Fortune News | Aug 17,2025
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.
PUBLISHED ON
Jul 07,2026 [ VOL
27 , NO
1367]
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