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

Jun 15 , 2025. By KETURAH CAMPBELL ( Deputy Editor - in - Chief of Fortune )

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 managment from Haile Selassie University, now Addis Abeba University. The Bank where he started work was nationalised and merged with the Commercial Bank of Ethiopia (CBE); he was transferred there and eventually ascended to become its Chief Executive Officer (CEO).

Banking during a socialist command economy demanded obedience to party edicts, but it also required caution. Lend too freely and foreign currency evaporated; lend too little and factories idled. Colleagues recalled that he weighed every decision twice and preferred to under-promise. Such restraint enabled him to endure the years of revolutionary suspicion.

The storm intensified in 1991 when the Derg collapsed, the war ended, and the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) marched into Addis Abeba, promising markets and pluralism. The new rulers promptly appointed him the sixth Central Bank Governor. For four fraught years, he tried to reconcile inflationary spending, bare coffers and a Birr weakened by drought and conflict. He opted for incremental currency adjustments, tighter reserve targets and a fledgling inter-bank money market. These were small moves, yet daring in a country moving from rationing to relative openness.

The measures steadied prices and prepared the ground for financial-sector liberalisation during the mid-1990s.

That reform unleashed private banking. Later on, Awash International Bank (AIB), among the first entrants, lured him to its presidency. There he spent more than 14 years knitting together a branch network, nudging risk officers toward prudence, and persuading wary savers to trust a start-up institution.

Tsegaye Kemtsi, who ran Awash Insurance for 25 years, often shared coffee and counsel with him.

“He was knowledgeable and immensely personable,” Tsegaye recalled.

The partnership with Tsegaye proved fruitful. Together, they co-piloted the growth of the twin Awash firms, which became mainstays in the nascent private sector. For investors, Leikun’s presence was a comfort. He understood the ministerial accents of the Central Bank, yet could still speak the language of competition.

Success bred pride but not ostentation. The villa remained modest, the garden neat but ungilded. In the evenings, he sat outside, reading bank statements or the day’s papers while children raced across the lawn. Once in a while, someone produced a one-Birr note, bearing his signature from his years at the National Bank. He laughed that the relic was worth more at collectors’ auctions than in shops.

In November 2010, however, the mood changed. Awash Bank’s Board, acting on instructions from the Central Bank, ordered him to take forced leave after regulators alleged breaches of foreign-currency rules. The Bank, investigators claimed, had parked 28.9 million dollars, later revised to 25 million dollars, in reserve above legal limits between December 2009 and January 2010. The numbers were small by global standards but eye-watering in a country starved of dollars.

The success seemed to confirm the gospel of caution, until it did not. The episode shocked Addis Abeba’s financial district.

In November 2010, Awash Bank’s board told him to take forced annual leave after the Central Bank alleged breaches involving letters of credit and foreign currency rules. Investigators claimed the Bank had parked 28.9 million dollars, later revised to 25 million, above the legal ceiling in the brief window between December 2009 and January 2010. In a country where hard currency is treasure, the charge was dynamite.

The matter went to court. In August 2011, judges presiding at the Sixth Criminal Bench of the Federal First Instance Court at Arada found him and eight former Awash Bank executives guilty of mishandling foreign exchange. He was sentenced to one year and three months in prison and fined 10,000 Br, yet remained free on bail while appealing.

The conviction ended his formal leadership overnight and dimmed his standing among the very regulators he had once commanded. His special adviser, Mitiku Abeshu, was also swept into the dock. Critics argued that the scandal revealed the limits of private-sector discipline in a system that remained state-dominated. Admirers countered that the losses were trivial compared with the value he had added through decades of institution-building.

Neither side could deny the irony. A man feted for prudence felled by a breach of prudential regulation.

Leikun retreated to his veranda. Each morning, he read newspapers, sipping strong coffee; each afternoon, he welcomed old protégés who came seeking counsel or solace. The chair on which he sat now stands unused. Its carved arms are a silent reminder of the banker who once balanced ideological extremes with technocratic calm.

His methods were rarely flamboyant but always deliberate. At CBE, he modernised ledger systems without frightening party cadres. As Governor, he nudged ministries toward accepting treasury bills (T-bills) and cautioned against raiding compulsory reserves. At Awash Bank, he insisted that credit officers test clients' cash flow projections three ways.

“Decisions taken behind a desk,” he warned juniors, “ripple far beyond four walls.”

The injunction survives him in staff manuals. Yet, he was never fully at ease with the rougher side of commerce. Those close to him say the 2010 furore stemmed from misplaced trust in subordinates, not personal greed. However, courts care little for motives. What remains is the record. His record stands as an unbroken ascent from imperial Ethiopia through Marxist rule to market liberalisation, followed by an unfortunate descent, and finally quiet redemption in family life.

Today, private banks show double-digit deposit growth, mobile-money platforms proliferate, and credit reaches towns once served only by travelling cashiers. None of this can be attributed to a single person, but many processes began during his tenure. His notes and memos from the early 1990s, preserved in the Central Bank’s archive, still guide trainees.

The assessment of his life is split between admiration and admonition. Supporters insist on the institutional structures he built: reserve ratios, open-market desks, and prudential guidelines drafted in nights lit by kerosene lamps. Detractors dwell on the foreign-exchange debacle and ask how a guardian of rules could misread them so badly. Both camps agree on his influence. Without his early reforms, the financial sector might have lurched from dirigisme straight into crony chaos. With them, the country gained a chance, still not fully taken, to marry growth with stability.

Measured in numbers, Leikun's career spans four decades, three defining posts, and one conviction.

“He took the country with him,” his daughter, Ethiopia, said in grief.

She meant the weight of responsibility that never left his shoulders, even after the courts did.

It captured the feeling that a chapter had come to a close. The generation that bridged monarchy, socialism, and markets is passing, and the institutions it built now stand or fall on their own.

What would he have made of the current ferment, with digital wallets sprouting and policymakers reeling from the tremors of forex regime liberalisation?

He would probably have urged patience.

“Small steps,” he once muttered to a colleague after watching a minister unveil an ambitious scheme, “are harder to trip over.” Those small steps, accumulated over decades, helped Ethiopia build a banking system that moves billions of Birr each day. Whether it can keep its footing without him remains to be seen.

The veranda chairs await new occupants, perhaps grandchildren studying business administration or merely curious about a grandfather whose signature once travelled in every pocket. They may learn that integrity and pragmatism need not be enemies, that caution can be a virtue until it becomes a vice, and that even the steadiest banker cannot insure against the future. In a country where institutions are young and memories long, that is lesson enough.

Leikun died in May 2025; yet, few Ethiopian technocrats have left a more profound imprint on a crucial industry. He is survived by his wife, Selus, and eight children, 17 grandchildren, and a great-grandchild.

PUBLISHED ON Jun 15,2025 [ VOL 26 , NO 1312]