Running on Half Power

Addis Ababa’s Railways and the Arithmetic of a Broken Promise

By E. Frashie

8 September 2026

A decade after its unveiling as the future of African urban transit, the capital’s light rail now runs on less than half its fleet — and the reasons lead, step by step, from a crowded platform to the loan books of Beijing and Ankara.

Every weekday at Autobus Tera, Surafel Tafesework performs the same quiet calculation. A bank officer bound for Megenagna, he would rather take the train — it is the cheapest way across the city — but the platform now fills faster than the trains arrive. He waits up to an hour, he told The Reporter, watching the crowd thicken the way it does at a bus stop. The fare still wins the argument. The waiting is beginning to lose it.

Multiply Surafel by the tens of thousands who ride the light rail each morning and you have the small, daily face of a large, expensive failure. A decade after Addis Ababa’s trains were unveiled as the future of African urban transit, the network runs on less than half its lungs — and the reasons why lead, step by step, from a crowded platform to the foreign-currency desk of the National Bank and the loan books of Beijing and Ankara.

The tyranny of the spare part

The immediate problem is brutally simple. The Addis Ababa Light Rail Transit Service began life with 41 cars; by the account of its own chief executive, Berhan Abebaw (PhD), only 19 are now fit to run. The culprit is not sabotage or mismanagement of the theatrical kind, but something more mundane and more damning: there is no hard currency to buy replacement parts, down to the tyres that wear out fastest. The service has no dedicated workshop of its own, and leans on Ethiopian Railway Corporation engineers dispatched from Dire Dawa and Dewale.

This is not a new wound. As far back as 2023, only eight trains were moving; China stepped in with a spare-parts package worth some USD 23 million, and repair estimates ran past USD 60 million. That the operational count has crept back to 19 is, in a bleak sense, progress. But a USD 475 million system — 85 percent of it financed by a loan from the Export-Import Bank of China — sitting idle for want of imported rubber is the whole Ethiopian macro-crisis rendered as a stalled tram.

A USD 475 million system idled for want of imported rubber is the whole Ethiopian macro-crisis rendered as a stalled tram.

The ledger against the promise

When the line opened in 2015, it was sold as a machine that could sweep up to 60,000 passengers an hour. Today it carries roughly that number across an entire day. The Federal Auditor General has put the project’s accumulated loss at around ETB 16 billion. In the 2025/26 fiscal year, ticket sales brought in just ETB 270 million; the city administration pours in an annual ETB 500 million subsidy simply to keep the fares humane — a Kality-to-Piassa trip costs 20 birr by train against 80 to 100 by taxi.

Officials now wave away the original pledge that the line would service its own debt within ten years. “In any country, urban railway operates with state subsidy,” Berhan says — and he is right, as a matter of transport economics the world over. But that truth was conspicuously absent from the sales pitch a decade ago, and it does not answer the harder question: subsidy toward what return? The commercial ballast that was meant to make the numbers work — transit-oriented development, station retail, leased commercial hubs — has barely materialised beyond a handful of sites like Leghar and Autobus Tera. The light rail today carries only about six percent of the city’s public-transport load, stranded from the Anbessa buses, Sheger buses and minibuses it was never properly stitched into.

The case for the defence

Honesty requires the counterpoint, because the railway story is not simply one of waste. The cross-country Ethio-Djibouti Railway — a USD 4.2 billion line built on USD 2.5 billion of Chinese credit — earns its keep in a currency the balance sheet cannot see. It now moves better than nine in ten of Ethiopia’s port-bound goods and the overwhelming majority of its coffee exports, cutting the Djibouti run from three days by truck to ten or twelve hours by rail, and slashing the demurrage bills that once bled the treasury at the port. A senior corporation official, speaking anonymously, makes the fair point that judging a rail line purely on ticketed profit misses the productivity it lends everything else.

That defence is genuine — and it is also why the financing model matters so much. Even the EDR needed relief: in 2018 China agreed to stretch out its repayment terms, one of several reschedulings of an infrastructure debt to Beijing that now runs past USD 13 billion. A trade lifeline built on a loan that must itself be perpetually renegotiated is an asset and a vulnerability in the same breath.

The northern warning

Nowhere is that vulnerability clearer than on the Awash–Kombolcha–Hara Gebeya line. This USD 1.7 billion, 392-kilometre corridor — financed by Turkey’s Exim Bank and built by Yapı Merkezi — was nearly finished when war engulfed the north in late 2020. Looting, evacuation and two years of paralysis followed, and the contractor took its losses to arbitration in London, in a dispute reported to be worth around USD 2.6 billion all told. The London tribunal, with Professor Tilahun Teshome as sole arbitrator, threw out the bulk of the contractor’s roughly USD 1 billion claim and ordered a USD 29.1 million advance repaid to the corporation — hailed at home as a decisive victory.

It is worth a note of caution: the contractor’s counsel has publicly disputed the “bulk knocked out” framing, and even a favourable award does not make the episode cheap. Years of frozen construction, depreciating assets and contingent liabilities are their own tax on a state-owned enterprise — and Ethiopian Railway Corporation is one of nearly forty such enterprises now folded under Ethiopian Investment Holdings, the sovereign fund quietly restructuring their balance sheets away from public view. The line has since been relaunched, with the government hoping Yapı Merkezi will return to finish what the war interrupted.

Who carries it

The recurring lesson, from the light rail to Djibouti to the north, is the one the planners kept postponing: track laid without last-mile links, local maintenance capacity or a revenue base beyond the farebox becomes a liability the moment the currency tightens. The fixes experts keep prescribing — unified ticketing across modes, developed station real estate, domestic manufacture of high-wear parts, and a firewall between operating budgets and legacy construction debt — are neither exotic nor new. They were simply cheaper to defer.

The cost of deferral is not paid in arbitration awards or sovereign-fund spreadsheets. It is paid on the platform at Autobus Tera.

The cost of deferral is not paid in the language of arbitration awards or sovereign-fund spreadsheets. It is paid on the platform at Autobus Tera, in the extra forty-five minutes, in the taxi fare a bank officer can barely justify, by the several hundred thousand residents who continue to ride a network running, as it has for years now, on half power.

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