Commentaries | Mar 28,2020
They sit in plain sight on Addis Abeba’s streets, yet rarely feature in official speeches about modernisation. Rows of blue-and-white Lada taxis, with their dented frames and fading paint, bear witness to a transition that never quite arrived. For decades, the Soviet-era VAZ-2101 defined urban mobility in the capital. From the 1970s onward, the Lada was not merely a means of transport but part of a public transport infrastructure, culture, and livelihood rolled into one. Today, it has become a moving indictment of policy incoherence, caught between environmental ambition, foreign-exchange scarcity, and the limits of administrative follow-through.
Inside one taxi near Ras Mekonnen Avenue, a driver’s seat was stabilised with stones. The passenger seat is tied down with a rope. The driver kept medical documents close, ready to justify himself to the police if stopped. His worn shoes, patched with cloth, tell a quieter story of a livelihood stretched thin. His, like thousands still in the trade, is a story of endurance. Across neighbourhoods, from Qera to Wello Sefer, similar scenes repeat. Drivers wait long hours for passengers who increasingly avoid old vehicles, while repair costs surge and spare parts are scavenged from scrap yards. On good days, some earn barely enough to cover fuel. On bad days, they return home empty-handed. More than 10,000 taxi owners now live in this limbo, the unintended casualties of a replacement programme that promised renewal but delivered prolonged uncertainty.
Replacing ageing taxis should have been a straightforward intervention, with newer vehicles, safer transport, and cleaner emissions. Instead, it exposed the fragility of policy coordination across city and federal institutions. In 2020, Addis Abeba’s Administration announced a plan to phase out Ladas and replace them with new taxis, requiring drivers to make a substantial down payment. The initiative was publicly endorsed by senior officials and structured around a private assembler and importer, with financing expected from a state-owned bank. Thousands of drivers complied. Many paid 130,000 Br, often their life savings, and waited. Years later, most are still waiting.
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PUBLISHED ON
Jan 10,2026 [ VOL
26 , NO
1341]
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