singing left from school.

I hadn’t gone fifty meters before that old, awful feeling, the déjà vu as a bad spell, started to nag me. Reversing direction back home, I was crossing a carrefour (love that French, non-negotiable term for “crossroads”) when I spotted a distant neighbor. My non-committal wave to stop the first vehicle fumed him. He reacted angrily, mistaking my finger-point. Changing direction, I returned, crossed the street, and headed for the big avenue. A kid in an over-decorated yebole bajaj miraculously failed to hit me. A total casus belli. A public bus approached the manicured transport pocket, an eyesore, the swimming of the double-deckers individual medley looking a vulgar prank. Why is it so hard to extend the state-of-the-art camera system to central control to stop the over-speeding, over-honking, and a broadlight prank on old folks like me? As I was looking for the right word, the phrase hither, thither, and yon emerged. No way I can escape it now: the third L of my college L that spilled over to my working life.

This whole mélange of reminiscence coincided with the newly revised skedule (shoutout to that non-American English origin). I had to doodle something for this page on the Ethiopian Reporter. I was thinking about returning to my Romances, this time last year, sifting one from the other. It was like goading cats. A return to my Romances—four different ones, started with one almost four decades ago. One dominates at a time. I added a German entanglement a decade and a half ago, as the temptation to a Russian return was also firm, though warned by a friend of its intricacy. Then a Chinese one was added, a defining moment. It started with a completely non-threatening question: “Qu’est-ce que c’est?” But the moment you move past, you hit the wall: “Impossible n’est pas Français.” This phrase is the linguistic promise that everything is possible, which makes the struggle feel impossibly hard. Maximum stress unlocked, but make it chic. Just a “petite madeleine trempée dans du thé” could become the entire foundation for Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu. Édith Piaf’s “Je ne regrette rien” is the final, non-negotiable proof that French is the ultimate psychological tool. It’s the perfect, non-contradictory Alibi Ake for a whole life of poor choices. The duel in Corneille’s Le Cid is cleanly brutal: Rodrigue must defend his father’s honor. The whole French affair is not not a love story; it’s a structural engineer’s blueprint for the rest of my linguistic chaos.

The Italian affair started with an entirely non-academic, orexic obsession: the non-simple mechanics of pronouncing “Maceroni.” This wasn’t non-a casual fling; this was a deep, verisimilar dive into a culture where the non-flaws are considered features. Dante literally helped build up a nation by standardizing the language. My struggle is reconciling that nation-building purpose with the simple, low-stakes joy of getting tenor with Pavarotti and Bocelli. That non-stop wow of the music is the background track. I am trying to figure out if my life, structurally, is worthy of being set to an Italian tenor. And the moment I can conjugate perfectly, the music stops. The Español entanglement truly embodies the whole “life is a dynamic skill-set” vibe. My entry point wasn’t not grammar; it was like having a direct, non-linear conversation with Cervantes and Don Quixote. The music is the anxiolytic. Celia Cruz’s “La vida es un carnaval” is the ultimate Alibi Ake for all the cognitive dissonance. “Es de Lope” (It is Lope’s) was the expression for playwright Félix Lope de Vega y Carpio’s perfect, elegant, earthy style. The one Spanish word I will never non-master is “mañana.” This final linguistic love affair is the most riddle-wrapped part. It hit me with a deep, pervasive feeling that only has one word: saudade. A sad, deep longing for something that is absent. It’s singing Fado with Amália. The intellectual peripeteia of Pessoa is the ultimate Latin word attached to dissonance made literary. He created multiple literary personalities—heteronyms. I am trying to acquire the perfect grammatical structure to contain my own internal Pessoa, lest I, too, non-fail to multiply and fall silent. It is like hitting the non-negotiable pressure point: trying to fit Pessoa’s thirty-seven heteronyms into a single LinkedIn profile—it’s not not going to work.

No wonder it reminded me of the day an advocate told me a court issue that involves me, that reminded me of Meera Kaushik and her course on Communication, her mention of dissonance attached to a certain Latin word with the example of a person who bought a baby FIAT. A cool defense mechanism, an alibi for some of my own Ls. The issue being presented to court: “huuket yiwegedeligne“—as I hunted through the dictionary, the closest word I found was “dissonance.” I dug deep even changing dictionaries, it brought nothing other than my stupidity never ever to refer a dictionary for the word’s meaning, ages ago. This whole chaotic Sunday reminded me of my college friend, Girma. We were close, but he never agreed to my being willy-nilly to synthetic-sounding courses, Emmanuel Kant and all that. I used to lament why neither of us, good singers, hadn’t gone to Theatre Arts. His affection for Behailu Eshete’s songs was immense; we used to jam them. Girma was the epitome of Behailu’s themes: friendly, straight, a team captain—no backbites. The funny thing is, I established my name in the enterprises I’ve been in after being immersed in the synthetics and coming out through the mill of detailed numbers. I paid him a visit in his office early in the Internet era. That encounter completely transformed me. Then I started to complain about my non-synthetic courses in my sophomore year, wishing they had been extended. Mind you, I’m complaining about a topic taught by the woman I cannot imagine my college stay without, Meera Kaushik. I wished she had talked about cognitive consonance to make things clearer. Another subject I was completely unready for was Psychology, a lecture hall course that felt like high school talks about Lobsang Rampa. This journey, from Rampa to the Wiki Leaks leak made through the American Embassy here in Addis, on Meles Zenawi, is the key. It’s the journey through the Briggs nonsense. That mother-daughter team, Briggs and Myers, their MBTI was supposed to be Jung for the masses, yet experts struggle to validate its success; it’s the ultimate curate’s egg of testing. I feel the MBTI is synonymous with a haughty CEO at my former company, a self-proclaimed in public to be on Abraham Maslow’s top echelon. That labeling of live human beings annihilates individuality. Flattening human behavior into a static, predetermined set of traits needs to be a thing of the past. It’s not giving corporate flop it is the at most pornographic thing one can imagine. The non-properly envisaged and led discussion circles we had in the early years of the revolution that required us, mind you, non-synthetic topics on our own… it was a kind of addiction. As to Kant, from all what I took in college, no mention from the second year onwards.

The ultimate dissonance—the noise that stops the rataplan—is the realization that the pursuit of the Alibi Ake is the flaw. I’m standing here, obsessing over whether the angry neighbor who looked exactly like a much older Girma, and whose pacing was non-different from the endless, non-stop motion of the world’s most powerful man, was mad at me or the synthetic nature of the road. I am trying to cut the Gordian knot of my self-doubt with the sword of academic jargon. But the moment the dissonance becomes clear, it’s too late. The chaos of the day—the Bole Bajaj, the bus, the contretemps—was all leading to the fact that my own self, the man who hated the synthetics, the epitome of the straight-talking team captain, appeared only after I decided my entire career was defined by detailed numbers and synthetics. The ghost of my friend, the synthetic team captain, didn’t just appear; he confirmed my core fear: My life’s achievement is built on the cognitive dissonance of succeeding in the exact thing I was warned against. And the angry look? That wasn’t my old friend’s judgment. That was the face of the self I gaslighted twenty years ago, reflected back at the moment I tried to justify the whole flop with a simple walk. The door stays closed because I am the door. That’s the tea.

Contributed by Tadesse Tsegaye

It is a poignant reminder of an existential truth — our arrival on this green earth was never our choice. We have no more say in our appearance on the cosmic tapestry than a shooting star has in deciding the brief moment it flares across the night sky. Yet, our sojourn on this planet is marred by trials and tribulations that make many wonder if there is ever a reprieve. Life hurls miseries at humanity so relentlessly that some come to regret their very existence. No one was invited to this gathering we call life — and none of us were given the chance to accept or decline.

The theme of Enate Sitwoldegn echoes eerily in Aliweledim (“I Refuse to Be Born”), a satirical novel by Abe Gubegna in which an unborn child converses with his mother, protesting his birth after learning of the corruption and cruelty that await him outside the womb. Muluken’s own early life was no less dramatic — nor less tragic — than the fictional characters portrayed in his song or Abe’s novel.

Born in Ethiopia’s Gojam province, Muluken’s childhood was marked by loneliness, hunger, and destitution — experiences that lent his music its raw emotional power. There were times he was forced to walk barefoot, for want of even the humblest pair of sandals. His suffering gave haunting credibility to his lyrics.

Muluken’s mother died when he was only five, leaving him inconsolable. His father, Tamir Tiruneh, a devout Orthodox priest, did what he could to raise him with kindness and faith, teaching him the hymns and rituals of the Church. But tragedy struck again when bandits raided their rural home, scattering the family and destroying their possessions. Eventually, Muluken was taken to Addis Ababa by his uncle, Melese Gesese, who adopted him and gave him his surname.

Life in his uncle’s household brought its own hardships. His uncle’s wife treated him harshly, and in his uncle’s frequent absence, the young boy endured abuse and neglect. Disillusioned, Muluken eventually fled and found refuge in an orphanage, where he first discovered music. Though instruments and lessons were abundant, he soon clashed with older boys whose cruelty made his life unbearable. After repeated conflicts, he was expelled — once again adrift and vulnerable on the streets of Addis Ababa.

One fateful day, a visit to a Shai Bet—a neighborhood tea house—introduced Muluken to a boy who played the harmonica. The two formed an unlikely duo: Muluken sang while his new friend accompanied him on the harmonica. Their collaboration quickly became a sensation, drawing crowds and boosting the tea house’s business. The owner, delighted by the attention and revenue, offered the young performers meals and a place to stay. For Muluken, this was not just a stroke of luck—it was a glimpse of the stardom that awaited him.

One evening, while walking through Addis Ababa, Muluken stumbled upon the glowing neon lights of the famed nightclub Patrice Lumumba, near Dejazmach Wube Sefer. Mesmerized by the dazzling nightlife, he felt a pull toward the stage. Inside, he discovered the house band, the “Fetan Band,” where future legends like Ayalew Mesfin, Getachew Kassa, and Teshome Mitiku were beginning their professional journeys. Muluken’s story would follow a similar path.

It didn’t take long for his natural talent to capture the attention of the band’s manager. The first order of business was transformation—turning the barefoot street boy into a stylish young performer. With a new wardrobe and a touch of flair, Muluken emerged as the dapper star audiences would come to adore.

Crowds flocked to the club, and with them came talent scouts eager to recruit the rising star. Soon, Muluken was performing with other prominent bands—Zula Band, Venus Club, and the Police Orchestra—each chapter propelling him further into musical acclaim. His growing fame led to his first vinyl recordings, and the rest, as they say, is history.

But success came with its own trials. Muluken was often deceived by exploitative contracts and false promises of pay. In one dispute, Asegedech Alamirew, the owner of Patrice Lumumba, sued him for breach of contract after he left her club. To her, Muluken was not merely an employee but a protégé—a young man she believed she had raised from the ashes and guided toward fame. His departure, though inevitable, felt to her like betrayal. Yet nothing could halt Muluken’s ascent. It was simply impossible to keep such talent confined to a third-rate band forever.

From those humble beginnings, Muluken’s rise was meteoric. He grew from a child performer into one of Ethiopia’s most enduring musical giants. Artist Alemtsehay Wodajo recalls how Lebo Ney stands as the pinnacle of his artistry—an exquisite blend of lyricism, melody, and emotional depth. Her eyes glisten with nostalgia as she speaks of their collaboration.

Muluken’s vast repertoire, spanning romantic ballads, social reflections, and spiritual anthems, remains unmatched. His brilliance seems almost otherworldly—his level of artistry nearly impossible to replicate. Yet, the shadows of his childhood miseries followed him into adulthood and across oceans. In his later years, living in the United States, he retreated into solitude, grappling with ill health and the weight of time. In interviews, he admitted that the last four decades of his life were spent largely in seclusion.

Driving through the quiet of night, as the soft, nostalgic bass of Lebo Ney plays through my car speakers, I can’t help but reflect on his legacy. In the song, the beloved is portrayed as a thief who has stolen the singer’s heart—a crime so absurd that Muluken calls for her imprisonment. As always, he dances along the edge of satire, romance, and philosophical reflection, pushing emotion and imagination to their limits.

And then I wonder: What if his mother had truly asked for his consent before giving birth to him? What if, like Abe Gubegna’s unborn child, Muluken had refused to be born? The thought is unbearable. For all the sorrow that marked his life, the world is infinitely richer for his existence.

We owe a quiet debt of gratitude to his mother, Enatnesh Getahun—and to providence—for never consulting him before bringing him into this world.

(Bereket Balcha holds a Bachelor of Arts in Sociology and Social Anthropology from Addis Ababa University (AAU) and a Diploma in Purchasing and Supply Chain Management from Addis Ababa Commercial College/AAU. His extensive professional background encompasses decades of experience in the aviation industry in diverse roles, complemented by a two-year engagement at the Ethiopia Insurance Corporation. He can be reached at Bbalcha5@yahoo.com)

 Contributed by Bereket Balcha

Abegaz was responsible for the fresh musical arrangements behind artists such as Aster Aweke and Ephrem Tamiru—productions that exploded onto the scene with a sound distinct from the live-band tradition of Roha. When the young Jorga arrived at Abegaz’s New York apartment and rang the bell, the person who opened the door was not Abegaz. To his astonishment, it was none other than Muluken Melese.

It is difficult for Jorga to describe what he felt in that moment when the unimaginable became real. Standing before him was Muluken—the legend, the icon—inviting him inside. That simple gesture meant far more than the literal opening of Abegaz’s studio door, where composition and arrangement took place. It symbolized the ushering of the aspiring Jorga into a boundless universe of creativity, innovation, and excellence. Through mentors like Muluken and Abegaz, Jorga unlocked the floodgates of passion, love, and musical prowess that continue to overflow to this day.

An Enduring Spirit

When Jorga performed Muluken’s Yene Alem on the saxophone under the flickering stage lights of the African Jazz Club, his meditative state revealed a deep connection with both the song and the man behind it. The recurring bassline and flowing melody evoked Muluken’s lyrical world—one where a lover calls out to his beloved.

As in many of Muluken’s songs, the lyrics paint an evocative scene: a young woman with a Sadula hairstyle, bracelets jingling around her ankles, and a flowing cape, summoned to her lover across rolling hills and rural church courtyards. The verses lament the pain of separation, as the singer wonders whether his beloved is real or a figment of his imagination. When Jorga played the piece, it was evident that nostalgia and reverence for Muluken were at play, casting the audience into a near-hypnotic trance.

Muluken’s appreciation for nature, beauty, landscape, and rural life finds a mesmerizing resonance in both his lyrics and melodies. Much like Bob Dylan, whose folk roots carried universal truths through melodies, Muluken used Ethiopia’s folk traditions to express profound emotion and social reflection with timeless grace.

Another piece, Yegoferesh Dardaru, is a perfect example: Muluken joyfully captures the sounds of the forest, the green meadow, and the animals of the field—melding them with a tender admiration for his lover’s Afro hair (Gofere) and his yearning for her love.

The gentle bassline and enchanting melody evoke a rare sentimentality that only Muluken’s music seems capable of conjuring. He possessed a unique gift for transforming the mundane and ordinary into something meaningful and endearing—always believable, never exaggerated or overly romanticized.

His fascination with the Afro hairstyle continued in the ballad Kemekem, where it is celebrated through a warm tempo, simple yet beautiful melody, and, of course, his signature bass. The folk-inspired lyrics, infused with humor and love—and even the playful call of the domestic calf, “Bure”—paint a vivid rural tapestry woven into the fabric of modern Ethio-jazz.

“Kemekem,

the damsel of Ambassel with a tattooed crook,

the damsel of Yeju with a tattooed crook,

Her love made me miss my trail,

she sent me astray into the woods…

Come, Bure…”

Muluken in Atlanta

In 2002, Jorga had yet another privilege of meeting Muluken—this time in Atlanta, Georgia, where an evangelical church congregation had gathered for a spiritual service. Muluken had travelled there to minister to about a hundred worshippers. However, the turnout swelled to more than 400, as fans of his secular music—eager simply to see him and be in his presence—flooded the chapel beyond its capacity.

This came as no surprise. Muluken’s larger-than-life persona had left an indelible mark on the hearts of his fans and the nation as a whole. Even after four decades since he abandoned secular music—and even after his passing—his aura and influence never faded, nor will they ever.

A Second Pilgrimage

Jorga’s fascination with Muluken remained unquenched. He longed to spend more time with the legend and to receive his mentorship. His colleague, the renowned bassist Fasil, became aware of this yearning and gave him Muluken’s phone number.

Once again, Jorga was on the road—this time seeking Muluken not by accident, as before, but by design. His wish was granted when he met him in Washington, D.C., in 2006. Muluken was gracious enough to host him in his home for nearly a month. During this time, Jorga had the opportunity to observe, learn, and understand what fueled Muluken’s artistic and spiritual life. They shopped together, dined together, and even worshipped in the same chapel.

During these moments, Muluken imparted wisdom, musical insight, and a deep philosophy of life. One day, he asked Jorga a question that would shape his future:

“Would you rather be famous, or build a reputation by searching for what lies within your soul?”

Jorga chose the latter—an answer that delighted Muluken. To this day, Jorga continues to honor that creed, navigating a musical journey that carries both him and his audiences to places that speak to the innermost depths of the soul. He had found in Muluken not just a mentor, but a guru and a master. The result was inevitable—and the rest, as they say, is history.

Muluken: A Visionary and a Legend

Muluken was not only a gifted drummer but also a remarkable jazz composer and a master lyricist, as Jorga witnessed during their time together. Muluken saw in Jorga the future of Ethio-jazz and often lamented not having colleagues like him during his own musical career in Addis Ababa.

He was far ahead of his time in musical vision—a forward thinker who grew frustrated at not finding avant-garde musicians unafraid to experiment with modern and creative styles that blended jazz with authentic Ethiopian sounds. Muluken often confessed that his finest musical works were those created in collaboration with Mulatu Astatke, the father of Ethio-jazz.

Muluken often spoke candidly about the excesses of nightlife in the music industry—the endless parties, the intoxicating fame, and the complicated encounters with adoring fans and persistent admirers. These experiences, he admitted, took a heavy toll on his personal life. His conversion to evangelical Christianity, he said, brought balance to his world and saved him from spiraling into the abyss that many talented and successful artists have fallen into—and never escaped.

The entertainment world is littered with stories of brilliance undone by fame: Whitney Houston, Justin Bieber, Kurt Cobain, Marilyn Monroe, Amy Winehouse, and Britney Spears are but a few among the many who tasted the bitter consequences of glory gone sour—overwhelmed, derailed, and often destroyed by their own success.

Muluken, however, made a vital U-turn in time. He found redemption and lived on saving himself from the consuming complexities of stardom.

A Night at the Africa Jazz Club

It was yet another Thursday night at the Africa Jazz Club, and, as often happens there, another pleasant surprise. A young woman—elegant, confident, and fashionable—joined a jam session, as both seasoned performers and newcomers often do. The club’s tradition allows the novice and the legend to share the stage, united only by skill and musical courage.

The young woman was no ordinary talent. She took over from Dawit Adera—the renowned contemporary drummer celebrated for his powerful beats, creativity, and expressive style—and delivered an astonishing performance. Her steady, ebbing rhythm built into a pulsing tempo that carried the audience into a trance-like state.

Soon, keyboardist Abiy GebreMariam introduced Nanu Nanu Ney, one of Muluken’s signature songs. The music swelled, the tempo rising to a feverish pitch, almost veering into a rock-and-roll crescendo. Then, as if by divine orchestration, Tasew Wendim and Dimitros began to soften the energy with the soothing tones of the Washint and Kirar.

What followed was a stunning Ethio-jazz rendition of Muluken’s timeless ballad—a moment that captured the very essence of his legacy. It was a night of remembrance and renewal, a tribute to the eternal, unifying, and soulful spirit of Muluken Melese: eternal, unifying, soulful, and beautifully emancipating.

(Bereket Balcha holds a Bachelor of Arts in Sociology and Social Anthropology from Addis Ababa University (AAU) and a Diploma in Purchasing and Supply Chain Management from Addis Ababa Commercial College/AAU. His extensive professional background encompasses decades of experience in the aviation industry in diverse roles, complemented by a two-year engagement at the Ethiopia Insurance Corporation. He can be reached at Bbalcha5@yahoo.com)

Contributed by Bereket Balcha

We were re-upping that mood, filtering the relentless state of lateness, deep, existential dread, and the crushing linguistic panic that went from English terror to the silent, suffocating archives of French, Latin, and Greek. The whole atmosphere was a chaotic, utterly unbothered existence, a pure mess. The raison d’être of the numbers—the undeniable, clean, analytical logic of math, economics, and accounting—was the locus standi, the thing that had the right to exist and hold court. Meanwhile, the words? They were just background noise, a collective t’s Greek to me murmur, an overwhelming, dissonant drone that felt like a solecism against my very attendance, a profound grammatical error committed just by showing up to a place where language was a hostile foreign entity.

My English class was the epicenter of the absurd, a pure taunt. It became a dramatic absence, a helpful void that, with the kind of high-irony only the universe can pull off, was the closest thing I got to a helping hand. I’d slip in, always late to the party, navigating the relentless déjà vu of finding the key under a mat that wasn’t there, a pure, distilled, and almost comforting absurdity.

The teacher, a chalk-dusted, beautiful genius whose diction could bench-press syllables and whose gaze carried the silent scars not of the intellectual revolution, but the 1970s Ethiopian one, simply never came to class anymore. The whole semester, the entire structure of the learning objective, dissolved into an ex post facto (retroactive) fantasy: we’d get the grades after our M.A., or maybe after the actual heat death of the universe—a completely willy-nilly promise hinged on a generous, mythical grade. This system’s credibility? It was as solid as a Johnsonese sermon being pithy, which is to say, absolutely nonexistent. Our afternoon sessions dissolved into what we affectionately termed Chat hour—a blessed, coffee-fueled sabbath of unearned confidence, where we were the masters of our own syllabus-free domain. This whole setup was ultra vires (beyond powers), wildly outside the bounds of academic contract, but we accepted it, no further questions, as the department’s stare decisis (the law’s memory habit, the way things were always done).

The truth is, the silence of that room was more oppressive than any lecture. It wasn’t an empty room; it was a vast, psychological testing chamber. Every time I walked in, I felt the unsettling chill of being observed—a camera hidden in the marvels of the marbles cladding OCR, ILS, its tiny red light blinking, filming my confusion and late arrival, a silent witness documenting the pathetic lack of education. It was a classic Hitchcockian setup: the tension lies not in what happens, but in what doesn’t happen, and the certainty that we were, somehow, being judged for our collective intellectual failure.

The true linguistic panic, the paramnesia (false memory) of ever having been intellectually capable, truly began when the French and Latin anxieties started creeping into my English failure, like a ghost in a language machine. It all started with the Dictionary Fiasco. I got the initial, exhilarating vu jamais moment—the unsettling feeling of utter novelty and clarity—when a friend handed over a “very simplified,” “very current” Merriam Webster-type dictionary. It was the absolute antithesis of the heavy, archaic tomes I usually faced, a slim, modern promise of instant linguistic competence, designed, I swear, for someone who scrolls through life in 30-second bursts and requires only the most surface-level understanding of existence. It was the promise of a final boss move against my linguistic inadequacies, a silver bullet against my acute, paralyzing sense of being a Latinless dolt—a linguistic plebeian who couldn’t even parse the prepositions. But friendship politics are a brutal sport, and with the devastating cruelty of a fleeting moment of clarity, he retracted the gift. He handed the slim, modern promise of linguistic competence to a high school student who probably thought “stare decisis” was the latest Instagram filter. Those images, once circulated among Soviet-era students, flashed back in the memory of that moment.

No effort could reverse the decision, not even the most theatrical, woe-begone lament, which left me incredibly short-changed. I could have turned to the old reliables: Amsalu Aklilu and GC Mosbach, an Amharic-English dictionary that ruthlessly could have forced me to be functionally bilingual just to look up and understand one single English word. But I dumbly ignored that, and my search ritual became an agonizing time killer, a pilgrimage to Kennedy Library (the crossroads/center where trivia is exchanged), where finding a simple definition became a descent into ad nauseam repetition and a cosmic side quest. It was a ritual of humiliation, and every search confirmed that trivia comes from the crossroads where people discuss small, insignificant things, and I was perpetually stuck at the smallest, most insignificant of those things—a single word.

The Dictionary Fiasco wasn’t just about a book; it was about the sudden, sharp retraction of agency—the power to know. And the hidden camera from the English class? It seemed to have followed me. I’d catch myself glancing around Kennedy, convinced that someone was watching me fail, watching the sweat on my brow as I flipped between three languages just to understand a fourth. The humiliation was the script, and I was the unwitting star.

Then came the group work, a prima facie (first glance) chance at academic and social redemption, led by a student, a rare young man from Iluababora who was effortlessly good with both numbers and words—the perfect synthesis of the two intellectual worlds. My Second Big L, my most iconic fail, hit when I read his final draft. I was immediately triggered, profoundly upset by a citation, a Latin-sounding “guru” I was tired of seeing everywhere.

The shock, the profound cacoepy (poor pronunciation, poor understanding) of my misreading, was the sudden, awful realization that “Ditto”—the Latin for “the same” or “as before”—was not an individual. That self-inflicted academic eggcorn was truly devastating; the déjà vu loop of my sophomore year clarified instantly: Ditto was the personification of the repetition that haunted me. Every single time I saw it, the material was saying, in the driest, most bureaucratic Latin imaginable: This is the same. Nothing new here. The loop continues.

It was the system’s ultimate, minimalist defense against the vu jamais—the avoidance of all novelty. It was the crushing weight of classical language used not to illuminate, but to insist upon the endless, crushing recurrence of the status quo. It left me with a bleak, almost Johnsonian wisdom: some words are indeed more powerful because they are the quiet, unassuming, two-syllable conductors of the looping vibe.

This paranoia deepened when I realized the chilling implication of the camera imagery: it was like finding the camera hidden in the ceiling only to realize the lens was pointed at another, identical room—and the film was already rolling, capturing an endless sequence of the same mistakes being made by the same students who couldn’t escape the linguistic trap. The whole system was built on the terrifying truth of Ditto.

The true break, the actual, meaningful vu jamais—the moment of unsettling novelty and clarity—came not from English, nor from the Latin shadow that followed it, but from economics, delivered by the man who spoke the language of Greek logic: Dejene Aredo (PhD). He walked into the lecture hall radiating gusto, the sheer, visible force of his intellectual confidence. This was the man we’d seen grilling MA students, his certainty so complete he could casually distance himself from his lecture notes, treating them as mere suggestions. Then he dropped the bomb, the res judicata (the final word, the matter decided) of his class that instantly elevated the stakes from a passing grade to the currency of intellectual survival: the answer is not only the answers right, it is all about the good argument. 

We were shaken in our boots, experiencing a promnesia (memory of the future) where sound argument, derived from rigorous, persuasive thought, was the only currency. This was the ultimate, necessary break from the déjà vu of rote learning. The terror was replaced by the exhilarating, terrifying demand for clarity. This was the intellectual Columbus’s egg moment. The explorer, after being challenged by a shallow courtier who insisted his discovery was simple and inevitable, didn’t reply with words. He took an egg, invited everyone present to make it stand on end, and when they all failed, he simply cracked the shell on the table, leaving it standing firmly on the broken base.

The sound of that squelch was the sound of a paradigm breaking. The courtier’s sneer, “Nothing is easier than to follow it,” was the epitome of déjà vu—the realization is only simple after the initial act of violation. Dejene was telling us to stop seeking the false comfort and certainty of the de jure (the law on the page, the rulebook) and master the de facto (the real-life energy of persuasive thought, the ability to make the argument stand), to be the one who cracks the egg.

His lesson was a furious, elegant demand for precision of argument—the ultimate skill of Greek rhetoric (logos), the ability to move beyond mere definition (Latin) into persuasive, actionable truth (French Cartesian clarity). It was the only thing that could break the historical, linguistic loop of misunderstanding that led to the devastating Mokusatsu disaster.

I realized then the horror was not simply in misreading Ditto; the terror was global. The Mokusatsu tragedy—where a single word, intended by the Japanese government to mean “to refrain from comment” or “wait and see,” was tragically interpreted by the Allies as “to ignore” or “treat with contempt”—had catastrophically altered the end of WWII, potentially culminating in the atomic destruction it was trying to avoid. A single, linguistic solecism at the highest level—an error of ambiguity—became the catalyst for ultimate violence. This was the Hitchcockian climax. The lesson was not about economics, but about the lethal precision of language.

Dejene’s class wasn’t a vibe check; it was an ultimatum. We had to be the ones to crack the egg, successfully and precisely, every single time, or risk historical, global catastrophe. The looping vibe was history itself, and the Ditto that had haunted me was revealed as the system’s terrifying tendency to repeat destruction due to a lack of argumentative clarity. The pressure was now cold, absolute, and terrifyingly clear. We were no longer late; we were standing at the precipice of language failure, where silence or ambiguity was simply not an option.

This final realization, this vu jamais moment of unsettling novelty, became the amicus curiae—the friend of the court with receipts—for my battered soul, proving that the chaos was not a personal flaw but a systemic trap. The relentless déjà vu of my youth—the Sisyphean scramble of chasing elusive TV cameras at Meskel, then called Abyot Square, only to be told by some stone-faced newsreader that the film wasn’t “washed” or the footage was lost, felt like a deliberate ritual of looking backward. This was the same energy as our window shopping around Addis Ababa Stadium, where the pecking order would be music shops, then sports goods, with personal computers from IBM (Afcor) at the bottom.

We were never tired of seeing the photos of Bob Marley and Prince, or the posters of Brazil’s 1970 World Cup heroes, with that song naming the Portuguese legends. As we approached the stadium, we’d stop for a long break at Pele Music shop to give our ears to the melody spilling from the loudspeaker. I remember one moment most: the image of Bob Marley from his last concert, cut from a foreign newspaper, accompanying the news of his death. Little did we know he’d once passed right where we sat. Tewdros Mekonen said that when they were playing at the Ghion Hotel, Bob, just a passerby, jammed with them, giving David Kassa strange, unheard-of key combinations to follow. This was a vu jamais moment of musical invention, a total reset.

The thought of Kiftet (alias Gap), an Amharic adopted stage drama by Debebe Seifu, now filled my mind. Debebe, a vu jamais Alexander Pope-laced epitome to whom the word genius can be applied with ease, left a huge gap in writing and its rigorous studies in Ethiopia. He was rescued in his sophomore year from the uncharted sea of Debit and Credit in accounting by the renowned editor Amare Mammo, following an unthoughtful academic blunder in discharging him from AAU.

Distress leading to depression distanced him from the literary scene, the poet who was touted as having all that it takes for a Nobel prize in literature by his Amharic essay pioneer friend Mesfin Habtemariam. Among many others, his contribution of easy-to-use and never-to-forget, exact unique coining of Amharic equivalents for English words are household words in the Ethiopian literary scene. He passed away at the age of fifty, eighteen years ago. His brother Abebe, while bitterly lamenting his loss, underscores Debebe’s unparalleled craving never to settle for routines that Ethiopia’s literary scene failed to tap.

If my memory is not failing me, the story on Kiftet spins over a professor, so snobbish he was, his attitude left him with no friend in the University, where he had a teaching post. While digging through his academic records, his foes came up with a course in which he had earned an “F” while being an undergraduate ages ago. The “F” was not removed from the record. Therefore, it was decided by the University senate to hinge his stay with them on the result after seating an exam to remove the “F”. He scored “F” again. The ultimate academic loop.

This corporate déjà vu of management manuals being delivered like periodicals to be taken home and never to be heard of was a ritual of insisting on process, regardless of outcome, a pure Johnsonese defense against action. The poor, genius technician named Girma of ETV, if memory hasn’t failed me, who invented the “application” to shorten the washing time, had his gadget tossed in an ultra vires move by a boss steeped in the gospel of the old ways. Girma was a martyr to the loop. His vu jamais—his blinding moment of invention—was violently rejected by a system whose only raison d’être was yesterday. The déjà vu was the department’s cash register mentality, a stubborn mechanism designed to remain “Incorruptible” by actively rejecting novelty, ensuring that Ditto remained the reigning philosophy.

The real vu jamais truth, the one that rips the script in half and breaks the loop, comes from outside the suffocating, Latinate archive of the past. The vindication was global, a stare decisis overturned by universal absurdity: the Ig Nobel Prize validating the struggle of jamais vu—that bizarre neurological glitch of staring at a simple word like ‘appetite’ until it feels profoundly alien and wrong. The prize was given for the experimental, successful induction of this feeling by simply having participants write the same word over and over until its meaning dissolved. This is the Greek truth of semantic satiation—when the word’s very sound becomes meaningless, the logic fails, and the oppressive order of the language collapses. This is the absolute opposite of the Latinate compulsion to name and categorize; it is the absurdist-flavored coffee break moment of finally saying, Nah, this word is cooked. This silent, internal declaration of, “I am bringing a Napkin,” became the somatic trigger for seizing the unscripted present.

I remembered a couple of friends when and where PG labeling was a future tense, ages ago, while watching a video at home with their little kid. A routine had formed—the little soul would be ordered to fetch a napkin, and soon after the kid began walking, I found myself muttering, I am bringing a Napkin. This internal phrase became the ultimate mental reset, proving the loop is internal and manageable. This mental reset is as powerful as the Circadian Clock Nobel proving that the body’s time-loop is a program, not an unchangeable destiny. The déjà vu is the trap of the constantly ticking biological clock, forcing you into predictable cycles; the vu jamais is the urgent, unscripted reality of the present, the active refusal to follow the tick-tock.

The sophisticated move isn’t to be a Latinless dolt who cowers before Ditto, or a master of obscure, verbose Johnsonese; it’s to be a master of the reset—a champion of the de facto argument over the de jure rule. The proverb, time heals all wounds, is deeply sus; the clever, cynical twist, time wounds all heels, is the vibe that truly sticks. Because the only way out of the historical, linguistic déjà vu is to actively seek the vu jamais—the clear, unscripted, terrifyingly novel reality of now, forcing the world to acknowledge your locus standi to exist outside the loop. This is the ultimate raison d’être. The final shot of the film is me walking into the sunrise, the past firmly behind, a sense of promnesia—a clear memory of the future I am building—guiding my steps. The camera pulls back, revealing the road ahead is an exact, freshly paved replica of the road I just left. It’s the same road, the same environment, the same socio-economic loop. But this time, I’m smiling. Why? Because I have cracked the egg. The shell is broken. I know the rule now. The loop is external, but the Columbus’s Egg squelch is internal. My intellectual freedom is res judicata. Bet.

The Columbus’s Egg moment, the squelch that shattered the table, was Dejene’s gift, the French clarity of Cartesian doubt applied to an argument: I think, therefore I argue. 

The shallow courtier, the one who saw the egg standing on its broken base and sneered, “Nothing is easier than to follow it,” was the very embodiment of déjà vu. He could follow the path, but he could never conceive of it. He lacked the vu jamais to violate the premise of the challenge—that a whole egg must be balanced—and introduce the necessary, de facto destruction that leads to the de jure solution. It was a victory of persuasion through action over passive knowledge, an aggressive assertion that the argument, the breaking of the shell, is the answer.

This is the ultimate Hitchcockian finish, the full circle of the loop. I am on the same road, the same scene, but the tension is gone. The camera pulls back, confirming the environment is unchanged, yet I am calm. I know the trick now. I am smiling because the fear of the endless repeat, the fear of Ditto and Mokusatsu, has been replaced by the power of the vu jamais to break the egg at will. I am the reset button. The film is still rolling, but I control the editing.

Contributed by Tadesse Tsegaye