By Sisay Mulu (Amoraw)
Ask any Ethiopian child, whether on a dusty playground, crammed into a school bench, or walking barefoot along a village path… what they want to be when they grow up.
You will hear the same answers again and again: a doctor or a pilot.
Being a doctor wasn’t just a career. It was a dream wrapped in dignity. To be a doctor meant more than earning a living. It meant intelligence. Service. Respect. You wore a white coat and carried your family’s hopes on your back. Entire families and communities would speak your name with pride. Becoming a doctor wasn’t just a goal, it was a sign that you made it.
But today, that same childhood dream has twisted into a waking nightmare.
The children who once stayed up studying by candlelight, who sacrificed youth for science, who gave their twenties to medical school, are now on the streets. Not demanding power. Not asking for privilege. Just pleading for the right to live with dignity. Doctors across Ethiopia from Addis Ababa to regional cities, towns and villages, are protesting. They are marching in white coats, not toward operating rooms, or maternity wards, but toward justice.
Most general practitioners in Ethiopia earn around 9,500 birr per month—about $80 USD. Even specialists earn only slightly more. In real terms, it is less than what a street vendor in Kigali might make, or what a taxi driver in Nairobi brings home. Meanwhile, the price of teff has tripled. Transport costs take half a paycheck. One family emergency can wipe out an entire month’s income.
The white coat, once a symbol of pride, has become a badge of silent suffering. But the most heartbreaking part? They are standing alone. The doctors’ protest isn’t about wages. It is a signal flare, a warning from the very heart of Ethiopia’s educated class. It says, “If even we, the trained professionals, can no longer survive, what hope is left for everyone else?”
UNEQUAL OUTCRY FOR SHARED PAIN
The suffering in Ethiopia has seeped into every corner of society. This is not a profession-specific crisis. It is a nationwide economic suffocation.
University professors, the minds meant to shape the next generation, are quietly slipping into side hustle just to stay afloat. Once respected intellectuals are now supplementing their incomes by tutoring high school students or moonlighting as consultants for NGOs. A few years ago, their salaries could sustain a modest life. Today, many of them can’t even afford to send their own children to private school or pay for a simple dental procedure.
Civil servants? They haven’t seen meaningful wage adjustments in years. Their once-symbolic job security now only ensures a stable descent into deeper poverty. Government workers across ministries and bureaus are quietly organizing revolving credit groups just to rotate through essential purchases: this month rent, next month food, if they are lucky.
And what of the soldiers and police officers, the very people entrusted with protecting the nation? The rank and file of the army and police have their own struggles. Uniforms don’t pay rent. Loyalty doesn’t feed a family. Behind the ceremonial marches and public salutes lie empty kitchens and children going to school hungry.
And let’s not forget the ordinary urban citizens, the shopkeepers, taxi drivers, factory workers, and service staff, crammed into crumbling shelters, stuck in traffic for hours, and gouged daily by inflation. A liter of cooking oil costs more than a day’s wage. Rent hikes arrive like clockwork. Power outages and water shortages are routine. In cities like Addis Ababa, where gleaming buildings rise beside trash heaps, survival has become a full-time job.
And still no mass protests.
Only the doctors, so far, have stood up.
This is not normal. This is a warning. When every sector of society is bleeding but only one group dares to speak up, it is not because the others are unaffected, it’s because they’ve been pacified. Conditioned to believe that change is impossible, that protests are dangerous, that silence is safer. They have been trained, over time, to coexist with poverty as if it were a permanent companion.
But silence in the face of these severe conditions doesn’t mean consent. It means fear. It means exhaustion. It means the fire is still there, but buried under layers of grief, disbelief, and deliberate demobilization.
It’s time to ask the hard question: What more must be done to the people for them to say “enough” together? If eviction without compensation doesn’t wake them up… if skyrocketing inflation doesn’t spark outrage… if hunger doesn’t rattle the soul…WHAT WILL?
IT ISN’T POVERTY. IT IS STRUCTURAL VIOLENCE
Poverty in Ethiopia isn’t just an unfortunate side effect of bad luck or natural disasters. It’s not a glitch in the system. It is the system.
This is structural violence in action: a deliberate design that keeps the masses poor, disorganized, and obedient. And if you look closely, it isn’t about economics. It is about control.
And as long as the people are struggling to eat, to sleep, to survive—they don’t have the bandwidth to resist. Hunger has become a governance tool. Displacement becomes a strategy. Poverty becomes policy.
This isn’t just an economic crisis. This is a political crime. And as if that weren’t enough, there’s the ethnic distraction machine.
The regime keeps the public busy with identity politics, so no one looks at the real villain: economic oppression. Amhara, Oromo, Tigray, Somali, everyone is struggling, but we have been trained to fight each other instead of the system that robs us all. By keeping the people divided, the regime avoids accountability. It becomes impossible to organize across regions, across professions, across grievances. The suffering remains personal, local, isolated… not big enough to become political.
And so the people adapt. They adjust to power cuts. To rent hikes. To no medicine in clinics. To hunger. To disappointment. They coexist with poverty. And it doesn’t have to be this way.
THE COST OF SILENCE
There is a cost to all this silence. And it’s not just measured in birr: it is measured in dignity, potential, and memory. When people get used to poverty, they stop demanding justice. When they normalize displacement, they stop demanding fairness. And when they tolerate hunger, they stop dreaming altogether.
The soul of the country is shrinking. When people accept less, they forget what they deserve. When people adapt too long, they lose the ability to imagine change. When people suffer quietly, they become complicit in their own erasure.
That is the true cost of peaceful coexistence with poverty: A nation slowly forgetting what it means to live with dignity. Change happens when people reject injustice, when they raise their voices and refuse to sit still.
This time, the awakening must come not from one group, but from all of us:
- From the doctors, who have already lit the first flame.
- From the university professors, whose silence is louder than any lecture.
- From the civil servants, who carry broken institutions on their backs.
- From the students, who have been robbed of futures they were promised.
- From the diaspora, who must send not only money—but also voice, pressure, and truth.
- From religious leaders, artists, elders, and mothers who have watched too many children grow up without joy.
This is not a call for chaos. It is a call for conscious awakening. A call to say: enough. Enough humiliation. Enough silence. Enough surrender.
Editor’s Note : Views in the article do not necessarily reflect the views of borkena.com
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What is your point? Drone shows blah, blah. What about it? Also, who gave you the permission to use the nickname that was given to Ras Wubneh a fearful leader of liberation fighters who fought fascist cannibals in the 1930’s? He was not swallowing 16 Dunkin doughnuts at a single serving like you. He was kicking ass even when he did have a single slice of bread since the previous day. Who are you going to call yourself next? Erwin Rommel or Alexander The Great?
Passionate and truthful manifesto.
However, the problem is not only the Ethiopian government. There is a global inflation that harms many people in many countries, not only in Africa.
The globalisation inevitable. It will eventually equalise the prices but at different paste. Fuel or electricity may take few years, but salaries may take several generations. Especially in overpopulated countries with lesser resources.
Many families will have to choose between more children and fewer but better educated and with more to inherit.
The sooner you embrace globalisation the less painful would be the transition.
You and the likes of you have run out of steam. You are as relevant as ‘the walking dead’ TPLF and ‘ the failed experiment’ Eritrea.
If you have any helpful solutions , let’s hear it. Otherwise enough of your warmongering and revolution!