The mother of all distortions: Ethiopia's foreign currency peg

Check your ideology at the door

Perhaps the biggest economic topic in Ethiopia today is foreign currency. Sadly, much of the discussion around it is low quality. Instead of reasoning from first principles, people drown in jargon and misunderstood theories: inflation, socialism, neoliberalism, colonialism, IMF,  China, bla bla bla. Whether the motivations are naivete or special interests, the result is many strongly held but incoherent beliefs. To navigate this, let's be guided by this (perhaps apocryphal) quote from the great physicist Richard Feynman: "If you can't explain something to a child, there's a chance you don't understand it well". So don't let any expert tell you: "it's too complex, don't try to understand, just believe my prediction". In that spirit, dear reader, please leave your isms and schisms at the door and join me in this ELI5 version of the problem of foreign currency in Ethiopia.

Notes: 

1. In this post, we will talk about US Dollars as the "foreign" currency, but all of it applies equally to  Euros or any freely exchanged and widely used currency.
2. Feedback is welcome. If there are factual errors, please let me know and I will correct them. If you have a solid counter-argument to any point made herein, feel free to comment here or contact me on Twitter, and I will respond and update the post (with credit!).

Two markets

How much is one US Dollar worth in Ethiopian Birr? Officially the price is pegged, currently at around 55 ETB per USD. But if an ordinary person, let's call him Abebe, simply goes to his bank and asks to buy 1 dollar for 55 birr, they will say no. There is a limited supply of dollars.  Ok how about 56, 57, ...? Nope. Now what if at the same time, another customer, let's call her Berhane, has a dollar and she's willing to sell it for 56? Naturally, the bank should be happy to buy that dollar at 56 and sell it to Abebe at 57. The buyer, the seller, and the bank would be happy. Problem solved! Actually no, by law, the bank is not allowed to do that. It must sell only to approved buyers at the official price and if that means those two customers go home unsatisfied, so be it. 

So what is the alternative? Abebe and Berhane could meet privately, find a mutually agreeable price and exchange. This is called the parallel market (also known as the "black" market).   Of course, even though it's a private transaction, just like when people buy and sell eggs or bread or whatever, information gets around and a market price emerges. These days it is apparently around 105 ETB per USD. No one is forcing this price, it's just a rough average of a lot of private transactions. In each case,  the buyer and seller get what they need. Problem solved! Actually no, by law Abebe and Berhane are not allowed to do that.

So we have two markets: the official one where the price is pegged by law, and relatively few people can transact.  And the "parallel" market where the price is voluntary but it is illegal.   

Mind the gap

Having two markets would be no big deal if they were reasonably close. Even in free market prices, there are gaps due to distance, convenience, time delays, etc.  But in this case, one price is almost double the other! This is an extreme gap by historical standards, a structural gap created by a legal barrier between the two markets. Let's examine how this barrier affects different people.  

There are two groups, buyers (who have birr and want dollars) and sellers (who have dollars and want birr). 

First consider the sellers. What brings dollars into Ethiopia? Roughly: 

• Remittances: $6B/yr
• Foreign investment: $4B/yr
• Exports: $4B/yr
• International aid: $3B/yr
  
• Tourism: $0.4B/year

So anyone involved in those activities using the peg is getting 55 instead of 105. If an exporter sells coffee abroad, and brings back $1, they are getting half as many birr that trickle back to pay farmers, transportation etc. In other words, it's like there's a 50% tax on exports. Similarly if an investor wants to bring $1M into Ethiopia they are getting the equivalent of 50% tax on their investment before they even hire their first employee or lay the first brick.  Ditto for remittances, if a diaspora Ethiopian sends money to family in Ethiopia at the official rate, 50% tax. For visitors, it's like they are paying double for everything they consume in Ethiopia. Of course, it's not literally a tax. But with the peg, the only choice is to pay 50% or not do the activity at all. In other words it's just like a tax. And whenever something is taxed, at the margin, the tax can be the difference between an activity being feasible or not, which means the volume of that activity is less than it would be without the tax.

Now, having left ideology at the door, we won't assume taxes are automatically good or bad. Instead, let's ask what are the costs and benefits. We know the cost: it reduces legal exports, investment, remittances and to a lesser extent tourism. What or who does it benefit? 

The buyers of course. Those who get dollars at the pegged rate. To get legal dollars, you need a "letter of credit", which allows the bank to take your birr and give you dollars to use abroad. This permission goes to the government itself and to private imports prioritized by the government.

Debatable priorities and the problem of central planning

This leaves the Ministry of Finance the unenviable task of deciding the relative importance of hundreds or thousands of things, and deciding which ones should get higher priority for letters of credit, lower priority or none at all. Last October, the government decided to ban letters of credit for 38 items. 

 

The list includes oddly specific items like "Vimto", impossibly vague categories like "Different games", and hilarious ones like "Artificial and Human hairs" and "tiaras".  Comedy aside, some choices are really sad.  "Bicycles"! That one really broke my heart.  

Oil gets a double subsidy: first from foreign currency priority, and second from getting explicit subsidies of the price at the fuel pump.  Believe it or not, in Ethiopia which doesn't produce any oil, has a foreign currency crisis, and where less than 1% of the population has cars, the price of gasoline is half of the price in neighboring Kenya! Fuel subsidies may be one thing that is even crazier than the foreign currency nightmare, but let's leave that for another post.

Meanwhile, businesses are suffocating because they can't get foreign currency. If you make electrical equipment, you can't get the dollars to import copper, so you stop and wait. If you are constructing a building, you can't get dollars to buy steel, so you stop. Over 200 business ceased operations because of lack of foreign currencies. Manufacturers are getting less than 15% of the foreign currency they need for raw materials, according to the Ministry of Finance. A common sight around Addis Abeba is unfinished buildings, sitting half-built for months or years, a constant demonstration of wasted land, wasted capital, lost opportunities. If you talk to anybody in manufacturing, you will be overwhelmed with stories of dying companies.  Companies fail all the time of course, that's the nature of business. But the heartbreaking thing is they are not failing for business reasons. Imagine you  have the right idea, you invest lots of money, hire the right employees, make the right product, find the right customers.  You are willing to pay for inputs at market value, but, understandably, you don't want to go to the black market.  So you just sit and wait for permission to buy your inputs. And eventually close up shop. That is the tragic fate of many many businesses that could help the livelihood of  millions, dying because of this foreign currency policy.

Perhaps the starkest illustration of the failure of this central planning approach to prioritization is: "Lack of forex to import fertilizer threatens agricultural output". Nothing is more important than agricultural production, and the government understands that. So they planned ahead and allocated $1B for fertilizer,  much more than last year. But due to global market changes, the need is $1.2B. So here we are with a shortage of fertilizer.  

In short what we have is the classic "economic calculation problem" which forever plagues central planning. The problem is not that the planners have bad intentions, nor that they are not smart enough, nor that they don't have the right data, nor that they need more powerful computers. It's more fundamental. In a large economy, the full information to make the optimal allocations simply does not exist in one place at one time no matter how much you try. You cannot sit at a desk and decide for 100M people whether steel is more or less important than copper, or whether aspirin is more important than fertilizer. The information is distributed in the subjective values and decisions of thousands of different actors, and when they act locally on their specific problems, their collective intelligence is much greater than even the best possible central planner.

Inefficiency of indirect subsidies

Further, even if we assume the priorities are perfectly correct and everyone agrees, there is another basic problem. Who pays for them? The cost is of course being born by the sellers we identified above: exporters, people receiving remittances, etc. And the benefit goes to specific imports. Which raises the question: why should coffee exporters or remittances carry the cost of gasoline for car owners? Why shouldn't plumbers, teff farmers or real estate businesses share the burden? A society may decide the rich should subsidize the poor, or some things should have punitive taxes, etc. But implicitly making one sector pay for another specific sector is unfair and inefficient, and leads to many unintended consequences. If the society wants something to be subsidized, then it's better for the government to spend money directly on that thing, using money that it collects through normal explicit taxes. The optimal mix of taxes (VAT, duties, income tax, etc.) is a separate debate the society can have. But whatever the specific combination of taxes, explicit taxes are better than an implicit tax via currency controls.

Corruption

Another problem is that access to foreign currency becomes an exorbitant privilege, so there's an extreme incentive for corruption. Common sense says that when there's a magic way of doubling your money, there's bound to be some cheating. The people who are most adept at playing the privilege game will get more of it, while those who are politically naive  get less. To think otherwise is to ignore human nature.  Cronyism and corruption is rewarded and productive work is penalized. This is of course extremely damaging to the economic and moral health of the society.

The grey zone

Inevitably, many of those who can't get this privilege resort to the parallel market. Indeed, the black market has become mainstream. Increasingly this is not just individuals like Abebe and Berhane in our story above, but also in business. Research shows that prices of imported commodities are tracking the parallel market rather than the peg. Banks too are flirting with the black market, by adding transaction fees as high as 60% to bridge the gap. Even parts of government are resorting to the black market. For example, earlier this year, there was a huge public bus procurement scandal. The Addis Abeba city government paid 19 million birr per bus, which according to the peg, is about $350K. Critics screamed that those same buses cost less than $150K internationally, so surely someone pocketed the difference! But an alternative explanation soon emerged: the importer had to get their foreign currency at the parallel market rate. Using that rate, and adding the cost of shipping etc., the price seems more reasonable. Should you praise the importer for creative problem-solving (after all the city does need more public buses!), or condemn them for price gouging? You decide. It is a bit like the debate about "illegal" vs "undocumented" immigrants in the US, but much worse. Exploiter and exploited start to blur into an unhappy grey zone. Huge swaths of society are operating outside the law. The hypocrisy is staggering. People will publicly defend the peg and privately use the black market. That's not only legally risky for everyone involved, it's deeply corrosive to the rule of law. Ethiopia is becoming a mafia state.

The solution

The polite economist word for this nightmare is "distortion".  And while the consequences are very wide and complicated, there is a simple and narrow solution.  The government could simply revoke the law that says Abebe, Berhane and the banks are not allowed to exchange their USD for ETB at whatever price they agree to. That's what is meant by jargon like "float" or "unification", "liberalization",  etc.  Just let the two parties agree on a price. No other laws need to change. Any product that is illegal can remain illegal. Banking licenses don't need to change. Just decriminalize voluntary price. That's it.  

And, surprise! That is actually the current Ethiopian government's position.  Don't take my word for it. It said so in 2019:  Ethiopia: Central Bank announces floating exchange rate regime. And again in 2020: Ethiopia Plans New Key Rate, Floating Currency to Boost Economy. Even now in 2023, exchange rate unification remains the goal. But the policy is "gradual", and 4 years in, the peg remains and the gap is growing. So what are we waiting for? Why don't they just waive this magic wand today? 

The reasons for this inability to execute the change fall in two categories. First, this inefficiency benefits some special interests, even if it hurts the majority. And multi-billion dollar special interests, both within and outside government, are tough get rid of. The second set of reasons is many sincere but misguided fears, both within and outside the government, of what would happen with such a change. Let's examine them.

Inflation: the map and the territory

The most common fear is: if the currency is floated, inflation will go up. But this is due to a misunderstanding. Let's say the international price of copper is $0.10 per gram. And the local competition is such that  importers can't make more than 10% profit. If copper is a priority and importers get letters of credit allowing them to buy dollars at 55 ETB/USD, they can import it for 5.50 birr and sell it to you for 6 Birr. Ok great. But if the importers can't get foreign currency, what is the price? It's as if the price is infinity. You could go bankrupt while waiting for copper to be available. Or go to jail buying it from smugglers. Now suppose the importers can get dollars at a market rate legally, they will bring it in at a cost of 10 birr and sell it for 11. The naive academic might say there is inflation because the price went up from 6 to 11.  But people in the real world realize that 11 is less than infinity! Scarcity is a form of inflation. Focusing only on official prices while ignoring scarcity is mistaking the map for the territory, or mistaking the thermometer for the temperature. 

Of course inflation is a serious problem so it's easy to fall for this fallacy. But would you trust a doctor using a broken thermometer who says: if we fix the thermometer, you will develop a fever? No, you want a practical one who sees the thermometer is broken and that you already have a fever. So while academics and commentators talk about potential inflation, people who provide real goods and services know that the inflation they fear is already happening. 

Exchange rate

A closely related concern is that if the exchange rate is floated, then the currency will rapidly lose value. There are three versions of this worry.

Some think that, by some unexplained law of nature, the black market has to remain more expensive than the official market. So if the official market is floated and ETB/USD goes from 55 to 100, then the black market price will go to 200. That is nonsense The black market responds to supply and demand. If there is a functioning legal market, then there's no reason for anyone to pay a higher price and also take the risk of doing something illegal! It's just human nature, people prefer to pay less, and people don't like going to jail.

A more sophisticated version of this worry is the following: in the black market, both supply of and demand for foreign currency are suppressed, and if you legalize free exchange, the demand might increase more than the supply so the market price will be higher.  But this is also incorrect. Usually, when there's prohibition, supply is more suppressed than demand. Or to be technical, the elasticity of supply is greater than the elasticity of demand. Without prohibition, all else being equal, the price is lower.

Another variant of the same fear is based on historical examples. In a recent discussion on this topic this example came up: once upon a time, Sudan floated their currency. At the time of the change of policy, the USD on the black market was at 550 SDP. After the float, the market price rose to 600 SDP/USD.  So proponents of currency control claim that getting rid of it caused the SDP to lose 10% of its value. But they should note that in the preceding decade, the black market price of USD had risen 5000%! The currency was losing value very fast. And floating it, if anything, slowed it down. Similarly in the case of Ethiopia, I wouldn't say that if the exchange rate is allowed to float today, the price of foreign currency will go down tomorrow! Most likely it will continue to rise but it will slow down.  Here's a picture to illustrate the point (the dots represent real values of the black market as reported in news articles over the last 5 years): 

In short, the black market price is the free market plus a risk premium. If it is decriminalized, the risk premium goes away. So the black market is an upper bound on what the natural market price would be.  

Speculative attacks

A closely related fear is that if the currency is freely exchanged, international currency traders would swoop in and wreak havoc by "speculating". It is true that financial markets can be volatile but let's put that in perspective. That volatility is much less than the brutality of the practical forex market as currently experienced by Ethiopians today. The random shocks of getting or not getting a letter of credit are much worse. You can go for arbitrary length periods with an effective price of infinity and volume of zero! 

Sure, if the currency was freely traded, the National Bank of Ethiopia (the central bank) and the Ministry of Finance may make monetary or fiscal policy errors, reserves might run low, etc. But all that would be child's play compared to the devastation the current currency regime is inflicting on the real economy.  That said, the government can and should shore up reserves. Two obvious moves: stop fuel subsidies; sell off non-strategic and poorly-performing state enterprises (of which there are many).

Sequencing reforms

A related point often made by academics and commentators is: yes the parallel market should be decriminalized, but first the economy must be strengthened, productivity must increase etc. This argument is a bit like sitting in a burning house and saying: yes the fire is bad, but first let's invest in non-flammable furniture and curtains. It's missing the burning issue. The currency not being freely exchangeable is suffocating the very things that make the economy more productive.

Upside down tiger

Another argument given against free exchange is that some countries, like the so-called Asian Tigers and China, grew their economies while controlling their currencies. The irony is that in those cases, the control consisted of under-valuing their currencies, to promote exports and investments, while suppressing imports and domestic consumption. They essentially delayed the rise in standard of living in exchange for faster industrialization. But what we have in Ethiopia is the exact opposite: the peg over-values the currency, which subsidizes selected imports, while lowering investment, domestic production and exports! You might call this the "upside down tiger" de-industrialization strategy. No country has grown out of poverty this way. 

Brace for media impact

If the peg is abandoned, we can be almost sure that a lot of the commentariat will miss these two points:

1. they will compare the new free market price to the old peg, instead of comparing it to the old black market price, falling for the map and territory fallacy;
2. they will comment on the increase of foreign currency exchange rate, rather than the fact that the rate of increase declines.  

Even economics professors confuse a decline in the rate of change with an actual decline in the price! So what are the chances journalists and social media activists will be rational? Low. They will probably scream bloody murder.  And governments know that. Hence the "gradual" policy. To be blunt, the political cost of doing the right thing is very high.  

Deva!uyashun!1!?

It's amazing how many people think the strength or weakness of a currency is determined by a government simply deciding on a price. And they talk about "devaluation" as if it is a matter of just typing in a larger number. Their concept is: the bad guys will force African countries to use a larger number! Oh no, devaluation! We must fight the IMF! Neocolonialism! Bla bla bla. I'm very critical of the IMF and the current international financial order, but this conception of "devaluation" is complete nonsense. But it is political dynamite and a lot of energy is spent trying to defuse it. Here's how I would respond to it. If you think "government type big number = bad", then ask yourself do you believe that "type small number= good"? If it's that easy, do you think that, tomorrow, the Ethiopian government could set the peg at 50 ETB/USD instead of 55 ETB/USD and all imports would automatically be 10% cheaper? If they peg it at 0.01 ETB/USD would imports suddenly be 5000 times cheaper, and the average Ethiopian would afford a Ferrari? Of course not.

Root cause of currency strength or weakness

From a policy making perspective, the exchange rate is an effect not a cause. It's an output signal, not an input variable. The real price (which is approximated by the black market not the peg) is a reflection of a basic reality: how many dollars are coming, and how many dollars are going out. This is called the balance of payments. The birr gets weaker if the economy is not bringing in enough dollars. Exports and foreign investments are too little compared to the consumption of imports. And this imbalance can only improve if a) the economy produces more things the rest of the world wants, and b)  the country is more attractive for investment.

Now as we saw earlier, the first order victims of the peg overvaluing ETB are exporters, investors, and remittance recipients. The gap between the market and the peg is a de facto tax on them so it directly reduces their volume. Fewer dollars come in.  At the same time, it's a de facto subsidy of specific imports, which means more dollars go out. Which makes the currency weaker. Which increases the gap. That's the death spiral of a weakening currency.  The second order victims are manufacturers and producers more generally; even if they are not exporters, they help the balance of payments by creating products that would otherwise have to be imported. Plus they are part of making the society more productive which improves chances that the society will make stuff the rest of the world wants. Thus, by choking producers, the peg further increases the imbalance, another vicious cycle.

There is no solution that doesn't include facing reality. Recognize that 55 ETB is just not worth 1 USD. The peg doesn't make the currency stronger. A broken thermometer does not cure fever! The cure starts by getting rid of the peg, which will

1. in the short term, eliminate the risk premium, improve availability of consumer goods, eliminate an unfair de-facto tax and subsidy, reduce corruption, and stop a major cause of socio-economic rot;
2. and in the longer term, increase exports, foreign investments, and productivity of the society, which will help fix the structural weakness of the currency.

People voluntarily exchanging things at prices they agree on is not a neo-colonial imperialist capitalist evil that needs to be forbidden. It's what humans have always done naturally everywhere, including in Ethiopia.

"Attention" and "Transformers" in Large Language Models

Everyone is talking about OpenAI's ChatGPT these days. Here's a very quick attempt to summarize the core idea behind large language models (LLMs) like GPT.

"Attention is all you need" (aka the transformer paper) published in 2017 by Vaswani et al from Google is still the mother of current LLMs, including GPT.  "Effective Approaches to Attention-based Neural Machine Translation", an earlier paper by Luong et al from Stanford, was also quite important.

These are sequence-to-sequence models, i.e. their job is mapping an input sequence of text into an output sequence of text. Applications include translation from one language to another, answering questions,  having a conversation, etc.

They use language embeddings (made famous by Word2vec in 2013 and later by BERT, both also from Google) as the basic encoding/decoding building blocks, i.e. mapping text to vectors of real numbers in an "embedding space".

The main new idea is in the architecture of the neural network between the input encoding and output decoding stages. The model uses the preceding terms in the current output sequence to decide which parts of the input sequence to pay more "attention" to for the next output term. A bit more precisely: the previous output is a "query" which gets used to generate a linear combination of "keys" from the input which maps to a linear combination of "values" also from the input. That in turn gets transformed into the next output term with a few more layers in a plain feed forward network (i.e. a bunch of layers of neurons, where each neuron is putting a linear combination of inputs into non-linear activation function). Each step has trainable weights.

There are also clever tricks besides "attention". One is positional encoding to represent the order so the same input term in a different position has different effects even though, unlike in recurrent neural networks,  in transformers the network just sees them as bag of words that could be in any order. Another is layer normalization to sort of keep the nonlinear outputs within a reasonable area in the embedding vector space.

This architecture, as far as I know, was not derived explicitly from the way human brains work. The "attention" analogy is really useful, but there are no principles saying this architecture is more fundamental to intelligence, or more natural, than many others. It just happens to produce remarkably good results when the weights are trained properly.

So that's the basic idea of contemporary LLMs. Of course in some sense, all computer neural networks are  just a bunch of matrix multiplications and ad-hoc activation functions. But you can't just connect a large number of mathematical "neurons" randomly in a network and hope it learns something.  The choice of architecture, i.e. how the "neurons" are connected, is key. On top of that, there is still an enormous amount of innovation/engineering to make the real world language models, not to mention turn them into a product like ChatGPT or Google Bard.

Nile basin mechanism design

Part 1 made the case for GERD in the short and medium term. Now for the really big picture

The human population of the Nile basin will probably double in the next century. Even if the Nile's water flow increases (some climate change scenario models indicate that rainfall could actually increase in the Nile basin over the next 50-100 years), it seems inevitable that demand will grow faster. And as mentioned in part 1, 100% of the flow is already being consumed. But this doesn't have to cause conflict. Globally, 70% of water use is for agriculture. So that's where the adjustments would have to be. From a natural resource optimization point of view, just like it doesn't make sense to grow almonds in California, or cotton in Kazakhstan, growing cotton and wheat in Egypt is probably not the most efficient use of water. 

What do we mean by efficient? Imagine for a second the whole region was one country; if an allocation of water to different uses maximizes total benefit, i.e. there is no other allocation that has a larger total benefit, then that's an efficient outcome. To achieve this efficiency, obviously some water intensive agriculture should migrate to other regions. But of course, the Nile doesn't have one owner and we don't have perfect cooperation, so we can't expect individual players (a country or a farmer or a business) to sacrifice their immediate interest and give up some water use for the greater good.  Game theory teaches us that an efficient resource allocation is useless if it is not feasible. And feasible means it's an equilibrium where each party benefits more from sticking to it than from deviating unilaterally. 

What would such an equilibrium look like? It's not as simple as dividing it equally.  For example, one issue is that if two people get the same amount of water, but one of them doesn't actually need it, that's a waste, i.e. inefficient.  Even the notion of need, beyond bare survival, is subjective: you can argue about the relative merit of washing clothes, how often people should take a shower or bath etc. 

Fortunately, there is a way to turn subjective values into an objective agreement: a price. What pricing mechanism might work in this scenario? For example, in a hypothetical v2.0 of the CFA all the countries in the basin could agree on a uniform Nile water tax. Each country would be liable to pay the tax for its total usage yearly. Of course, it would be up to each government to determine how the cost is distributed in its society: as a tax explicitly passed on to water consumers, or paid by general government revenue, or something in between. Passing the cost on is not as hard as it sounds since in most places that matter (homes and factories with running water, and farms with irrigation) water usage can easily be metered or is already. And non-consumptive uses like electricity generation would naturally be neutral. 

To keep each other honest, the countries could easily agree on verifiable data sources. Egypt doesn't have to trust the metering in Ethiopia and vice versa, they could rely on aggregate measurements of the water balance, a lot of which can be done using currently existing satellite data that is freely available from neutral sources.

The revenue from this would be collected in a common fund and automatically redistributed to member countries in pre-set proportions. The proportions are negotiated in advanced and fixed, and of course that would be the hardest part of the whole deal. One basis for this negotiation could be a share proportional to the present fraction of the total Nile basin population in that country (not the total population, obviously as countries have different fractions of territory and population falling within the basin).  

Naturally the price would have to be adjustable, say yearly, with a protocol agreed to in advance, so it regulates annual usage at sustainable levels i.e. below 100% of flow volume with a safety margin. If total usage is too high, the price goes up. If a lot of water goes unused, the price goes down. And if the total usage stays well below the sustainability level for a long time, the price would keep going down all the way to zero. This too is not as difficult as it may seem, it's basically the same idea as a carbon tax to fight climate change but much easier: the set of players that need to agree is much smaller (it's "only" 10 countries not 200), the consequences of water are immediately felt by all participants every year (unlike climate change which plays out over longer periods), and the target quantity is much easier to compute (total flow is well known, unlike the effect of different levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere which requires complex models with lots of uncertainty). (As an aside, the carbon tax itself is much better than cap and trade or carbon offsets, as I wrote on this blog a long time ago). With a pricing mechanism like that, no need for arguments about cotton in Egypt or irrigation in Ethiopia. Instead we would see a graceful phasing out of sub-optimal uses of water, and maximize the benefit of this shared resource. 

Finally to further solidify the positive economics and minimize the negative politics of the system, the countries should facilitate investments and trade across the region. If for example investors from each basin country were free to invest in other basin countries in farming and industry while still supplying the outputs to their domestic market, there would be less political friction around the natural geographic distribution of agriculture and industrial production. 

There are many examples of more complex cooperative agreements between countries around the world today, so it doesn't seem infeasible for the Nile basin countries to reach this kind of equilibrium. And recall we have plenty of time to achieve this long term goal, as the short term issue of GERD itself is win-win as discussed in part 1. But the chances of achieving this outcome will be greatly enhanced if in the meantime, the region's economies grow and become better diversified  across farming, industry and services.  Which brings us back to the present. Electrification is the sine qua non of developing a diversified economy. And GERD is a big step in the right direction, one which is immediately beneficial to not just Ethiopia but also Sudan and Egypt. 

The case for GERD

As the third filling of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) goes ahead, we should expect what is now becoming an annual uptick in media coverage and geopolitical controversy.  I've been thinking of writing a version of this blog post ever since the project started more than 10 years ago, but always ended up assuming this is adequately covered elsewhere. Years later, I'm still surprised by the frequency of incorrect assumptions dominating the discussion.  Not just in the media, but also in countless conversations. So it sounds like there might be some value in exposing the basic facts.

Power

GERD will have the capacity to generate 6GW of power at peak. However, due to seasonal variations, the average is expected to be about 40% of the peak. So on average, it should generate about 80 million GJ or 20 billion kWh of energy per year. Electricity production in 2019 was about 15 billion kWh, so GERD will more than double the  country's capacity. 

Economic impact

What is the economic value of this additional energy? Note that we are not asking what is the cost to produce it, nor the price at which it is sold. We are asking what is the economic value of consumer and industrial uses that it enables.  One way to estimate that is to look at the relationship between energy and GDP.  From a widely cited paper, "Energy and Economic Growth: The Stylized Facts",  we can deduce that each Gigajoule of energy corresponds to about $100 of GDP:  

 

Double checking with another source, "Our World in Data", gives us about $0.40 of GDP for every kWH.  This data has the added benefit that it shows a similar relationship, not just across countries but also on the same country over time: 

The two datasets are in almost perfect agreement. And they imply GERD's impact will be about $8B/year, or an increase of about 7% of GDP.[1] 

Considering the cost of the dam is about $5B, a return of $8B per year is great. Of course it will take a couple of more years for it to reach it's maximum generation capacity,  many years to develop the transmission and distribution of all this additional power to 100M consumers, and even more years for industries to grow that will take advantage of it. So the full impact is still far down the road, and depends on quite a few things happening correctly (not the least of which is finding ways to sell the "stranded" generated energy to finance the development of the distribution infrastructure, a topic which I will expand upon in the future). Still, the long term benefit is so large that there is no question the dam is a phenomenally good investment by Ethiopia.

You can also view it with a "social impact" lens if you are so inclined. Can you think of many projects where a one-time investment generates 160% return per year for many many years, increasing income by 7% for more than 100M people, most of whom are among the poorest in the world? Indeed GERD is possibly the biggest and perhaps most effective poverty reduction effort in the entire world today.

Climate impact

Of course, hydroelectric power is 100% renewable, and outside of the materials used in construction, the on-going operations have zero greenhouse gas emissions. Less obvious but also important is the fact that this electricity will displace current sources of energy which are dirtier. For example, millions of people in Ethiopia today often cook with wood charcoal, which from an emissions perspective, is worse than oil, let alone gas, or clean electricity. The amount is tiny on the scale of global emissions and climate change, but still moving from burning wood to electricity is a positive transition from dirty energy to clean energy. Further, the wood comes from cutting trees. Thus, electrification helps combat deforestation, and trees take CO2 out of the atmosphere through photosynthesis. For a good discussion on the relationship between electrification, deforestation and climate, I recommend the book "Apocalypse Never",  which explains this same point in detail using an example from the Democratic Republic of Congo. (As an aside, I also recommend my  review of that book on this blog).  So GERD not only does not emit, it reduces other carbon emissions, and saves trees which take carbon out of the atmosphere, a triple win in terms of reducing anthropogenic climate change. 

Water balance

Increased rainfall?

An additional argument, articulated by Ugandan president Museveni in this video, is that saving trees helps rainfall, which is a positive for total water balance of the overall Nile basin (water balance is a crucial point of contention as we shall see below).  

   

This particular argument is debatable since forests increase rainfall but trees also consume water. Here's a good paper on the links between forest cover and rainfall.  So it's probably a stretch to argue that water balance will increase. But hey, trees do enough for us even if they are neutral in the water balance equation. The overwhelming consensus is that preserving forests as much as possible is good, and electrification happens to help that.

No reduction in flow

The bigger question regarding water balance is of course whether the dam itself will reduce water availability downstream. This is where there is the biggest misunderstanding. Egyptians are extremely fearful that the dam will reduce the flow of the Nile, and they view it as an existential threat. But the reality is that the GERD will not reduce the amount of water that gets to Sudan and Egypt:

1. Electricity generation doesn't consume water. As water, pulled by gravity, flows through turbines, the kinetic energy of the water becomes electric energy, and all the water comes out on the other side and flows downhill from there as always. 
2. When there is loss of water from a dam, it is because it has a reservoir, a lake. The larger the area of the lake, the larger the loss due to evaporation. Indeed at the High Aswan Dam in Egypt, located more than a thousand kilometers downstream from the GERD in a flatter and hotter area, the reservoir (Lake Nasser) is large and shallow, causing a significant loss of water to evaporation. The GERD however is situated in a gorge, so the lake it creates is much narrower and deeper (about 1,900 km2 for GERD vs 5,250 km2 for Lake Nasser). It's also in a cooler area. Thus the evaporation impact of GERD is much less than Aswan's. Further, the purpose of the reservoir is to regulate the flow, like a battery. In theory, if you have a reservoir upstream, you can reduce the size of a reservoir downstream. So if we naively forget political boundaries for a second, and assume Egypt, Sudan and Ethiopia were 100% cooperative, to manage the total flow optimally, they would achieve the same magnitude of regulation by reducing the volume of Lake Nasser by the volume of GERD lake. Since GERD has relatively lower evaporation, this would be a net reduction in evaporation. But to keep things in perspective, evaporation accounts for less than 2 billion out of about 90 billion m3 /year of water flow on the Nile, so it's a minor issue.
3. A much larger fear for downstream people is that the GERD might enable additional consumptive uses, like irrigation for agriculture. This is a legitimate general concern of course, and fairness and efficiency in consumptive uses is important. However, in the case of the GERD, its location at the most downstream point in Ethiopia, near the point where the river exits to Sudan, means that it would be infeasible to use any of the water from that point for agriculture, as you would have to pump it uphill to reach farms within Ethiopia. This effectively guarantees that GERD cannot physically be used for irrigation or any consumptive activity in Ethiopia.  

For more on this, see the seminar on 'The economic impacts of large dams: a comparative analysis of the Nile and Colorado Rivers' . In particular the evaporation question and non-consumptive nature of GERD are addressed at 1:09:23 in the video. 

Bottom line: GERD will not decrease the net amount of water that reaches Egypt and Sudan. Regardless of what you think about the historical sharing of water, the fear that it can harm downstream people is just not supported by facts.

Floods and drought mitigation

In fact it's actually beneficial to them. As I tweeted some time ago, this excellent paper entitled 'Understanding and managing new risks on the Nile with the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam' explains it:

1. "Sudan will clearly be better off ... because GERD operations will smooth Blue Nile flows, eliminating flood losses, increasing hydropower generation, decreasing sediment load to the reservoirs and canals, and, most importantly, increasing water for summer irrigation in the Gezira Scheme and other irrigated areas along the Blue Nile".  To get a sense of the magnitude of this benefit, consider that flooding in 2020 caused over 100,000 homes to collapse and Sudan to declare a 3-month state of emergency.
2. During droughts, it is expected that the existence of the GERD will cause "decreased water deficits to Egypt and increased water availability". 
   

It is also extremely important to note that, as the paper explains, these benefits to Egypt and Sudan do not depend on generosity and goodwill from Ethiopia. Keeping the flow steady by boosting it during droughts and throttling it during floods is also necessary from the self-interested electricity generating perspective of GERD, so it's a win-win-win proposition even without explicit cooperation.  In other words, long term incentives are aligned between Ethiopia, Sudan and Egypt, which should offer the strongest reassurance to back whatever political understanding is (hopefully) reached.

Filling

Now besides the long-term incentives, there is a separate question of what happens during the initial filling of the GERD reservoir, which started in 2020 and is expected to last 4 to 7 years. Filling the reservoir obviously must temporarily decrease the downstream flow. But here two facts should be understood. First, filling takes place in the rainy season (July and August) each year, where typically there is "too much" flow, so there should be no detrimental effect downstream.  Second, by chance, the first and second fillings took place during above average rainfall years 2020 and 2021. It's almost as if nature decided to be pro-GERD at this most critical time!

It's possible that the filling has already helped reduce the severity of floods in Sudan, although that effect may be limited by the fact that filling stopped as scheduled halfway through the rainy season (the Sudanese irrigation minister even complained that the filling didn't go fast enough to help).

Geopolitics

That is not to say Egypt and Sudan don't have any legitimate concerns. Future upstream uses of the Nile water could reduce their supply. The total water flow, while abundant, is currently almost 100% consumed: no Nile water actually reaches the Mediterranean Sea, except what's needed to push back salinity. So, even though GERD itself is a win-win-win,  in the bigger picture, the Nile water use is a zero sum game.  Currently, Egypt consumes 79%, Sudan 18%, and the rest of the countries combined less than 3%.

But there is international law and precedent on how to share rivers between multiple countries. The right way to deal with this case is the Nile Basin Initiative's Cooperative Framework Agreement  (CFA) which should be able to handle the issues of the next few decades at least. Uganda, Ethiopia,  Rwanda, Tanzania, Kenya, Burundi and South Sudan are on board. Sudan and Egypt initially joined, then "froze" their participation, but from what I gathered at the aforementioned seminar, Sudan has recently rejoined.  

The main problem is the recalcitrance of the Egyptian government. Given that their country consumes 79% of the Nile's water, perhaps they feel that acceptance of any upstream change jeopardizes this entitlement. The military government of Egypt has taken a hard line and it seems like they fear any compromise abroad might weaken their political power at home. This political trap has far reaching consequences for the region's stability and peace. Very unfortunate. Let's hope reason beats politics for once and things work out rationally, since GERD itself is actually beneficial to Egypt. 

Part 2 of this post explores the longer term sharing of the Nile beyond GERD.

P.S. This post is dedicated to my dear friend Ahmed Amr. A brilliant and hyper-informed Egyptian who during a conversation last year, was surprised by some of these technical facts.  Sadly Ahmed passed away from a long illness a few months ago. Ahmed, wherever you are, I hope you enjoy this post and I look forward to chatting with you again in the afterlife!

[1]Another way of getting economic impact is to multiply production by average price to get the direct value of the energy, and then apply a GDP "multiplier" which estimates the downstream GDP impact (electricity enables goods and services, which in turn enable other goods and services etc.) The problem as you can imagine is that multipliers are very inexact. In a tweet on this topic a couple of years ago, I used the a multiplier of 1.6 which I now realize is too low. I also incorrectly used peak power instead of average. Coincidentally the two inaccuracies cancelled out and the GDP estimate was about the same.

The 4th wave of Bitcoin FUD

I just came across Why This Computer Scientist Says All Cryptocurrency Should “Die in a Fire”. I can't find any point in there that hasn't already been refuted many times. But it's relatively rare to find so many of them in one place, and it has been going around, so I thought I should make a little effort to rebut it. 

Security

Though not the most important aspect of the article, the "computer scientist" in the title is a not-too-subtle argument from authority, so it behooves us to take a look. The computer scientist in question is Nicholas Weaver, who I haven't heard of before, though from a brief look at his publications, I recognize some of his co-authors. It seems like his expertise is network security. So his most important contribution as an expert would be if he could find an actual technical security problem in Bitcoin. But of course he hasn't, in fact no one has successfully exploited Bitcoin. This is a rarely appreciated aspect of the network. Even though it's the world's largest honey pot, with literally several hundred billion dollars there for the taking, the entire codebase is open source, and all the data is on the public blockchain, no one has actually technically been able to "crack" Bitcoin. There is plenty of theft of Bitcoin of course, because people make mistakes with their keys etc. A scary bug was luckily fixed in the early days. Still no one has exploited the system itself. For any computer scientist, or anyone who has ever written software, this is very remarkable. As a network security expert,  you'd think Weaver would at least mention it. 

Maybe he has motivation for not saying anything positive? Indeed, apparently he's been declaring the death of Bitcoin so many times since 2013 that Weaver has earned a place in the Bitcoin Skeptic Hall of Fame.  It seems like he has dug himself into an anti-Bitcoin emotional trap which is hard to climb out of.

Bubbles

Credentialism aside, his actual criticism consists of economic arguments. He points to the price of Bitcoin in USD and "bubbles" where it rose from $10 to $100 then "crashed". Then to $1000 and crashed. Then to $20,000 and crashed. Then to $60,000 and crashed. And confidently asserts that there won't be a fifth bubble, that this time it's really dead.  But this only inadvertently points to the fact that he's been wrong so many times. Without any coherent explanation of why his previous predictions have failed, it's hard to believe him this time. A more honest view is to zoom out and look at it on a log scale, and notice that each "crash" bottoms out much higher than the previous one. So if one is going to reason purely from historical prices, then a reasonable observer would not confidently say that the last peak happens to be the final one before it goes to zero forever. That's like looking at a toddler learning how to walk and after the fourth time he falls down saying the kid will never walk. A more reasonable take is that if the Bitcoin price chart tells us anything, it's more likely the story of an emergent store of value.   Of course, chart analysis to predict future prices is generally a fool's errand, and even more so with this unique phenomenon. There are not many analogues in history -- we don't have exchange rates of gold from 2500 years ago. It's better to think about Bitcoin from first principles and think about long term adoption while avoiding short term price predictions.   

Adjacent crypto: altcoins, blockchains etc.

To make matters more confusing, most critics (and Weaver is no exception) put Bitcoin in a bucket with all the other cryptocurrencies, ICOs, NFTs etc. But almost all of the other stuff around "crypto" is junk, much of it unethical or even fraudulent.

Leaving aside the many outright frauds, the whole "altcoin" space reminds me a bit of the history of the Internet.  In the 1980s and 90s, TCP/IP had alternatives like ATM (Asynchronous Transfer Mode). A lot argued that the IP network wouldn't scale, or wouldn't offer good enough QoS, etc. They argued that the net would never be used for serious things like the phone network or television. It's true that there are various trade-offs in the design of TCP and IP, even some arbitrary choices. You can argue for different ones in hindsight. And things do evolve, albeit slowly. Witness IPv6 getting deployed in a backward compatible way over more than 2 decades, while IPv4 continues to chug along. Even ATM was absorbed as a short-lived layer 2 protocol under IP. But there's only one Internet. That's the so-called network effect. If the protocol is good enough, early enough, it becomes the standard.  

And that is where proponents and critics of "altcoins" are causing confusion and driving unjustified hostility to Bitcoin. Viewing Bitcoin as one of many "cryptocurrencies" masks a basic reality: Bitcoin is like the Internet of money and it is here to stay.

That said, I'm not against all other cryptocurrencies. For example a broader smart contract platform makes sense long term, and Ethereum may be the one for the ages. But there are significant technical hurdles remaining. And it's already so bloated very few people actually run a full Ethereum node. And that's all before the much delayed eth 2.0 migration, which if it succeeds may introduce a potentially fatal governance change called proof-of-stake. Building a "world computer" as it needs to be is much harder than what has been achieved to date. 

"Blockchain not Bitcoin" is another common theme among "crypto" hopefuls. But without a real reason for decentralization, a blockchain is just an expensive and slow database. Most of the envisioned applications for blockchains can be more easily achieved with traditional databases.

Bitcoin's proof-of-work ledger for sound commodity money is to date the only real world blockchain use case.

Energy and Proof-of-Work

Speaking of proof of work, energy use is the most common and dangerous vector of FUD against Bitcoin, and Weaver recycles the usual points. He claims that Bitcoin miners are "wasting tons of electricity". This topic is deep and generally misunderstood. Here's my attempt to distill it in my paper entitled "Dynamics of Bitcoin mining":

Does mining use too much energy?

This question assumes the system requires some amount of computation to be done and that it ”wants” to minimize the energy to achieve it. That is indeed how most systems work. But not Bitcoin. Proof-of-work does the reverse of that. The system ”wants” a certain value to be spent on energy, and the amount of computation adjusts to achieve it. Of course individual miners compete by being as efficient as possible, but the resulting collective behavior is to achieve a certain cost of energy with variable amounts of computation, not to perform a specific amount of computation with variable amounts of energy. 

This unusual combination – individual participants being efficiency-seeking but their collective behavior being efficiency-neutral – is very counter-intuitive and probably the root cause of much misguided hostility. It’s also worth emphasizing that the amount of energy doesn’t matter, only the cost. If the price of electricity relative to everything else in the world doubles, but nothing else changes, then Bitcoin would simply use half the amount of energy to achieve the same relative cost[...] The cost of energy is a feature not a bug, and ”waste” is impossible by design. All of the energy is ”work”. 

And where there’s no ”waste”, the question of energy use boils down to a moral judgement. Can you argue that heating in the winter, even if perfectly efficient, is not justified and people should move to warmer climates? What about air conditioning, or electric clothes dryers, or ice cream? When is any purposeful energy use justified? Morally, as long as access to and the price of energy is fair, what it’s used for should be accepted as a subjective choice. Bitcoin offers the possibility of inflation-resistant savings, low-cost long-distance value transfer, and censorship-resistant money. For its users, these are important benefits which are no less justified than most other uses of energy.

In the same interview, Weaver attacks the notion that Bitcoin "incentivizes green power", and goes on to misrepresent the incentives, and the supply and demand dynamics of electric power. I covered this too in the same paper:

Many sources of renewable energy are highly variable: solar and wind power depend on time of day and weather, hydroelectric power is seasonal, etc. In general, these ups and downs on the supply side do not line up perfectly with the demand for electricity. Further, even with the largest possible batteries, water reservoirs, etc., electric energy remains extremely difficult to store for later use at a large scale. Thus there is often a lot of ”stranded” energy when using renewable sources. Just like off-peak bandwidth in telecommunication networks, or empty seats on scheduled airline flights, the cost of production is already sunk, and so for the supplier, selling stranded power at any price is better than letting it go unused. [...] The competitive dynamics of Bitcoin mining are such that it shifts in time and space to the lowest available cost of electricity. This occurs not just by deploying hardware to various locations, but also by turning miners on or off instantly. This flexible demand-side support makes mining the ideal customer to balance variable supply, and as variability tends to affect renewable much more than fossil fuel sources, in effect, Bitcoin subsidizes the development of ”green” electricity.

Adoption

Finally, Weaver claims that Bitcoin will permanently fall apart Real Soon Now™, when it runs out of suckers. But there's really no basis for his claim. He doesn't give any reason why the number of suckers is a particular fraction of the world's population and why that limit has been reached now. Why didn't it run out after 1M people? Or 100M? Why not 8 billion people?  

Of course, the success of Bitcoin depends on widespread adoption. Why is gold used as money? You can try to explain it based on some key properties: it's impossible to synthesize, the supply is limited, it's fungible and can be shaped easily, it doesn't degrade... Those are useful, but we don't know if they are sufficient.  The emergence of a monetary good is a fascinating topic, one that most people don't understand and don't even realize that they don't know. ("The Origins of Money", an article which predates Bitcoin, is a good read). Ultimately, Bitcoin is just a Schelling point whose emergence is highly path dependent.That's just a fancy way of saying "we'll see", but every day that passes makes the ultimate success more likely, and it's been almost 5000 days already.

Doomsday argument

And now for something completely different: a fun little probability puzzle. 

What's the probability that the human race will end some time in the next 100 years? Surprisingly this question has a logical answer. And not because we have some magic crystal ball.  In fact, our puzzle  specifically assumes we have no information at all about the future.  

Here's how it goes.  Let's step out of time for a second, and consider the total number of humans who will ever exist. Let's say that number is N.  If you are of the Abrahamic faiths, you can call the first one Adam. But we're just having fun so we'll just number them from first to last: 1,2,3, ..., N.  Now let n be your number. So 1 <  n < N, you are somewhere between the first  and the last person ever.  Since we  have no information about the future, we have no clue if you are near the end or near the beginning or somewhere in the middle.  You just happened to land at some random position in the long line of  humans. So we have to assume that any position is equally likely, or technically that n is uniformly distributed between 1 and N. The chance that you are in a particular interval is equal to how big that interval is relative to the whole sequence. There's a 50% chance that you are in the first half and 50% chance that you are in the second half,  there's a 95% chance that you are in the first 95% and a 5% chance that you are in the last 5% of people, etc.  So P(n < f*N) = f and P(n>f*N)  = 1-f, for any fraction f between 0 and 1.  

We don't know N, but we can estimate n, because we can approximately calculate the cumulative population to date. This is more accurate  than you might think because the parts really long time ago where we have poor estimates are also the times where there were very few people.  The left tail is long but thin. Estimates now are around  n = 117 billion.

From the above, the distribution of N is P(N<n/f) = 1-f. That means there's a 5% chance that N < 123B i.e. that there are only 6 billion babies to go before the last one. If we translate that into time, using the current rate of 140M births per year,  it means there's a 5% chance that we have less than 43 years left! And a 50-50 chance that we'll be around for another 800 years. At the other end, a 5% chance that we have more than 16,000 years left, and so on.

I heard about this puzzle known as the "doomsday argument" about a year ago. Of course you can debate about whether this is a realistic model, but it's a cute way to provoke thought about all the minor risks we collectively worry about and the big ones we don't consider rationally. 

Reminds me of a few scenarios discussed in this blog a long time ago:  ineffective posturing on climate change, the asteroid lottery , political pandering in a pandemic... Ouch ouch ouch! Sadly humanity doesn't seem to have gotten wiser in the decade (!) since those posts... 43 years seems like an awfully short time. At least math is eternal!

What happened in Ethiopia? Simplistic narrative

My previous posts were deep dives for readers already familiar with the basic facts. Today, I just want to respond to this request:

I could use a simplistic Good Guys vs Bad Guys narrative on the Tigray conflict in Ethiopia — what’s on offer?

— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) November 23, 2021

It's not very simple, sorry Matt, but the following is about as simple as it can be made:

• In 1991, the communist regime of Ethiopia was overthrown by a coalition of rebel groups led by the TPLF and the EPLF, and joined by OLF and others.  This alliance masked a contradiction, EPLF was a multi-ethnic party fighting for independence of the then-province of Eritrea from Ethiopia, and TPLF was an ethnic party, while the two were led by members of the same ethnic group.
• OLF sooned fell out with TPLF and became an armed opposition group and its leaders went into exile.
• In 1993, under EPLF (renamed PFJD), Eritrea became an independent country.
• The TPLF became the dominant party in Ethiopia and instituted a system of ethnic apartheid where different ethnic groups had separate regions and parties.
• In 1998 the former allies had a falling out and war broke out between Eritrea and Ethiopia. After 2 years the massive war ended in a stalemate and the two governments remained enemies for the next 18 years.
• Economically, the formerly Marxist TPLF adopted a "developmental state" model, where the government had tight controls on many areas, but was much freer than the fully communist system that preceded it. GDP growth was very high in the 2000s. However, party affiliated businesses dominated the economy,  cronyism and corruption were high and resentment of the TPLF elite grew.
• The TPLF ruled until 2018 with an iron fist, within a coalition called EPRDF. In the 2005 elections, opposition parties made significant gains for the first time and TPLF responded with a massive crackdown, opposition leaders were imprisoned many receiving death sentences. In the following elections, the ruling party "won" 545 out of 547 seats in 2010, and 100% of the seats in the  2015 elections. Ethiopia often topped the world charts of number of journalists and opponents imprisoned.
• Discontent grew to a boiling point and after several years of massive protests TPLF lost power in 2018. Abiy Ahmed a member of a junior party in the coalition called OPDO was chosen to lead EPRDF. Abiy dissolved the coalition and formed a new party called PP. All the constituent parties of EPRDF merged into PP, except TPLF which refused and retreated to its home province of Tigray where it continued to dominate.
• From 2018 to 2020, Abiy started a series of reforms, liberalizing key economic sectors, freeing political prisoners, inviting exiled opposition politicians to return, legalizing banned opposition parties, and making a peace treaty with Eritrea, which earned him a Nobel peace prize.  
• Meanwhile, TPLF repeatedly defied the federal government, harboring individuals indicted for assassination attempts, corruption, etc. During this period TPLF still dominated the top ranks of the federal armed forces and the economy, and its regional militia was widely believed be larger than the federal army. TPLF used its considerable resources to instigate ethnic conflicts throughout the country.  From the OLF, which was now a legal political party, a more radical group called the OLA split off and launched an armed struggle.  For 2 years the federal government bent over backwards to avoid direct conflict with TPLF, attempted negotiations,  sent groups of "elders" to mediate, etc. At the same time Abiy was working to reduce the TPLF's grip on the military. 
• In 2020, the independent Electoral Commission, led by a former opposition leader Birtukan Mideksa, postponed federal elections because of Covid-19. All major parties except TPLF agreed to the postponement. In September, TPLF held its own elections in Tigray where it "won" 100% of the seats, and declared that it no longer recognized the federal government.  In October, when the government appointed new leaders for the federal military bases in the Tigray region, the TPLF rejected and turned back the appointees. 
• Finally on the night of November 3-4 2020, the TPLF launched what it called a "pre-emptive" attack and seized 5 federal military bases in Tigray (the Northern Command) which held an estimated 80% of the country's military hardware.  As part of it, TPLF loyal soldiers in the federal army attacked their colleagues from within the barracks, murdering hundreds in their sleep, a move which was seen as a deep betrayal in the Ethiopian military.
• In response, the federal government launched what it called a "law enforcement operation" to bring those responsible for the attack to justice.
• On November 9-10, as fighting raged throughout Tigray, a TPLF group called Samri killed hundreds of civilians in a place called Mai Kadra. Mai Kadra is in a region which was annexed to Tigray in the early 1990s, but was previously part of Begemder (aka Gonder) province, which is now in the Amhara region. On November 29, following battles where control of the city of Axum changed hands from TPLF to the Eritrean army,  Eritrean soldiers conducted house to house raids and killed hundreds of men they claimed were part of the fighting. 
• The federal army, with the help of Amhara region forces and Eritrean military, managed to regain control of the main cities and towns in Tigray region and declared the "law enforcement operation" finished  by the end of November 2020
• However the war continued, with accusations of war crimes being made by TPLF against Eritrean and Ethiopian military and echoed by mainstream media in the West. The Ethiopian government prosecuted a number of individuals for war crimes,  but denied systematic war crimes.  The Ethiopian government also said that it was supplying the overwhelming majority of the aid to civilians in Tigray affected by the war, while outside forces were using aid as a cover to provide military support to TPLF.
• In June 2021, the postponed federal elections were held and the PP won a large majority. A few parties including OLF boycotted, and the elections were delayed to September in about 20% of the country.  But overall it was the freest vote ever held in the country. In terms of popular mandate, PM Abiy is by far the most legitimate head of government the country has had in our lifetimes.  
• Meanwhile, the TPLF had regrouped and by June 2021, with diplomatic (and possibly covert military) support from the US, regained the military initiative in an operation it called "Operation Alula" throughout Tigray
• The federal government declared a unilateral ceasefire on June 28 and withdrew from Tigray. 
• From July to November 2021, having regained control of most of Tigray, the TPLF went on the offensive outside of Tigray on three fronts going deep into neighboring regions: east into the Afar region, south into Wollo and south-west into Gonder in the Amhara region. The offensive was defeated on the eastern and south-western fronts, but successful in the southern direction, capturing the key city of Dessie and, with help from the OLA, advanced to less than 300km from Addis Abeba.

I've tried to be as objective as possible, and left out speculation on motives and other analysis, in favor of just relaying facts. But it's probably obvious that my answer to Matt's question is the same as what the overwhelming  majority of Ethiopians would say: the Bad Guys are TPLF.  

Ethiopia and the ethnicity rat race - part 2: history

Part 1 looked at ethnic federalism in Ethiopia through a geographic lens, and showed it has a bug: that it's not feasible to geographically separate ethnic groups.  

In this post, let's take the historical perspective. The philosophical foundation of ethnic federalism emerged in the early 1970s, as a solution to the problem called "Ethiopia as a prison of nations". Here's one summary:

(Source:  International Journal of Ethiopian Studies, Vol. 11, No. 1 & 2)

So, the Ethiopian Student Movement, along with the ethnic nationalists it spawned, referred to Ethiopia as a "prison of nations". 

This idea produced a number of ethnic political parties, often named X Liberation Front, where X is an ethnicity. The most successful of these is of course the Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF)  founded in 1975. I guess they had to add the P because there was another group called the Tigray Liberation Front (TLF), the two apparently fought each other and TPLF eliminated TLF in the late 70s. The history of the XLFs is very complicated, full of isms and schisms, featuring different flavors of Marxism-Leninism and extremely violent struggles. The Marxist aspect is not very relevant to our discussion, however the Leninist strategy of "sharpening contradictions" has some bearing. I won't try to summarize that history here, for that see e.g. the excellent History of Modern Ethiopia by Bahru Zewde. Instead let's just focus on one basic assumption of this "prison of nations" concept, namely that ethnicity comes first and the country comes after. Does this assumption have any historical basis?

Ethiopia is 1,700 years old. (The specific number  doesn't change the point I am making here so I put discussion of it in a different post). What about the 80+ ethnic groups that exist in the country?  Consider the Amharic language. During the Axumite period, Ge'ez was a living language.  Many people believe that Amharic is a descendant of Ge'ez, which is not wrong but is an oversimplification:

"As early as the middle of the fourth century, military expeditions may have reached the area later known as Amhara. By the mid-ninth century, four centuries later, a distinctive Amhara region was recognized. The conquering Semitic-speakers spoke a language which was perhaps only four to seven centuries removed from the common origin with Giiz" 

Source:  The origin of Amharic, Ethiopian Journal of Language and Literature, Vol. 1 No. 1 (1983)

The oldest surviving written Amharic documents are 14th century praise songs in honor of the kings.  In biology, there is no precise moment when one species evolved into another. Similarly, as cultures and languages evolve, it is hard to pinpoint a specific date when a new language or ethnicity is born.  The consensus among the linguists seems to be that Amharic gradually evolved, not directly from Ge'ez but from a Semitic language related to Ge'ez, which got mixed on top of a Cushitic "substratum" (or base) which was a member of the Agew family.  The Agew family includes the Qimant and Bilen languages, which are still spoken in the region today.  But whether you consider the earliest or the latest time frame, it's clear that Amharic did not exist before Ethiopia. Certainly it doesn't make sense to think of the Amhara ethnic group as  being "imprisoned" in Ethiopia. 

Speaking of Agew (also spelled Agaw), a few months ago, in August 2021, something called the Agew Liberation Front popped up in a Facebook post and a Twitter post.  The first thing that comes to mind regarding Agew history is the Zagwe dynasty (1137-1270AD) and the amazing churches they build around Lalibela. Tradition has it that the first Zagwe Emperor, Mara Takla Haymanot, married the daughter of the last king of Axum.  One of the most fascinating characters in Ethiopian history is the insurgent Queen Yodit Gudit (940-80AD).  The information about her is from oral tradition, so it should be taken with a grain of salt, but apparently she was Agew, her religion was Jewish, when she reached Shewa  she encountered Oromo resistance (more on that below), and according to one source, the Zagwe founder Mara Talka Haymanot was her relative.  Though these details are far from  proven, even if they are completely legendary, they show that the Agew are glorified and viewed as part of the continuum with Axum in Ethiopian history, hardly what you would expect if the ethnic group was a "prisoner".  In short, you could say no one is more Ethiopian than the Agew. Back to the present... The first strange thing about the ALF is that the social media posts announcing its existence and alliance with TPLF were by people whose social media activities consist almost entirely of advocating for TPLF. Second, I did a thorough web search, and found no web page, no news article, no press release, nothing referring to this group before that week. Even after the announcement, no member or leader of the group could be identified. Now that a couple of months have elapsed, perhaps there's more info, I would love to hear who these individuals are, and their actions or thoughts before this year.  But so far,  it really looks like ALF was just manufactured by TPLF in 2021! A move straight out of the Leninist playbook. 

Speaking of the Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF), there's a puzzle there too. The Tigrinya language is Semitic intermixed with Cushitic, it emerged in the middle ages, and the earliest known written examples date from the 13th century -- parallel with Amharic. And just like Amharic, Tigrinya didn't exist before Ethiopia.  The people are found in a number of historical provinces: Agame,  Akele Guzai, Enderta, Hamasien, Serae, etc. But today we are told that there's an ethnic group called Tigrinya people in Eritrea, and a different ethnic group called Tigrayans  (also known as Tegaru) in Tigray. Nobody seems to be able to explain the actual difference between them! Of course there are different accents, families, etc.  But the distance from, say, Senafe in Eritrea to Adigrat in Tigray is less than the distance from Senafe to Asmara, physically, and even in the blood relations. The separation is political: they ended up on different sides of a border from 1889 to 1936, when Eritrea was Italian but Ethiopia remained independent.  Other groups were also split by this border like the Afar, but nobody says Afars on either side of the border are different ethnic groups. Forty seven years is like the blink of an eye on the timescale of ethnic groups and language evolution. Yet, if you read the news today, you would think the Tigrinya speakers of Eritrea, and those who are in Tigray are different people, capable of committing "genocide" against each other. It's a category error.  Eritrea is multi-ethnic like Ethiopia, and the majority ethnic group happens to be the same one as in Tigray. A naive outsider who has only been following the news of the past year would be surprised to hear that Isaias Afewerki (President of Eritrea) and the late  Meles Zenawi (long-time leader of TPLF and Prime Minister of Ethiopia) were cousins. Another example is Yemane Kidane. The history of EPLF and TPLF is way more complicated than we can describe here (again I refer you to the book by Bahru Zewde as a starting point), but the bottom line for us here is that framing their current enmity as ethnic makes no sense. You can call it intense, brutal, horrifying, many things, but not ethnic, it's political.

Yohannes IV, Emperor of Ethiopia from 1871 to 1889 was from Tigray. Yet he chose Amharic as the official language of his government.  Haile Selassie I, who today is cast by XLFs as the ultimate symbol of Amhara domination, was half Oromo through his mother.  His wife, Etege Menen, was also part-Oromo. Her grandfather was Ras Mikael Ali of Wollo, who famously played a huge role in the battle of Adwa. The Yejju Oromo, from the area around  Weldiya (a city which has been very much in the news in the last few months!), are well known as having dominated the politics of the empire during the Zemene Mesafint era (1769-1855). The picture that emerges when examining the last 300 years is of power alliances and rivalries as frequently within ethnic groups as across ethnic groups. In other words, the exact opposite of  the idea of a "prison of nationalities". 

The 18th century, by the way, was not the beginning of the Oromo presence in what is now called the Amhara region: 

"According to one written source obtained from the Yajju Oromo inhabitants of the Amhara National Regional State, these peoples are mentioned as inhabitants of northern Ethiopia already before the 14th century. This document deals with the rise and fall of the Yajju dynasty. According to this source, the Bokoji clan was the first Oromo settler of Yajju. Later on, however, the Muslim Oromo of the Yajju known as Warra-Sheih family took the territory of the Bokoji clan. From the early settlers of Bokoji clan in Yajju, the same document cites the names of the founding fathers like Kumbi, Marso, Shekka and Abba Dimbar. Maliye, Gammada and Ilman Oromo. At present, this region is found in southern Waldiya. The man named Abba Dimbar Maliye occupied and settled in the present region of Gubbaa Laftoo."

Source: "History of the Oromo to the Sixteenth Century", Alemayehu Haile, Boshi Gonfa, Daniel Deressa, Senbeto Busha, Umer Nure (2004) 

According to the same source, this time frame  is corroborated by an Arabic account of the war of Ahmed Gragn entitled "Futuh al Habasha" which says that when he got there in 1533, the Yejju had been in the area for 6 generations, i.e 14th century, which also agrees with oral tradition from the region, and with the chronicle of King Amda Tsion (1314-44).  Going further, from the same book, we learn that Yekuno Amlak, the king who overthrew the aforementioned Zagwe dynasty in 1270 and established the Solomonic line that lasted until 1974, was from Sagarat, near Lake Hayq (another place that's been in the news a lot lately!) which was ruled by an Oromo Azaj named Challa. Still earlier, archeological evidence shows that in the Menz province of the Shewa region, the Oromo presence goes back to the 8th century, which, as we saw above, is right in the thick of the origins of Amharic. In other words, there has never been a time when Amhara and Oromo were not deeply intertwined.

Moving a bit further north, in the same book, we find this about Oromo presence in present-day Tigray:

"The present-day settlers of Wajirat named Dobba are difficult to identify whether or not they belong to Offla or Marawa Oromo, but they are known to have been old Oromo settlers of Northern Ethiopia. Igguy and Marawa Oromo are said to have been settled in Wajirat since ancient times and that they are prior settlers. This period preludes the reign of the renowned Christian King Amda Siyon (1314-44) and this king himself is said to have recruited Oromo into his army  [...]  At present Wajjirat is bounded by Afar in the east, Inderta in the west, and Rayya in the south. The settlement area of Rayya which begins from southern Wajirat extends southwards as far as Amba Alage or Endamehone. The southern part of Rayya territory is known as Rayya and Azebo whereas the southern territory is known as Rayya and Qobbo. The Dobba Oromo that settled over the mountainous highland territories is traditionally known by the name of Chittu-Ofa. There are several Oromo tribes known with the name Dobba that are living in Hararge, northern Shawa and other Oromo regions."

It might surprise some readers to find ancient Oromo presence so far from present day Oromia.  Further, how can you reconcile that with the common (mis)conception of Oromos as "invaders" who arrived in the 16th century? One possible explanation, from the same source, is:

"Oral tradition collected from the Macha Oromo elders tell us that there are two groups of Oromo settlers in Western Oromia. One group consists of pastoralist Oromo that came and settled in the region during the 16th century organizing itself under a military leadership of the Gada system. Another group consists of sedentary agriculturalists that lived in the region long years before the advent of the pastoralist Oromo. The earlier group called itself "Orom-Duro." It means the ancient or prior Oromo. They used this term to make a distinction with the pastoralist Oromo" 

Note that the word "d'ro" means "long time ago" in Amharic.  There are indeed many basic words in modern Amharic that are similar to Oromo words, which should not be surprising given all of the above. History shows that the Oromo culture is one of, if not the most successful in Ethiopia,  in the evolutionary sense. It has been expanding, assimilating, and influencing others for over a thousand years. (Another source is this book by Martial de Salviac, a fascinating read for modern readers with a thick skin, I will post a review when time permits).

But XLF doctrinaires of the last few decades, e.g. in the OLF, tend to cast the Oromo as victims. A very sad misconception. Unfortunately it's a very effective strategy for ambitious politicians to exploit. I am reminded of this comment by Tigist Gemeda on a previous post on this blog (see also her more recent tweet). Her grandfather was a Balambaras, a high ranking Ethiopian during the reign of Haile Selassie I, but some of his family in the present day are key OLFites who "manipulate" people and exploit a sense of "persecution" for political ambition. Very courageous and powerful stuff. 

My meandering through history is very incomplete, I only mentioned 7 out of the 80+ ethnic groups, focusing, not coincidentally, on the areas at the heart of the current war. The point is not to give a complete history. Nor is it to debate whether there has been ethnic discrimination and conflicts. The answer is obviously yes there has!  Nor is it an argument for centralization. I happen to believe in decentralization and localism, but not along artificial "procrustean" ethnic lines. Rather it is to show that the "prison of nationalities" concept of Ethiopian history is wrong. You can call it a melting pot, a chessboard, a game of thrones etc. But it's not a recently built "prison" of pre-existing ethnic groups yearning for separation.  

And ethnic political parties and ethnic regions, i.e. apartheid, as a solution to this "problem" is a very recent phenomenon. It's a bug, which was formally implemented in the constitution of 1994. It goes against history and it doesn't work. The concept was invented by some university students in the late 1960s and early 1970s. And hasn't improved with age. But they mastered armed struggle and perfected the ideological tactics of Leninism, they were successful in co-opting thousands of people to their way of thinking, and passed it on to another generation of ideologues and political opportunists...  Kudos to them I guess. They are still at it. Most recently with UFEFCF (I think it stands for United Front of Ethnic Free Cash Flow) a pathetic collection of XLF puppets manufactured by TPLF masterminds in 2021. How long will this trick work? How long is the country going to be hostage to the bankrupt ideas of a bunch of unwise 20-something year old undergrads from 50 years ago? 

I don't expect to convince any XLF true believers with this post. It's almost impossible to change someone's mind when their livelihood or public persona is deeply invested in an idea, no matter how wrong it is. But many well-intentioned people have fallen for this false solution. They think: "if only X group was free from Y ethnic group...", "X has always oppressed Y...",  etc.  So they buy into "solutions" based on the false conception, judging people by their ethnicity, ascribing collective ethnic guilt for political injustice, blaming present individuals for past sins committed by members of their group etc. They are like the poor old lady who, a few years ago, wanted to repair a deteriorated fresco in a Spanish church. She had the kindest intentions, and she thought it was a simple matter of applying a bit of paint here and there. But the more she did, the worse it got, and she tried to fix her mistakes with more of the same. The result was perhaps the "worst art restoration of all time":

Ethiopia is like that painting: old, damaged, but can only be understood as a beautiful whole.

In my previous post, I tried to show why geographically, ethnic politics lead to doom. Here I hope that I have shown the richness of our different languages and cultures is not fixed, it's a dynamic process. A country evolves. But a person can't change their ethnic identity. So if your politics are based on ethnicity, you are asking to be trapped in conflict. Reject ethnic apartheid! Don't support any political party that has an ethnic group in its name. Believe in politics as a process of learning from mistakes, of forgiveness, where good ideas rise and bad ideas sink. Be resolute in defense of an Ethiopia that transcends ethnicity, and magnanimous in victory. 

ለ ኢትዮጵያዊነት ቀን አለ ገና