The Rule of the Number

Reform by milestone, and the loneliness of a citizen the state cannot count

By E. Frashie  ·  The Ethiopian Tribune

The second jaw of the trap does not announce itself with militias or secession. It arrives wearing a lanyard, carrying a spreadsheet, speaking the reasonable language of reform. It does not want to oppress you. It wants to measure you — and in the measuring, it will quietly decide that the parts of you it cannot count do not exist.

To see how the number came to rule, we return to the theorists. If game theory gave the Cold War its suspicious citizen, it was public choice theory that turned that same suspicion upon the state itself. The economists James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock, in The Calculus of Consent (1962), performed a single devastating inversion: they took the self-interested maximiser of economic theory and seated him behind the desk of the civil servant. The bureaucrat, on this account, is no selfless steward of the public good; he is a rational actor like any other, maximising his budget, his department, his own security. The politician does not serve; he buys votes. From this followed the whole apparatus of the coming age. Since you cannot trust the servants of the public, you must bind them — strip them of discretion, subject them to incentives, measure their output, and make the state, so far as possible, imitate a market. Judgement was the enemy, because judgement could be corrupt. The number was the solution, because the number could not lie.

Except that it could, and it did. This is the burden of Curtis’s second episode, The Lonely Robot, which follows the theory into the reconstruction of the British public services and watches it curdle. Governments enthralled by public choice replaced professional discretion with targets — waiting times, exam pass-rates, crime figures, arrest quotas. And human beings, being rather more resourceful than the theory allowed, did exactly what self-interested maximisers do: they gamed them. Ambulances idled outside hospitals so the clock on the four-hour target would not start. Patients were parked on trolleys in corridors reclassified as wards. The figures improved magnificently while the care beneath them rotted. The metric had detached from the mission and floated free, and the managers, trusting the metric, could no longer see the rot — because in the world their instruments described, there was no rot, only green numbers. The system meant to free the citizen from the arrogance of the professional had produced a new and lonelier subjection: to be reduced to the data a stranger collects about you, and to have that data believed over your own testimony of your life. Curtis’s point is not that measurement is wicked but that measurement, once it becomes the whole of governance, hollows out the thing it was meant to serve — and leaves everyone, governor and governed alike, staring at a dashboard instead of at one another.

Hold that image — the green number floating serenely above the burning reality — and turn to Ethiopia, because we have staged this drama on a national scale, and we have staged it twice.

The first staging was the developmental state. Meles Zenawi’s doctrine of agriculture-led industrialisation and the successive Growth and Transformation Plans were the planning vanguard in its confident mode: a state that claimed to know the people’s destiny, wrote it into five-year targets, and reported, year upon year, the double-digit growth that proved the plan was working. That those figures came to function as a kind of theology — recited, defended, and quietly disbelieved by everyone who actually bought bread — is now widely conceded even by sympathisers of that era. The planning state trusted its own numbers over its own citizens. It was the first Ethiopian rule of the number.

The genius of the post-2018 order was to present itself as the escape from that discredited planning — and to install, in its place, the very same worship under a new and more fashionable authorship.

We did not leave the rule of the number in 2018. We merely changed the hand that held the pen — from the vanguard’s plan to the market’s milestone.

The Homegrown Economic Reform Agenda, unveiled in 2019, announced liberation from the dead hand of the developmental state: liberalisation, privatisation, a currency freed to find its “true” value, an economy opened to choice and competition. In the vocabulary of this series, it was a pivot from positive liberty to negative — from the state that plans your prosperity to the market that merely frees you to pursue it. But look at the machinery through which the pivot was actually conducted, and it is public choice theory in its purest institutional form. The reform did not proceed by public deliberation about the kind of country Ethiopians wished to inhabit. It proceeded by milestone: a sequence of prior actions and structural benchmarks agreed with the International Monetary Fund, each a number to be hit to unlock the next disbursement. The floating of the birr in the summer of 2024, undertaken as Ethiopia secured a new IMF programme reported at around 3.4 billion US dollars; the opening of the banking sector to foreign entrants; the partial sale of the state telecom monopoly and the arrival of a foreign-led competitor; and the launch, in early 2025, of a securities exchange in a country where the overwhelming mass of the population has never held a share — these were narrated to us, and to the world, as milestones met. The green numbers turned green on schedule.

And beneath them, by many accounts, the reality burned much as the theory predicts it must. Independent monitoring and the Fund’s own reviews have recorded inflation running for extended stretches near or above thirty per cent in the years around the float, with the sharp devaluation passing through to the price of imported essentials — cooking oil, fuel, medicine — even as it satisfied the external benchmark. The “true” value the market discovered was true for the balance sheet and punishing for the household. The reform is reported in the register of achievement — targets hit, tranches released, confidence restored — while the lived economy, the one that cannot be entered into a letter of intent, contracts into a daily struggle the instruments are structurally unable to register. This is the loneliness of Curtis’s robot, denominated in birr: to be a person whose actual hunger is invisible to a state that has agreed to trust its metrics over your mouth.

There is a final turn of the screw, and it is the one that should trouble us most, because it is where the counting becomes literal. The suspicious, measuring state does not merely reduce the citizen to data as a metaphor; it is building the apparatus to do so in fact. The Fayda digital identity programme proposes to render every Ethiopian a unique, biometric, machine-readable entry — enrolled, de-duplicated, verified, a self resolved at last into a number the state can trust because, unlike the human being attached to it, the number cannot dissemble. The same logic runs in reverse in the network shutdowns that digital-rights monitors such as Access Now and NetBlocks have repeatedly documented across restive regions: to govern by subtraction, removing whole populations from the data-space, un-numbering them until they fall quiet. To be counted when the state wishes to see you and erased when it does not — this is the citizen as data point. It is the reductive self of a checklist psychiatry and the “survival machine” of popular genetics, given an administrative body: the person becomes a record, the record becomes the person, and the parts that overflow the boxes — the parts a life is actually made of — are, for the purposes of the state, simply not there.

Once again the discipline this series owes itself. None of this romanticises the developmental state we came from, nor pretends that a modern economy can be run without measurement, nor that identity systems and stock exchanges are inherently instruments of tyranny — they are not, and a serious accountability journalism must say so plainly. Numbers are not the enemy. The enemy is the substitution — the moment the number stops being a servant that describes the reality and becomes a sovereign that replaces it; the moment the state believes its milestone over its market, and its biometric over its citizen. The economist Amartya Sen, whom we will meet at the end of this argument, spent a career insisting that development is meaningful only as the expansion of real human freedom — of what people are actually able to do and to be — a measure the milestone cannot capture and was never designed to. Hold that thought. It is the first crack of daylight in the wall.

For now, mark the second jaw closed. The first taught each people to arm against the others. The second taught the state to trust its instruments over its people. What remains is the most dangerous movement of all — the one in which the dream itself, the beautiful dream of prosperity and greatness, becomes the justification for the bulldozer. The one in which they demolish your home, and your history, and tell you, sincerely, that they are setting you free.

Sources

The theory. James M. Buchanan & Gordon Tullock, The Calculus of Consent (1962); Adam Curtis, The Trap, Part 2, The Lonely Robot (BBC, 2007).

The Ethiopian record. The Homegrown Economic Reform Agenda (Government of Ethiopia, 2019); the birr float and associated IMF Extended Credit Facility (2024, programme value reported at c. US$3.4bn); banking-sector liberalisation and telecom entry; the Ethiopian Securities Exchange (2025); the Fayda / National ID programme. Inflation figures per IMF country reviews and independent monitoring. Network-shutdown documentation per Access Now’s #KeepItOn coalition and NetBlocks. Specific figures and dates to be locked to named sources at production.

The measure invoked. Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom (1999).

THE TRAP · PART III OF V · THE ETHIOPIAN TRIBUNE