Gold Cannot Buy Time: Ethiopia’s Debt Crisis and the Collapse of the Official Narrative
This gap is not accidental. It is engineered. Over the past eighteen months, the government has constructed an elaborate counter-narrative to obscure the severity of the macroeconomic crisis. Gold mining has become the centrepiece of this fiction. Official figures claim the sector generated USD 3.5 billion in export revenue over eight months, a stunning reversal that has displaced coffee as the nation’s primary export earner. The Ministry of Mines announced a 92 per cent increase in revenue compared to the prior year. Industrial projects like KEFI Gold’s Tulu Kapi venture and Zijin Mining’s acquisition of Allied Gold for USD 4 billion are paraded as proof of transformation.