The health sector remains underprovided despite rising public spending, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed (PhD) told Parliament today, in remarks that laid out where the money has gone and where it has fallen short, against a federal budget that shows how little of it there is to allocate.
The 2025/26 federal budget appropriates 48 billion Br for health, comprising 31.7 billion Br from the treasury and 16.3 billion Br from external assistance. Set against the total approved budget of 1.93 trillion Br, itself up 34.4pc from the previous year, the health allocation amounts to 2.5pc of federal spending, with external donors financing one of every three Birr.
The figure excludes regional health outlays channelled through federal subsidies, but as a statement of federal priority it sits far below the 15pc of government budgets that African Union member states, Ethiopia among them, pledged to health under the 2001 Abuja Declaration.
The Prime Minister’s account pointed to a spending pattern weighted toward medical equipment rather than broader system expansion. According to him, the sector’s needs extend beyond devices to buildings, beds and health workers, all of which remain in short supply.
“We can’t satisfy the country’s need with four hospitals,” he said, urging faster expansion of tertiary care for a population of well over 100 million.
Renovation work at St. Paul’s Hospital, while ongoing, does not meet national demand. His government’s response is a construction programme of new model hospitals designed to raise both capacity and standards of care.
The one clear success in his account to the federal legislative house was pharmaceutical manufacturing. Domestic producers’ share of the medicine market has climbed from about four percent to 45pc, according to the Prime Minister, a more than tenfold gain that shifts nearly half of supply onto local factory floors.
Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed (PhD) delivered one of his bluntest rebukes yet to the country’s young jobseekers, telling federal lawmakers that the country’s employment crisis is not a shortage of work but a shortage of people willing to do it.
“There’re people, and to a certain extent there are jobs, but there are no workers,” Abiy told Parliament, likening the paradox to a civil service in which “there are government appointees and civil servants, but no service.”
The complaint, unusually personal in tone, cut against the grain of a session dominated by questions on educational quality. It amounted to a public indictment of a work culture the Prime Minister believes has curdled into entitlement, and a warning that no amount of school-building will rescue a generation that refuses to leave the city.
The evidence, by the Prime Minister account, is everywhere. Government officials in Addis Abeba complain they cannot hire domestic workers, he said, despite wages that at times rival or exceed what Ethiopians earn in the Gulf. A renovation of Wenchi, the crater lake south-west of the capital that the government has groomed into a flagship tourism site, stalled for lack of local hands.
“Contractors were forced to recruit labourers in Addis Abeba and bus them out,” he said.
At the new airport project in Bishoftu, “one of the most amazing projects you will see in your lifetime,” he told members, activity runs around the clock, yet finding manpower “is not easy.”
“What people want is to immediately drive a car, to immediately own a house, not to work two jobs,” he said.
Abiy held up the Ethiopian diaspora in the United States as the counter-example. Teachers who drive Ubers after class, workers stacking two shifts across 16-hour days to pay the bills.
“If our families here just sit around looking at Facebook and claim there is no work, I don’t think they will succeed in the future,” he said.
His prescription was blunt. Young Ethiopians should get used to leaving the cities for project sites and families should push them out the door.
“They will gain experience, they will gain knowledge,” he said, adding that even working later in life was useful. Unless people work “two or three shifts and support each other, life will inevitably keep getting harder.”
The scolding sat inside a longer, and warmer, defence of his government’s education record, a sector he called its most successful, and the one he said he was proudest of. The administration has built 35,000 kindergartens in seven years, he told the chamber, a figure he claimed exceeds the combined output of 10 previous governments. More than 30 billion Br has been mobilised from the public to build model and boarding high schools across every region, alongside the repair of a massive number of schools damaged, shattered or burned in the country’s conflicts.
He reserved singular praise for Berhanu Nega (Prof.), the education minister and a member of the opposition Ezema party, whom he credited with “working tirelessly and faithfully” to execute the ruling Prosperity Party’s policy, from soliciting book donations to pushing educational quality through technology.
Proceeds from sales of Medemer, the Prime Minister’s own book, have financed 35 model high schools built through the First Lady’s Office, “against 39 such schools in the first century of the modern Ethiopian state.”
The kindergarten drive, he conceded, wins him nothing at the ballot box.
“We know these children will not vote for us in the elections, we know they won’t ‘like’ us on Facebook,” he said. “But we know that in 20 years, they’re the very survival of Ethiopia.”
He reached for a family anecdote to make the point. On a trip to Arba Minch, his son, not yet eight, watched crocodiles and birds share the shore of Lake Abaya and explained, unprompted, that the crocodiles spare the birds because the birds pick meat from their teeth.
“I only learned that at 38,” the Prime Minister said. “The children are not as we think they are; they are like fire.”
The juxtaposition appears deliberate. It is a state pouring money into classrooms for toddlers while pleading with their older siblings to pick up a shovel.
Prime Minister Abiy answered his critics with a mix of gratitude and edge, thanking lawmakers, many of whom, he noted, are returning for another term, before singlling out the opposition figure who had spent the session trying to “testify before history” against his government.
“I wish it wasn’t the last speech for you,” Abiy told Desalegn Chane (PhD), the parliamentarian who moments earlier had catalogued civil war, spiralling debt and a “generational catastrophe” in the country’s schools.
The line, delivered in response to Desalegn’s questions, carried an unmistakable double meaning in the wake of an election that has left the opposition holding a sliver of the chamber.
The Prime Minister framed that result as a mandate rather than a warning.
“The vote had handed the government a ‘blank check’ from the entire population, but not a licence for complacenc,” he told Parliamentarians. “We won’t take it for granted.”
In a striking characterisation of the electoral settlement, Abiy said the incumbent Prosperity Party had chosen to contest an 85pc share for itself and concede the remaining of parliamentary seats for the opposition, casting the ruling party’s dominance as a deliberate act of accommodation rather than an artefact of a lopsided contest.
He extended the argument to the national dialogue that Desalegn had questioned, disclosing his party had proposed that any single party be allowed to lead the government for only two electoral terms.
On the wars scarring the country, Abiy pushed back on the bleak picture drawn from the opposition benches.
“Conflict rooted in ethnicity and religion,” he argued, “has receded compared with earlier years. The armed groups still fuelling violence are driven by external actors pursuing their own interests in Ethiopia.”
This is an assertion that folds the country’s internal fractures into the same geopolitical frame that loyalist MPs invoked when they pressed the Premier on Red Sea security and “historical enemies.”
The rebuttal closed a session that had swung between ovation and indictment. A Prosperity Party lawmaker, Mohammed Ahmed, had earlier called the chamber to its feet in a standing ovation for the Premier. Desalegn had answered with an itemised bill of grievances, a 379 billion Br deficit, 15pc food inflation, 27 million citizens on food aid. The Prime Minister’s response did not engage each figure so much as reset the terms of the argument.
A ruling-party lawmaker, Mohammed Ahmed, called the Chamber to its feet for Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed (PhD). Moments earlier, a sharp opposition voice, Desalegn Chanie (PhD) rose to “testify before history.”
This is two portraits of Ethiopia collided on the floor of Parliament today as federal lawmakers received Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s (PhD) report on the concluding term of the current house. One MP portraited a country held up across Africa as a model of urban renewal and green ambition, the other of a country at war with itself and buckling under debt.
Mohammed, a legislator from the governing Prosperity Party, who praised the Premier’s stewardship and urged his colleagues to rise in a standing ovation. The gesture crowned a run of loyalist tributes through the session, for the Green Legacy tree-planting campaign, a much-imitated urban corridor-development drive, gains in tourism and agriculture, and a surge in foreign direct investment that government allies cast as proof the country had turned a corner.
Desalegn, the vocal opposition lawmaker thanked the Prime Minister, then set about dismantling the report, telling the chamber he intended to “testify before history about the government’s weaknesses.” He criticised the ruling party for passing laws while silencing the public and extinguishing political alternatives, and recast the past five years as a “chapter of tragedy rather than triumph.”
“Civil war and drone strikes had scarred the Amhara, Oromia, Gambella and Benishangul-Gumuz regions, displacing millions, damaging religious institutions and hardening the country’s political fractures,” he said.
He demanded an immediate end to the fighting in Amhara and Oromia regionalstates, and pressed the government on whether a genuine national dialogue, paired with transitional justice, was taking place at all.
His sharpest thrust was aimed at the numbers. The government’s report, he charged, rested on “manipulated data”. It claimed 1.5 trillion Br in revenue and 11 billion dollars in exports and remittance.
“Conditions on the ground told another story,” he said.
Desalegn pointed to a 379 billion Br budget deficit, food inflation running at 15pc, a middle class sliding toward poverty, and a budget in which roughly 90pc of spending is consumed by recurrent costs and debt servicing.
“How would the government finance a 1.13 trillion Br budget, and would the macroeconomic overhaul pursued with the IMF and the World Bank deliver real change, or simply tighten the debt trap around the country?” he asked.
Desalegn called the education system a “generational catastrophe.” Despite a 26 billion Br allocation, only about 50,000 of some 900,000 candidates passed the Grade 12 examination, a failure rate above 90pc, while seven million children remain out of school entirely. On the humanitarian front, he warned that 27 million citizens now depend on food aid.
The exchange laid bare the reality of Parliament over the past five years where Prosperity Party dominance leaves scant room for dissent and a few opposition figures can enumerate a litany of crises without moving the chamber’s applause. Yet the fault lines ran deeper than the government-versus-opposition divide.
Even loyalist members conceded on issues of painful cost of living, corruption and loss of peace, flagging youth unemployment, patchy infrastructure in Benishangul-Gumuz, and an urban housing shortage that high rents have made a chronic burden for low-income families.
For all the standing ovation, it was Desalegn’s closing challenge that hung over the session.
Addis Abeba’s renters and property owners are waiting on a city government decision that will set how far rents can rise under a two-year-old control regime. Owners feel their income has been frozen as costs climb, while tenants fear another bite out of earnings already stretched thin.
The pressure shows in the numbers. Many households spend more than 30pc of their income on rent, and a substantial minority more than half. A city-centre studio now averages 45,000 Br a month, ranging from 35,000 Br to 65,000 Br. For a family of five earning about 32,000 Br and paying 12,000 Br, a proposed 42pc increase at renewal means weighing whether to move the children from private to public school.
The rent law, two years old, tied annual increases to inflation and living costs, set a minimum two-year lease, and registered close to half a million units, though informal deals persist. A study behind the city officials’ thinking found increases had slowed from 28.76pc to 20.58pc, and suggested that holding inflation below 10pc could steady rent growth near 11.24pc, the ceiling officials now favour.
Beneath the argument lies a shortfall of more than one million homes. With rentals making up more than 61pc of housing in the capital and demand still outpacing supply, a cap may hold prices for a while, but it cannot build the homes the city lacks.
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