Ethiopia’s Fighter Jet Folly: A Nation Shopping for Su-35s While Begging for Bread
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By Sewasew Teklemariam Ethiopian Tribune columnist
One struggles to know where to begin with Ethiopia’s latest escapade in fiscal lunacy. Here we have a nation nursing a USD 397 billion financing gap—the sort of figure that would make a Greek finance minister blush—cheerfully browsing Russian catalogues for Su-35 fighter jets. It’s rather like discovering your bankrupt neighbour has just taken delivery of a Lamborghini whilst still borrowing sugar and asking if you wouldn’t mind covering his council tax.
The revelation, courtesy of some obligingly leaked Russian files, has sent ripples through what passes for informed circles. Not ripples of surprise, mind you—we’re long past that—but rather the weary sort of recognition one reserves for watching a drunk uncle attempt karaoke at a funeral. Again. The Su-35s, those gleaming testaments to aerial superiority and eye-watering expenditure, are apparently now part of Ethiopia’s strategic toolkit. One can only assume they’ll patrol the skies above the nation’s 31 million aid-dependent citizens, ensuring no unauthorised competence accidentally wanders into Ethiopian airspace.
An economist who decamped from Addis to Amsterdam after one too many PowerPoint presentations about Ethiopia’s impending economic miracle puts it rather well: “It’s like watching your uncle who owes everyone money show up to a family wedding in a rented Bentley. Except the uncle is also asking the guests to chip in for valet parking. And the wedding is a funeral for fiscal credibility.” Quite.
Meanwhile, back on the ground where most Ethiopians inconveniently insist on living and attempting commerce, the small business landscape resembles something between a Kafka novel and a particularly sadistic game show. Out of 800,000 SMEs, a princely 130,000 have access to credit. The remaining 670,000 are presumably expected to fund themselves through the power of positive thinking and that motivational poster about eagles that adorns every government office from Addis to Axum. The SME financing gap stands at USD 4.2 billion—a figure so quaint compared to the USD 252.8 billion climate finance shortfall that one almost wants to pat it on the head.
A former tech entrepreneur who made the Toronto-Addis-Toronto journey before wisely staying put in Canada observes: “The USD 4.2 billion SME financing gap is cute. Like, really cute. It’s the financing gap equivalent of a cry for help written in glitter. Meanwhile, we’re buying fighter jets we can’t maintain with money we don’t have to fight enemies we haven’t identified. It’s giving ‘I went to business school at Hogwarts.’”
The government’s solution to all this? Green bonds and voluntary carbon markets. Yes, nothing says “we’ve got this sorted” quite like betting your economic future on financial instruments so speculative they make cryptocurrency look like Premium Bonds. In a banking system where Excel spreadsheets are still regarded as dangerously progressive, pinning one’s climate adaptation hopes on carbon credit derivatives is the sort of optimism that really ought to come with a statutory health warning.
The impact investment community, those elusive creatures of ethical capitalism, continue to treat Ethiopia rather like one treats a nightclub with excellent reviews but also three recent health code violations—interesting from a distance, but not somewhere one actually goes. East Africa has attracted over USD 9.3 billion in impact deals. Ethiopia secured four percent. Four. Not forty, not fourteen. Four. A venture capitalist based in Nairobi who stopped taking meetings in Addis after his mobile phone proved more useful as a paperweight remarks: “I love how every conference features a panel on ‘unlocking Ethiopia’s investment potential.’ It’s always the same people, saying the same things, whilst outside the hotel compound reality does its own thing entirely. High capital costs? Check. Regulatory clarity somewhere between Kafka and a fever dream? Check. Foreign exchange access? You might as well be asking for Atlantis.”
The labour market, if one can dignify it with such terminology, has become something of a performance art piece. Ethiopia needs 2.5 million new jobs annually. Youth unemployment sits at 27.2 percent. The only queue growing faster than the one for humanitarian aid is the one for the next government press release explaining why this is all proceeding according to plan. A professor of development economics teaching in London, after spending a decade watching Ethiopian planning documents multiply like particularly optimistic rabbits, observes: “The Ten-Year Development Plan exists in a quantum state. It’s simultaneously bold and vague, ambitious and unfunded, comprehensive and unimplementable. It’s Schrödinger’s policy document. The plan assumes everything will work, nothing will go wrong, and the international community will just keep writing cheques whilst we buy fighter jets. It’s not a plan; it’s a prayer with bullet points.”
The recent Impact Dialogues Ethiopia Conference operated under the theme “Aligning Priorities to Accelerate and Scale-Up Impact Investment”—a title so rich in euphemism one could serve it at a state banquet. When your priorities include multirole fighter aircraft, yawning fiscal chasms, and climate debt that could swallow Luxembourg, “alignment” ceases to be about strategy and becomes interpretive dance. A development consultant managing projects from Washington DC sighs: “Every few months, someone from back home tells me about some new mega-project. A new railway. A new dam. New industrial parks. New fighter jets, apparently. And I’m like, darling, can we perhaps focus on the fact that the average person still can’t reliably get electricity, water, or a loan? But no—we need air superiority. Against whom? The IMF?”
A political economist based in Berlin is rather more direct: “Ethiopia is that person at the casino who’s down to their last chip but convinced the next bet will fix everything. Except the casino is geopolitics, the chip is borrowed, and the bet is on hardware we can’t afford to fly or maintain. Meanwhile, the house—reality—always wins.”
And so the performance continues. Ethiopia remains both magician and rabbit, pulling itself out of a hat whilst simultaneously asking the audience for spare change to fund the next trick. The Su-35s, should they ever materialise beyond the pages of leaked Russian correspondence, will join that glorious graveyard of ambitions where railways meet the sky, where development plans achieve escape velocity from reality, and where fiscal responsibility goes to die a quiet, unaudited death. In Ethiopia’s political economy, you see, reality isn’t merely optional—it’s actively discouraged. Facts are suggestions. Numbers are decorative. And apparently, fighter jets are essential whilst SME financing remains firmly in the aspirational category.
Of course, the government and its rather enthusiastic supporters have their own narrative, as they always do. According to the official line—parroted with impressive synchronicity by a coalition of Oromo activists, Protestant evangelicals, and Waqefena faithful who’ve apparently mistaken fighter jets for agricultural equipment—these acquisitions are about “national security” and “strategic necessity.” One prominent social media activist, whose economic credentials apparently derive from having once seen a banknote, declared that critics “don’t understand geopolitics” and that Ethiopia is “surrounded by enemies.” Quite which enemies these are remains delightfully vague. Eritrea? We’ve made peace. Somalia? Hardly in a position to threaten anyone. Perhaps it’s the IMF they’re planning to strafe?
This curious alliance of supporters was on full display during the recent Irrecha celebrations in Addis Ababa, a spectacle that had rather less to do with traditional spirituality and rather more to do with TikTok content creation. The government, in a stroke of logistical genius that perfectly encapsulates its approach to priorities, directed many of its supporters to sleep in conference halls due to a shortage of hotels. Nothing says “we’re a rising regional power” quite like bedding down your faithful in convention centres whilst window-shopping for Su-35s. One imagines the scene: thousands of celebrants filming YouTube Shorts by day, then returning to sleep on conference room floors by night, presumably dreaming of the fighter jets that will protect their makeshift accommodation.
The Prime Minister’s supporters have taken to Twitter—or X, or whatever Elon’s calling it this week—with the sort of fervour usually reserved for football matches, insisting that defence spending is “non-negotiable” and that “sovereignty isn’t cheap.” Well, quite. Neither are roads, schools, hospitals, functioning credit markets, or indeed hotel rooms for your supporters, but apparently those are negotiable. One particularly spirited defender of the regime suggested that critics are “anti-development” and “don’t want Ethiopia to be strong.” Yes, that’s precisely it. We’re all desperate for Ethiopia to remain weak. That’s why we keep banging on about tiresome things like SME financing and youth employment. How frightfully unpatriotic of us.
The government’s official position, when one can extract it from between the lines of press releases written in that special bureaucratic language designed to say everything and nothing simultaneously, appears to be that national defence and economic development are “complementary priorities.” It’s a bit like saying champagne and rent are complementary priorities when you’re three months behind on your flat. Technically true in the sense that words mean things, but rather missing the point about which should come first when the bailiff’s at the door.
The Amsterdam-based economist reflects: “At some point, you have to admire the commitment to the bit. Most countries pretending to have their priorities straight at least try to hide the contradictions. Ethiopia just leans in. USD 397 billion financing gap? Hold my tella, we’re buying jets. It’s not governance—it’s performance art. And we’re all stuck in the gallery, wondering if the exit is part of the installation.”
As the curtain falls on this particular act, one thing becomes abundantly clear: in the Ethiopian theatre of development, the show must go on. Even if the tickets were purchased on credit, the stage is collapsing, and the audience decamped for countries where the budget makes a modicum of sense and fighter jets are, you know, actually needed for something. But at least the aerial acrobatics will be impressive. Assuming, of course, anyone can afford the fuel.
The views and opinions expressed in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Ethiopian Tribune.
