Konjit Sinegiorgis, Diplomat Who Carried Ethiopia Through Africa's Institutional Rebirth, Dies at 86

A Diaspora Entrepreneur Who Turned Nostalgia into a Media Business Dies at 54

Amman Fissehazion liked to say that television was “a bridge with pictures”. In 2008, he and his brothers, Mussie and Noah, joined by Nebiyu Yared, set out to build that bridge from a rented studio in Silver Spring, Maryland. They called the channel the Ethiopian Broadcasting Service (EBS), put up their own savings, and filled the schedule with chat, music, and nostalgia, targeting Ethiopians scattered across the world as well as those at home. No institutional money backed them, only family resolve. Operating from suburban Washington D.C. had advantages. Studios, satellite uplinks a...

Leikun Berhanu, Rising from Clerk to Financial Patriarch, Dies at 80

Behind a gate painted grey and black, an unassuming villa sits hushed near the Saris neighbourhood in the southern outskirts of Addis Abeba. On its veranda, two empty chairs stare out at a yard once alive with the noise of children and the measured voice of Leikun Berhanu, the banker who guided the financial sector for half a century. Leikun's rise tracked the country's turbulent politics. In the early 1970s, as Emperor Haile Selassie's reign faltered, he was employed by Addis Abeba Bank, a private bank in the pre-Derg period. Born in Gimbi, Oromia Regional State, in 1945, he graduated in m...