Squeezing Stones, Selling Futures: Ethiopia’s Quiet War on the Middle Class
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By Sewasew Teklemariam, Ethiopian Tribune columnist
There’s a particular ache that comes from reading a memo that doesn’t say what it means. A memo that tells you your child’s education is being “adjusted,” when what it really means is: you can no longer afford it. A memo that speaks of “sustainability,” while quietly unsustaining your life.
Lebawi Academy’s tuition hike didn’t arrive with a confrontation. It arrived with a smile. A polite document, dressed in institutional English, citing “currency adjustment” and “operational realities.” The new fees over 20,000 birr per child per month landed like a slap disguised as a handshake. For many parents, it wasn’t just unaffordable. It was humiliating.
Mulu, a civil servant, stared at the paper for an hour. She earns 30,000 birr a month. Her son’s tuition now consumes two-thirds of that. She didn’t cry. She didn’t protest. She just folded the memo, placed it in a drawer, and began searching for another school. One that doesn’t speak in riddles.
This is the quiet violence of euphemism. It doesn’t shout. It whispers. It doesn’t confront. It evades. And in Ethiopia, it’s becoming the dominant dialect of power.
While Lebawi rebrands exclusion as adjustment, the Ministry of Finance is busy rebranding desperation as mobilisation. Its latest revenue strategy reads like a hymn to modernisation—digital receipts, harmonised codes, ambitious targets. But the reality is less hymn, more hustle. The state is broke, and it’s rifling through the pockets of those least able to protest.
The Addis Fortune piece, “Squeezing Stones for Silver,” exposes the farce. Ethiopia’s tax system isn’t a system it’s a scavenger hunt. In Addis, enforcement is ruthless. In Hawassa, it’s optional. Traders in Merkato unplug their e-tax machines to avoid surveillance. Civil servants in Bahir Dar pay income tax while their counterparts elsewhere enjoy exemptions. It’s not governance. It’s improvisation.
And yet, the state persists. It wants obedience without explanation. It wants compliance without conversation. It wants citizens to pay up while pretending they’re partners. But partnership requires trust, and trust requires truth. Ethiopia has neither.
What it does have is a growing population of quietly broken people. Parents who feel ashamed for not affording what they once could. Traders who feel hunted for trying to survive. Teachers who watch their classrooms shrink as fees rise and hope recedes.
Selam, a teacher at a mid-tier private school, told me she’s lost five students this term. Their families couldn’t keep up with the “adjustments.” She doesn’t blame the school. She blames the silence. The way decisions are made without dialogue. The way lives are rearranged without consent.
This is not just economic erosion. It’s emotional erosion. The slow, grinding loss of dignity. The feeling that you are being governed by people who do not see you, do not hear you, and do not care to learn your name.
And the language keeps lying. “Currency adjustment” instead of fee hike. “Revenue mobilisation” instead of tax squeeze. “Operational sustainability” instead of institutional abandonment. It’s as if the country has outsourced its conscience to a spreadsheet.
But language is not neutral. It shapes what we feel, what we fight, what we forgive. When institutions speak in code, citizens lose the ability to respond. They become objects of policy rather than subjects of history. And that, more than any budget deficit or tuition spike, is the real crisis.
There is a way forward. It begins with truth. With institutions that speak plainly, act justly, and listen deeply. With tax systems that reflect local logic, not imported templates. With schools that consult before they charge. With governments that build trust before they demand sacrifice.
It also begins with remembering that Ethiopia is not a ledger. It is not a memo. It is not a strategy document. It is a nation of people thinking, feeling, struggling people who deserve more than euphemism and extraction. They deserve clarity. They deserve dignity. They deserve a future.
Until then, we will keep squeezing stones for silver. And wondering how long we can bleed before someone calls it loss.
