Addis Abeba Vote Ending Peacefully Despite Pressure on Polling System

Posted on June 1, 2026 by Digital Editor

By the time the last light faded over Addis Abeba, the pressure at some polling stations had begun to ease.

At Gerji Roba polling station in Woreda 13, the number of voters waiting in queues had decreased substantially in the past hour, leaving fewer than 50 people outside a station that earlier in the evening had seen hundreds. Elsewhere, the city’s electoral machinery moved unevenly toward closure, revealing both the discipline of voters and the fragility of the administrative systems meant to serve them.

At the “Teramaj” polling station in Woreda 1, the system worked almost precisely as designed. By evening, 739 of the 821 registered voters had cast their ballots, a turnout of about 90pc, leaving election executives to wait idly for the final 82.

In Yeka District’s Woreda 2, the situation was different. A late surge forced voting to be extended until midnight, turning what had been expected to be a routine finish into a test of endurance for election workers, observers and voters.

The turnout pressures were not uniform, order was visible, but the process depended heavily on the capacity of each polling station to absorb late voters, verify names and preserve public confidence. In some places, queues thinned. In others, voting hours stretched deep into the night.

In Addis Abeba’s Council races, the political field had fragmented into a crowded battlefield. A single regional race drew 122 candidates, including 32 from the opposition Hidase Party, 24 from a prominent coalition, and 23 from the ruling Prosperity Party. High-profile figures, including Enatalem Melese, the minister of Government Communications Services, faced an array of minor party challengers, among them candidates from the Selam for Ethiopia Party.

Some polling stations were tightly packed with observers, ranging from a four-person coalition bloc to representatives from the opposition EZEMA party and independent Civil Society Organizations (CSOs). Their presence demonstrated a contest watched not only by voters and candidates, but by political organisations intent on documenting every step of the process, from the opening minutes to the counting of ballots.

At the polling station in Lideta Health College, a 20-year-old female student stood in queue for five hours, only to be turned away when election executives informed her that her name could not be found on the register. Like many young voters in the capital, she admitted she was initially reluctant to participate, fearing political or personal consequences for her family. She had only joined the queue at 10:00am on her family’s insistence.

“There is no my name. I can’t vote,” she said, her voice a mix of exhaustion and quiet resignation. “I’m here because of my family’s order to vote, not because I wanted.”

A similar administrative failure played out at Mesrake Goh School in the Kirkos District, where a steady trickle of citizens, including a woman turned away late in the evening, were sent home because their names were missing from the registry books.

Outside, in the courtyard, a small circle of residents who had already voted or given up on the process gathered to talk and laugh, creating a surreal pocket of lightheartedness against an otherwise demanding evening.

In other instances, the registry errors resembled a bureaucratic comedy of errors. At the Jagema Kelo station in Nifas Silk Lafto District, one voter was told he was at the wrong site and was directed to an adjacent station. Upon arriving there, electoral officials promptly sent him right back. He was eventually sent to a third station.

Despite these localised frustrations, the broader narrative of the day was one of order, calm and peaceful, a reality not taken for granted in a country with a history of turbulent transitions. The calm was not the absence of problems, but the ability of voters, observers and polling staff to absorb them without visible breakdown.

“I’ve been through many elections, but I’ve never seen such a peaceful and calm election,” said Menbere Ketsela, an election observer for the EZEMA party at Jagema Kelo. “Even as the sun beat down on them or the cold set in, people waited very patiently, sitting down, and casting their votes in a highly disciplined and civil manner.”

According to Menbere, the process had not been free of tensions. In the morning, she was barred from taking photos of the opening official minutes by a station chief. But she witnessed the process had remained transparent.

“We’ll be capturing the final minutes and the ballot-counting process this evening through both video and photos,” she told Fortune. “Poll workers had spent the day treating observers to roasted barley (Qolo), and bottled water.”

By late evening, finality was settling over the city. At Jagema Kelo, only four voters remained in line. Against the schoolroom wall, three ballot boxes for the city Council election sat entirely full, padlocked and sealed. Next to them, a lone box for the federal Parliament sat locked and waiting, a heavy plastic vault holding the immediate political future of a country.

Electoral Board Extends Voting Past Deadline as Manual System Bottleneck Strands Voters

Posted on June 1, 2026 by Digital Editor

The order came as dusk settled over most polling stations, turning what should have been the close of polling into a test of endurance for voters, officials and the National Election Board of Ethiopia (NEBE).

Faced with vast queues, exhausted staff and a sudden breakdown in digital voter verification, the Board took the extraordinary step of extending voting hours beyond the official 6:00pm deadline, directing polling stations to remain open until every voter already in line had cast a ballot.

Invoking emergency powers under law passed 2021, NEBE announced that no polling station could close while eligible voters who had joined queues before the cutoff remained unserved. Electoral officials on the ground acknowledged that the worst-hit districts of Addis Abeba could continue processing ballots until midnight, while observers warned that containment delays could stretch into Tuesday morning.
The decision exposed the logistical fragility behind an election carrying heavy political stakes. What began as a technical interruption in digital verification became, in several metropolitan polling centres, a manual registration bottleneck that slowed voting to a crawl.

In Arada District, central polling coordinators abandoned digital registries and began transferring voter information onto manual paper logs. At Wereda 5, station managers separated manual ledger books into three sections to distribute the administrative burden. By nightfall, only 400 of 1,148 registered citizens had been processed, forcing an extension.
A selected Addis Abeba electoral sample compiled from field reports by Fortune staff showed the scale of unfinished voting.
Arada District, Wereda 5, had 1,148 registered voters, with 400 processed by 6:00pm. Kirkos, in the Dembel area, had 1,500 registered voters, with fewer than 750 processed by 6:00pm.
At Nifas Silk Lafto’s Gagema Kelo station, where roughly 1,500 voters were registered, the process remained unfinished, with about 300 people still queued into the evening. In Bole District’s Gerji Woreda 13, disorganisation triggered localized altercations as lines collapsed, and polling heads barred media, accredited by the Board, access while attempting to restore order.

In Kirkos District, behind Dembel City Centre, registered voters reported waits of more than four hours. All four stations were placed under extended voting.

While parts of Addis Abeba struggled under procedural paralysis, the Somali Regional State, including Jijiga, concluded voting on schedule and without notable security incidents, a performance attributed to tight coordination between local security forces and electoral executives.

In Adama, in Oromia Regional State, polling stations closed their gates and moved toward counting, but officials noted a major deficit in final turnout. They attributed the drop not to voter apathy but to infrastructure deficits, including a total suspension of public taxi services that stranded business people far from assigned precincts and online registration errors that redirected hundreds to other districts.

Inside the polling apparatus, the extended hours deepened frustration.

At Jagema Kelo in Nifas Silk Lafto, where nearly 300 people remained in line well into the evening, poll workers openly criticised the Board’s directive.

“The number of voters and the available staff are not balanced,” Sultan Juhar, an election official, told Fortune. “There should have been additional manpower, They are forcing us. We were to work for 24 hours. If more staff had been deployed at this station, the process would have been completed much faster.”

As fatigue mounted and tempers flared, federal police moved late Monday to secure polling station perimeters across Addis Abeba. Under strict directives, officers blocked new arrivals from joining queues, locking down the active voting pools to let exhausted officials clear the backlog in the dark amid growing concern over procedural credibility.

Civil Society Monitor Finds Polling Broadly Accessible Across the Country

Posted on June 1, 2026 by Digital Editor

Kassaw Amsalu (MD) stood in the dust outside the Yeka Health Centre, on Fikremariam Abatechan St., not far from the British Embassy, checking his watch as the morning heat began to bake the pavement.

A veterinary health professional with two young children waiting at home, Kassaw had arrived at 7:45am, determined to cast his ballot in the seventh general elections, where electoral board officials declared over 54 million citizens like him have been registered to vote.

More than four hours later, he remained wedged in the middle of a slow-moving queue, one voter among many testing the limits of voters’ patience.

“A country is not built in a single day,” Kassaw told Fortune, adjusting his place in a line that stretched down the block. “By voting today, I feel I am fulfilling my responsibility to leave a peaceful and democratic country for my children tomorrow.”

His vigil captured the paradox that ran through polling day across the country. The appetite for participation was visible and, in places, tenacious. However, it collided with an electoral machinery burdened by administrative oversights, uneven logistics, procedural lapses, and security risks, turning the act of voting into a test of endurance.

According to the Coalition of Ethiopian Civil Society Organisations for Elections (CECOE), civic monitoring itself mirrored the scale of the exercise.
The Coalition deployed 2,258 stationary observers at assigned posts and 891 mobile observers travelling across regional states, forming a civil grid of 3,149 nationwide observers. Its reports, released midday today, June 1, 2026, at the Golden Tulipc Hotel, off Cameroon St., (near Bole Medihanialem Church) offer a picture of a system that was operating, but under strain.

At the Yeka polling station, where 1,500 voters were registered to choose among 14 political parties for the federal parliament and 27 candidates for the city council, the delay was due to basic administrative shortcomings.

Election officials had to cross-reference every voter’s identity against a single ledger of 1,500 names. The list was neither alphabetised nor sorted by voter number, forcing poll workers to search manually through hundreds of pages for each voter.

“The absence of any numbering system or alphabetical order has subjected voters to avoidable frustration and lengthy waiting times,” said Selamawit Adugna, a representative for the opposition Ethiopian Citizens for Social Justice Party (EZEMA), as the queue barely moved.

The same patience was not equally distributed across generations. At St. Markos School in Yeka Woreda 1, a high-stakes precinct featuring 112 regional council candidates, observers saw lines dominated by older citizens, with a distinct absence of young voters.

“We anticipated seeing a much stronger youth presence,” said Eyerusalem Wasihun, an observer representing the Addis Ababa Youth Association (AYA), who monitored the station alongside party agents from the ruling Prosperity Party (PP) and its electoral opponents. “The weak turnout among youth could signal a growing disconnect between young citizens and formal political processes.”

That disconnect appeared differently where economic disruption had already reshaped daily life. In Gelan Gura, an urban village heavily displaced by recent corridor infrastructure developments, voting carried mixed emotions.

“I cast my vote for a party I believe will build a peaceful country, a place where the youth can work,” said Kuribachew Mulatu, 39, after standing in line.

Nearby, 23-year-old Selamawit Debebe offered a darker verdict.

“I see this as a waste of taxpayer money,” she said after voting out of what she said “pressure”.

“I’ve no interest in knowing who wins the election. I’m just glad I am going home.”

For others, the ballot remained a practical instrument. At the heavily male-dominated queues of the Koye Tulu Mute polling station, where voters moved past independent monitors, Getahun Chala, a 38-year-old farmer voting for the third time, viewed the election through livelihoods.

“I think my vote will make a difference for us farmers in gaining better access to fertilisers and other essential supplies,” he told Fortune.

Beyond these precincts, the Coalition’s midterm data from 2,258 stationary polling stations showed an electoral apparatus functioning, but fragile.

Ninety-nine percent of monitored stations granted civil observers full, unhindered access to check polling files, while 17 locations barred or delayed independent monitors at the gates.

“While 99pc of stations respected independent credentials, local officials in Central Ethiopia’s Hadiya Zone outright blocked observers, claiming national credentials didn’t override local ledgers,” the Coalition said.

Ninety-seven percent of stations saw election officials arrive on time to organise voting materials before the official start at 6:00am, but 50 stations were left waiting between three hours or more for managers to arrive. Only 42pc of stations began casting ballots exactly at the designated early morning mark.

In Addis Abeba’s Kirkos District, observers documented unauthorised individuals entering voting booths to “guide” voters. At one precinct, a woman was “caught illicitly assisting 14 separate voters” before the station chief ejected her. Elsewhere, political parties distributed partisan literature within the legally restricted 200m radius of ballot boxes.

Staffing levels were stronger than the logistics. Ninety-five percent of stations met the legal baseline of three or more election officials present at opening. Sixty-one percent of local poll operations had at least one female official, and 31pc had more than one woman on the managing committee.

Leadership, however, remained overwhelmingly male, with only 10pc of polling stations having a woman as head chief of operations, while 87pc maintained exclusively male leadership.

More serious breaches were recorded outside the capital. In the Western Wollega Zone of the Oromia Regional State, the Coalition’s observers found officials “sealing ballot boxes and launching the vote without publicly demonstrating” that the boxes were initially empty.

Then came the reminder that administrative reform alone cannot secure democratic routine. In Central Gondar Zone of the Amhara Regional State, voting had gone smoothly until 1:10am, when nearby gunfire forced the immediate suspension of the process, according to the Coalition’s statement.

Logistical Triumphs, Bursts of Violence Shadow as Voters Head to the Ballot Box

Posted on June 1, 2026June 1, 2026 by Digital Editor

Inside the gleaming and high-ceilinged ballroom of the Skylight Hotel, on Africa Avenue (Bole Road), a delayed press conference became a window into the uneasy electral process today, June 1, 2026.

Melatwork Hailu, chief of the National Election Board of Ethiopia (NEBE), stepped to the microphone after two postponements this morning, carrying figures larger than administrative routine. The seventh national election was proceeding, but under the weight of security fears, digital confusion, uneven observation and the sheer logistics of managing a vote across a vast country.

Out of 50,964 polling stations nationwide, Melatwork reported that 50,158 opened on time. Another 659 overcame morning problems and opened within the hour. But 143 polling stations never opened at all, judged too dangerous for voters and officials because of imminent security risks.

Four more were forced to shut down during voting after gunfire or threats breached the perimeter. Behind those figures stood stark human loss. In Enemor Polling Station, Melatwork confirmed, a local NEBE logistics chief was killed in a motorcycle accident while rushing to deliver voting materials.

“The process is moving forward,” Melatwork said, noting that out of 359,000 deployed NEBE officials, 350,000 had reported to their posts.

However, beyond the polished marble of the capital, the day was already dividing into two narratives. One was civic participation, visible in long queues and officials trying to keep order. The other was of disruption, confusion and violence, exposing the frailty of the institutional project NEBE is trying to defend.
By midmorning, the early stillness of Addis Abeba had given way to the familiar hum of movement. Roads that had been quiet began to fill with minibuses, high-capacity buses and taxis, carrying voters and workers through the capital and nearby areas such as Koye Feche. But the calm traffic did not mean a frictionless vote.

At Shalla Park polling station in Bole area, many voters, particularly those who had registered digitally, struggled to cast ballots.

According to election officials, some arrived without knowing their designated polling station. Others, after registering online, turned up at random stations and were denied service once officials confirmed they had been assigned elsewhere. They were instructed to go to their proper locations.
Some had begun the online registration process but had not completed it, leaving them ineligible. Several waited for extended periods while trying to verify their status, and some said their mobile phones had run out of battery, preventing access to digital registration details.
Voters who had lost their identification cards also encountered difficulty, though officials helped by searching registration records and facilitating participation when details could be verified. Workers arriving from jobs, including hotel employees and drivers, asked to be allowed to vote first before returning to work. Officials refused, directing them to join the regular queue. Some left without voting.

Almaz Wondmu, an election official at Shalla Park, acknowledged the difficulty.

“Some voters came to the wrong polling station, while others had not completed their online registration process,” she told Fortune. “There were also voters who said their phones had died, making it difficult for them to access their registration information.”

Long lines were also seen in many areas. Melatwork attributed the queues partly to digital registration, stating the system had removed double registration, while manually printed voter lists arranged in Amharic alphabetical order had become a problem for digitally registered voters.

“The Board had added people to check voters’ names and determine the correct page of the registries,” she said.

For areas where citizens had not yet voted, Melatwork stated the Board would decide later. If lines remained long after the official closing time, she said, voters already in the queue would be allowed to cast ballots.

Far from the capital, the election acquired sharper regional textures.

In Bahir Dar, the Amhara Regional State, the morning air was cold. At Kebele 08, Polling Station 1 in Gish Abay District, voters had formed long and silent queues as early as 5:30am. Elderly citizens, wrapped in traditional cotton cloths against the dawn chill, stood at the front. Officials inside spent the early hours adjusting secret voting booths, checking serial numbers and sealing ballot boxes. By 11:51am, at nearby Kebele 09, Polling Station 2, the first ballot was cast.

NEBE’s national tally listed 39,723 independent observers and 41,978 party representatives deployed nationwide. Yet local officials in Bahir Dar’s Kebele 08 saw no opposition party agent or independent domestic observer was present at the opening. A similar pattern was observed in Adama, a commercial center in Oromia RegionalState, and Jigjiga, capital of the Somali RegionalState.

Stations in both cities opened late, between 6:00am and 6:45am. Election workers won local praise for giving priority to physicallychallenged, pregnant and elderly voters, but independent observers were scarce.

In Adama’s Lugo District, where between 355 and 520 votes were recorded at a station by midday, observer benches were filled almost exclusively by representatives of the ruling Prosperity Party. Only two stations had monitors from the Coalition of Ethiopian Civil Society Organizations for Election and the Ethiopian Association of Women with Disabilities. In Jigjiga, oversight was uniform: only ruling party members and state-vetted public representatives were present.

If the urban centers tell a story of a slow bureaucratic victory, the rural fringes revealed how quickly order could collapse. Outside Bahir Dar, in the rural kebele of Yibab near the Meray axis, the fragile peace of election day broke in seconds. Midmorning, as voters waited in an orderly queue, sustained gunfire echoed through the trees.

“We’re standing in peace, waiting for our turn,” Degnet Mulat, a local resident who witnessed the chaos, said by telephone, his voice still shaken. “Then the shots started. Everyone just ran.”

Laqe Getachew, another Yibab resident, confirmed that the polling station was abandoned within minutes as voters fled into surrounding fields. According to other locals, speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal, election officials were forced to abandon their posts, leaving ballot boxes and l election materials in limbo.

Back at the Skylight Hotel, such disruptions became wildcards that could overshadow the final tally.
As the morning gave way to the afternoon, long lines began to thin. In Adama and Jigjiga, officials reported fewer voters as the heat rose. NEBE officials insisted the overall trajectory remained stable.

Ethiopians Queue for Hours as Voters Seek Peace at the Ballot Box

Posted on June 1, 2026June 1, 2026 by Digital Editor

The charcoal braziers were lit before the sun cleared the volcanic ridges surrounding Addis Abeba, sending a thin blue smoke over the traditional coffee ceremony at Polling Sub-Station 120. By 4:00am, with the capital’s temperature still lingering in the single digits, a voter, Wegayehu was already waiting in the darkness of Lemi Kura District.

A housekeeper at an unfinished concrete residence nearby, he was the seventh person in line. Yet it was not until 7:15am, when the morning sun was already high, that he dipped his thumb in indelible ink and cast his ballot.

“Only six people were ahead of me,” Wegayehu murmured, gesturing with a mixture of exhaustion and civic duty toward the lines now snaking down the unpaved road.

This was the ground-level reality of the seventh national and regional elections. It is a slow, manual and intensely local exercise carrying the weight of national expectation. While the high-level political affairs may be debated in the glass-fronted ministries of Africa’s second-most populous country, the survival of its fragile state rested on a tedious analog process of registers, ballot papers, sealed boxes, party observers, patient voters, and election officials managing tempers one queue at a time.

Across the country, more than 54 million registered voters were testing whether a complex, multi-party apparatus could deliver stability to a country deeply scarred by militarised conflicts and double-digit inflation. The scale of the exercise remains formidable, as more than 10,900 candidates, 27pc fielded by the incumbent Prosperity Party (PP), contesting 547 seats in the federal Parliament in a country with a median age of about 19 years. A whole set of voters in Tigray Regional State are excluded from this process, as elections are not being held there.

For the ruling party, led by Abiy Ahmed (PhD), today’s election is as the “ultimate institutional validation” of its governance. Voting in his home village of Besheha, in the Jimma Zone of the Oromia region, Abiy struck a tone of historic destiny, describing the exercise as visible evidence of a “great democratic system taking shape.”

In the capital, Addis Abeba, Mayor Adanech Abiebie echoed his optimism, declaring that the “sovereignty of the state” has officially returned to ordinary citizens.

“The source of power in Ethiopia is the people’s vote,” Adanech told the media after casting her vote, urging voters to remain patient through logistical hitches, rain, or sun.

However beneath the official rhetoric lay a deeply fragmented political reality. The Prosperity Party, formed from the EPRDF coalition, was attempting a bold experiment of building a centralized and pan-Ethiopian civic identity. To its supporters, it represents a yearning for national unity. To its critics, the centralized model risks alienating regional forces in a country federalized by multicultural fault lines.

The opposition, led by figures such as Eyob Mesafint of the Ethiopian Citizens for Social Justice party (EZEMA), faced an uphill battle against deeply entrenched incumbent machinery. Speaking to reporters after casting his ballot at a polling station in Addis Abeba, Eyob acknowledged “minor irregularities” about the candidate lottery system but maintained a cautiously cooperative posturing.

“Establishing a government is much better than any other outcome,” he said, brushing off questions about the security vacuums that have kept parts of the Amhara and Tigray regional states from participating.

If the national political debate was philosophical, the polling stations were transactional. At the Yeka District Health Center (Station 02), election executives officially sealed the ballot boxes at 5:45am. About 1,409 are registered there, with exactly 1,700 papers allocated for Parliament and another 1,700 for the city Council.

But precision on paper did not prevent friction on the ground. At a polling station near Bole airport, lines stalled as Amarech Feleke, clinical nurse, observing for the Prosperity Party, noted that the manual cross-checking of voter registers eating up critical minutes. The queue moved only after voters mutually agreed to let local military personnel skip ahead to cast their ballots.

Elsewhere, the priority system, designed to shield the elderly, disabled, and mothers with infants from the wait, sparked flare-ups. At the main Lemi Kura station, murmurs turned into open disapproval when observers noted that healthy and younger religious leaders were being ushered to the front of the queue. Tensions briefly peaked when a frustrated voter tried to bypass the line entirely, pushing an executive before being restrained by election staff.

For veteran voters, the lines were a small price for what they saw as structural progress. Ayelech Deseta, a 69-year-old retiree waiting at the Yeka District compound among a heavy morning demographic of elderly women, has voted in every election since the mid-1990s.
“In the past, polling stations were not located in places that were convenient,” Ayelech said, recalling decades of shifting regimes.
She credited targeted campaign drives for giving her a clearer understanding of the ballot’s utility this year.

“Even if the country is facing difficult circumstances, I believe holding the election is appropriate,” she said.

Yet for many outside the political class, the vote was less an endorsement of democratic regime than a plea for economic stability. Large swaths of Addis Abeba remained unusually quiet throughout the morning, with commercial life paused as citizens watched the boxes fill.

Standing directly opposite the Lemi Kura polling station at his Michael Bakery, 64-year-old Merid Beshir, a retired head of the Wollega Agriculture Development Trade Bureau, summarized the stakes facing whoever forms the next government.

“I just want peace,” Merid said, his brief assessment cutting through the high-flown rhetoric of the morning speeches.

He argued that the state’s ongoing domestic conflicts have battered the local economy, driving up import prices and everyday staples.

“If the war stops, the cost of living will also improve,” he said.

The deeper test was whether the administrative process would be deemed credible enough by a weary public to buy the peace that citizens like Merid were counting on.

Mistaking Development Theatre for Public Trust Has a Cost

Posted on May 31, 2026May 31, 2026 by Digital Editor

Our subscribers to the print edition are entitled to get a bonus in a form of early access to our digital edition.Use the bank detail below or call our office at +251-011-416-3020 to subscribe – only 657.00 Br for 52 editions – and enjoy access to www.addisfortune.news beginning on SUNDAYS as early as 6:00am!

A Cold Shower for the AI Mania

Posted on May 31, 2026May 30, 2026 by Digital Editor

Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools will undoubtedly transform the nature of work. Large language models can already generate referee reports on my own research papers that rival those by human referees.

Unlike humans, who are always pressed for time, an LLM “knows” or can access much more of the literature in an instant, and often exhibits fewer biases. AI points out my analytical weaknesses, checks proofs, and makes suggestions for improvement. Only rarely are human reports better, typically because they connect the dots and offer new insights.

Nonetheless, the market euphoria around AI has become worrisome, especially given the scale of debt issuance in the sector. It is, therefore, worth considering where in the AI supply chain things could go wrong.

The supply chain starts with producers and designers of AI infrastructure. These are firms like TSMC and Samsung, which fabricate chips; Nvidia, which designs them; and Cisco, which provides connectivity. Then come the hyperscalers like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. They are building data centres for their own AI models and to sell compute (processing power) to others. In addition to the hyperscalers, there are more specialised companies like Equinix (data centres) and, of course, Anthropic and OpenAI, the developers of foundational LLMs.

Finally, there are the individual and corporate end users of AI services. Individual use is growing fast, and corporate use in some areas (software development and customer support) is exploding.

But most large businesses, while experimenting intensely, have yet to implement end-to-end uses. Many still need to organise their historical data to train AI for their own purposes, and to restructure their traditional operations so that AI can be deployed to improve with experience. Many firms rightly worry about data security, AI errors, and hallucinations that could destroy their brand image. Still, as less conservative younger companies find more AI uses, they will put competitive pressure on older, larger firms to change.

The AI rollout could nevertheless be interrupted in several ways, posing risks for debt-funded players. For instance, if graphics processing units, CPUs, and memory chips become faster and more energy efficient, the equipment filling existing data centres could depreciate rapidly, making it harder for them to amortise their costs. And LLMs, which have become extraordinarily capable through essentially next-word prediction, could plateau until a new technique emerges.

For now, AI labs are investing massive sums to train newer and larger models, on the assumption that the first model to reach some magic point where it becomes self-improving will rule the AI world, and reap enormous profits. But this scenario seems implausible. Even if there is such a point, competitors could still match the first mover’s model (including by hiring away key employees to obtain technical trade secrets).

So far, no AI model seems to have gained a sustained advantage. Unless Gemini (Google), Claude (Anthropic), and ChatGPT (OpenAI) can eventually differentiate themselves by appealing to specific user segments (or by merging or colluding), it is hard to see where the profits justifying their enormous training investments will come from.

Moreover, although politicians have been largely standing on the sidelines so far, policy interventions to address AI risks and concerns are inevitable. Since data centres consume tremendous amounts of power, driving up the power price for everyone, state and local governments will be under increased political pressure to limit their construction. In Indiana, for example, multiple counties recently proclaimed a moratorium on data-centre construction.

Projections for next year already suggest that hardware makers and data centres will be unable to supply enough US compute capacity. And as compute shortages mount, end users will have more reasons to delay implementation. We cannot reorganise all our operations around AI if we have good reason to worry about future access reliability or reasonable pricing.

Worse, whereas broader use may take longer than many expect, malevolent use by hackers and deepfakers, as well as unsupervised use by children, is growing rapidly. It is not difficult to imagine disaster scenarios, such as a deadly cyber incident, gross data misuse by AI agents, or poorly trained AI models advising children to commit acts of violence against themselves or others (something that has already happened). The chorus demanding regulation and more liability for AI models will only grow louder.

The risks posed by rogue AI could even prompt a sorely needed dialogue among major powers, perhaps leading to some kind of AI Geneva Convention.

Perhaps the most important trigger for political intervention would be massive AI-related job losses. Fearful of political or social backlash, even firms inclined to adopt AI may hesitate to shed redundant employees outside a recession, thereby reducing any gains from AI deployment and diffusion.

Given all these uncertainties, it is far from clear how widely and quickly AI will be rolled out, and who will profit. Hardware manufacturers and designers seemed well-positioned, given the tremendous demand for computing. But if data-centre construction is interrupted, that could shift profits to hyperscalers and AI labs. They might reduce the amount of compute dedicated to training better models, which gives them only fleeting advantages, and shift to selling the compute they have sewn up to firms using their already capable models.

Such shifts are also likely if model capabilities plateau. Regulation might also force modellers to spend more effort on improving the training and safety of existing models, building broader public trust.

The good news is that a more limited and careful AI rollout could give firms more time to find labour-augmenting (as opposed to labour-displacing) uses, and governments and workers more time to adjust. The bad news is that euphoric visions of quick exceptional profits could be unfounded, a particular problem for AI firms that have to make unforgiving debt payments. AI advances will likely pay off eventually. But not every provider will profit, or even survive.

In Addis Abeba, Comedy Finds Its Voice in What Others Fear to Say

Posted on May 31, 2026May 30, 2026 by Digital Editor

The Political Class Bet on Mega-projects, Pushed State Banks to the Brink

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Taking Women Farmers Seriously

Posted on May 31, 2026May 30, 2026 by Digital Editor

As the war in Iran disrupts fertiliser supplies and undermines food security around the world, the need to build more resilient food systems has never been clearer.

The hundreds of millions of women who farm across the Global South have a vital role to play in meeting this challenge, but their ability to do so continues to be systematically undermined. Though women comprise over 40pc of the agricultural labour force in developing countries, women farmers are less likely than their male counterparts to have access to quality seeds, fertilisers, and tools and less likely to be connected to markets.

They are also less likely to be visited by extension agents responsible for delivering agricultural innovations and practical solutions directly to farmers. And agriculture researchers are less likely to consider their experience and interests.

These failures compound one another, undermining yields, nutrition, incomes, and, ultimately, economic growth and development. Meanwhile, pressure on the global food system is intensifying, owing not only to conflicts like the Iran war, but also to population growth and proliferating floods and droughts, which climate change is making fiercer and more frequent.

One crop, the Bambara groundnut, illustrates the cascading costs of overlooking women farmers and illuminates a potential pathway toward strengthening food security. This protein-rich legume, widely cultivated by Africa’s female farmers, is a marvel of resilience, capable of thriving in harsh and drought-prone conditions. It also fixes nitrogen in depleted soil, thereby improving fertility. And women farmers grow it much as their mothers and grandmothers did, planting unimproved seeds, passed down from season to season, in fields fed by fickle rains.

The resulting yields average some 300Kg to 800Kg a hectare. That is less than a third of what researchers believe could be produced even with unimproved heritage seeds. With more advanced seeds, the gains could be tremendous. A triple dividend of significantly higher yields, enhancing nutrition, improved soil health, and economic empowerment of women can be achieved. And yet, the Bambara groundnut has received scant attention from agricultural researchers.

Ghana’s Council for Scientific & Industrial Research–Savanna Agricultural Research Institute is seeking to change this and to ensure that women, in particular, reap the benefits. With support from organisations such as Grow Further, separate large-scale surveys of male and female farmers were conducted to determine what they wanted in an improved Bambara groundnut variety.

This gender-based approach is rare in agricultural research, and the results were revealing. Whereas the men wanted simply to increase yields, the women emphasised the importance of quicker maturation. As they explained to researchers, when the planting season approaches, they should first help their husbands with their planting before turning to their own fields. This is not personal preference but a reality of gendered labour patterns. That delay leaves less time for women’s Bambara groundnut crops to mature, impacting the harvest.

This is precisely the kind of game-changing insight that goes unnoticed for decades, simply because women have no opportunity to voice it. Instead, solutions are designed to suit a generic, implicitly male, farmer and framed as being for everyone. The result is land-titling systems that document male ownership by default; credit markets that demand collateral that women are legally or customarily barred from holding; and policy processes that discuss food security in aggregate terms, ignoring the gendered distribution of its costs and benefits.

Rather than designing solutions for half the farming population while leaving the other half struggling to adapt to systems not built for them, researchers, policymakers, and others whose decisions affect agricultural operations and outcomes should consider the specific needs and preferences of female farmers. That means using gender-disaggregated data, like that collected by the CSIR-SARI. It also means collaborating with women in research and policy design, instead of treating them as passive beneficiaries. And it means redesigning financial systems, land frameworks, and extension services to reflect the reality of women’s lives.

Technology also has a role to play. AI is accelerating the pace of crop improvement by enabling researchers to analyse genetic traits, predict breeding outcomes, and identify groundbreaking seeds in a matter of months rather than years. And genomic editing technologies are putting unprecedented precision and power in the hands of breeders and researchers. These are powerful tools, which should be harnessed to serve the interests of male and female farmers equally.

The Bambara groundnut has been dubbed a hidden superfood, astonishingly resilient, capable of sustaining communities, and tragically overlooked. The same could be said about the women who grow it. In an era of intensifying food insecurity, that is not an oversight the world can afford. This year, which the United Nations has declared the International Year of the Woman Farmer, offers a critical opportunity to correct this mistake.

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Posted on May 31, 2026May 30, 2026 by Digital Editor

Author: Digital Editor