Your Money, Their Profit
By Sidoc Haytu
Here's a number to sit with before you read another word: 98 billion birr. That's what a federal audit found had disappeared from public funds in a single nine-month stretch this year — close to 5 percent of the entire national budget, gone, through a corruption network the federal police themselves admitted is too "sophisticated" to fully untangle.
That's not a rounding error. That's your money. And I'm about to show you exactly how they took it.
The scam, explained like you're hearing it for the first time
You've felt it even if nobody explained it: your birr buys less every single month. Rent went up. Food went up. Everything went up. You were told this is just "the market" — a currency float, a painful but necessary reform, the price of progress.
Here's what they didn't tell you. Some of the same state-owned and regime-connected banks running your country's official currency exchange — Commercial Bank of Ethiopia among them — were caught operating two systems at once: one official window for public optics, and one hidden channel for private arbitrage profit. That means: they'd buy dollars cheap through connections and back channels, then move them through informal networks in Merkato all the way to Dubai and Somaliland, pocketing the gap between the official rate and the real rate.
That gap has a name in the reporting on it: a "corruption tax" — pure rent extraction, sitting in the pockets of politically connected people, funded entirely by the difference between what you were told the birr is worth and what it's actually worth.
You didn't get a cut. You paid for it. Every time you converted birr for anything, every time a price adjusted upward "because of the exchange rate," some of that adjustment was covering a spread that somebody else was quietly walking away with.
It's not just the currency
While you were absorbing the cost of a devalued birr, thirteen supplier companies were caught deliberately withholding basic consumer goods from the market — creating artificial shortages on purpose, so prices would climb higher before they sold. Not a supply chain accident. A choice. Someone looked at empty shelves in your neighborhood and saw a pricing opportunity.
The same government crackdown that exposed this also had to seal more than 7,000 business establishments and warehouses and prosecute 169 people for illegal currency trading and 36 more for fraudulently draining money straight out of Commercial Bank of Ethiopia customer accounts. Read that last one again. People's actual bank accounts. Drained. By people with access most Ethiopians will never have.
This isn't one bad actor. It's a pattern, and the pattern has a shape: a small, connected layer of people figured out that every point of contact between your money and the system — the exchange rate, the supply chain, even your own bank account — was a place they could quietly take a cut.
Who's actually paying for this
Not the people who engineered it. You. If you're under thirty, this is your entire adult economic life:
- Your wage was set before the birr devalued. It hasn't caught up.
- Your rent, food, and transport costs adjusted upward almost overnight when the currency floated — the exact moment a "corruption tax" was quietly baked into the exchange people were using to reprice everything around you.
- The goods you couldn't find on the shelf last month may not have been missing. They may have been held back on purpose until the price was better for someone else.
- The public budget that's supposed to fund the schools, roads, and hospitals you'll need for the next fifty years just had nearly one birr in every twenty siphoned out of it in nine months.
One recent piece of Ethiopian commentary called this what it actually is, without softening it: not mismanagement, but the systematic extraction of national wealth for the glorification of a political and business elite that has confused holding state power with owning the country outright. That's not a metaphor. It's a description of a currency scheme, a supply chain, and a banking system all leaking in the same direction at once — toward people who were never going to feel the cost of any of it.
Why they're counting on you not connecting the dots
Every part of this scheme depends on you experiencing it as separate, disconnected bad luck. High rent is "the economy." Empty shelves are "shortages." A drained account is "fraud, unrelated to anything else." Treated one at a time, none of it looks like a system. Looked at together, it's obviously the same system, running the same play, in five different places at once: find a gap between the official story about your money and its real value, and extract the difference before you notice.
You're not imagining that things feel rigged. The federal government's own audits and its own crackdown just confirmed, in numbers, that they are. The only question left is whether that stays a headline you scroll past, or becomes the thing you finally stop accepting as just how the economy works.
It isn't how the economy has to work. It's how the economy works for them, funded quietly, one transaction at a time, by you.
Sidoc Haytu is an Ethiopian writer and researcher focused on political economy, class dynamics, and anti-imperialist movements in the Horn of Africa. If you are ready to build, not just read, join the movement at https://t.me/SiraPress.
