Time: The Invaluable Resource the Ethiopian Political Elite Is Continuously Failing to Husband and Build Prosperity Upon

Gezahegn Engida

In the life of a nation, few assets are as precious, as irreversible, or as determinative of destiny as time. 

Nations that recognize time as a finite, non-renewable resource and husband it wisely tend to build prosperity. Those that do not—those whose political class and leadership cannot apprehend time as a resource—inevitably waste it, usually without realizing what they are losing. Ethiopia’s political elite belongs to this latter category. Their failure lies not merely in wasting time, but in failing to perceive time itself as a resource requiring management, foresight, and accountability.

Time as a National Resource

Time is unlike other resources. It is invisible, intangible, and continuously depleting. It cannot be stored, mined, or multiplied. Yet it is the indispensable medium through which every other form of development must pass. The ability to perceive time as a resource distinguishes societies that plan, innovate, and progress from those that stagnate.

An enlightened political class measures success not only by what it builds, but by how quickly and efficiently it builds it. Every decade that passes without laying strong institutional, educational, and infrastructural foundations represents not just delay but irrecoverable loss. Time, unlike money or minerals, cannot be replenished once squandered.

Failure to Apprehend Time as a National Resource

The Ethiopian political elite’s tragedy lies deeper than mismanagement — it lies in a fundamental cognitive – even cultural- blind spot. The Ethiopian political elites does not conceive of time as a finite, valuable national asset. For them, material resources — land, livestock, gold, minerals, or foreign currency — are tangible, and thus “real.” For them time, being immaterial, is unreal and hence does not register as a resource that must be budgeted, monitored, or protected.

This failure of perception leads to a sort of “time illiteracy”. Because time is not seen as a measurable input into national progress, its loss carries no weight, no accountability, and no shame. Leaders replace one war with another, one political experiment with the next, without reckoning with the decades silently consumed in the process.

Thus, Ethiopia’s political elite has not merely wasted time; they have wasted it without being aware of its loss. Their minds are calibrated solely to visible, tangible, quantifiable resources — not to the invisible continuum called time in which every policy success or failure unfolds. The result is a political culture devoid of a sense of historical urgency: a culture that can spend fifty years fighting over identity politics while basic existential tasks — food security, environmental restoration, and institutional stability — remain unfulfilled.

The Consequence: Five Lost Decades

The preceding half-century of Ethiopian history offers plain proof of this blindness. The 1974 revolution overthrew a monarchy and promised rapid transformation. Yet fifty years later, the population has more than tripled, while all major socio-economic indicators have declined relative to potential, relative to what could have been.

Instead of consolidating peace, building institutions, and investing in education and industry, successive political elites have cycled through endless phases of upheaval — revolutions, “liberation wars” and new constitutions. Each phase is launched as though time were infinite and the future could be postponed indefinitely. Meanwhile, the cumulative effect is tragic: a vicious cycle of population growth, environmental degradation, deepening poverty, and recurrent conflict!

Had Ethiopia’s political class understood time as a wasting resource, they would have recognized that every year lost to conflict is a generation condemned to poverty.

Comparative Perspective: Those Who Managed Time Better

To appreciate how serious this failure (to perceive time as a resource) has been, one can look at countries that started at similar levels of socio-economic development roughly fifty years ago — such as Kenya, Egypt, and Indonesia — and examine where they stand today. As the table below shows, In the 1970s, Ethiopia stood on roughly the same economic rung as Kenya, Egypt, and Indonesia. Each was a young state, uncertain, poor, still shaking off colonial or feudal legacies. But the difference lay in how their leaders spent their decades. 

Kenya, despite corruption and conflict, kept its institutions alive long enough to mature. Egypt, for all its authoritarian excess, invested in continuity — building infrastructure, education, and a semblance of state durability. Indonesia, after its early chaos, disciplined itself into a long game, focusing on industry, education, and human development.

These countries understood, implicitly or explicitly, that time is capital — that what matters most is not how one begins but how one sustains momentum. The statistics today tell a story of divergence born not of luck or geography, but of the different ways time was perceived and used.

These numbers tell also a larger story: time compounds progress when harnessed; it also compounds loss when wasted. Indonesia and Egypt have effectively “invested” their five decades — in human capital, institutional capacity, and industrial diversification. Ethiopia, by contrast, has spent its decades fighting time instead of using it.

The Psychology of Lost Time

The Ethiopian political elite’s relationship with time is, perhaps, illustrative of a deeper cultural and intellectual challenge. Political projects are often justified in revolutionary rhetoric of “new beginnings”.  Yet these cycles of “beginning anew” betray a failure to understand historical continuity — that progress is an accumulative process, not a perpetual restart.

The result is institutional amnesia: each regime destroys what its predecessor built instead of building upon it. Ethiopia has therefore lived, not through linear progress, but through circles of beginning and forgetting, a ritual of perpetual restart. But in reality, time moves forward relentlessly. While the elites keep on treading in a perpetual state of “starting over,” the rest of the world keeps advancing — and Ethiopia falls further and farther behind. This disconnect also explains the lack of accountability: because time is not conceived as a resource, its loss is not recorded as theft or waste. Yet, in truth, to waste the nation’s time is to rob its future — silently, irreversibly, and often without recognition.

Every generation of leadership is given a portion of precious inheritance in the form of time. Some invest this inherited time — in schools, in science, in the building of institutions. Others consume it in conflict, corruption, and vanity. In this sense, time is the truest measure of leadership, for it reveals what cannot be hidden: the compounding of years into fruit or into ash.

Reclaiming Time: Toward Time-Consciousness

If Ethiopia is to alter this sad trajectory, it must begin with a revolution of temporal or time- consciousness. In a way, it is time-consciousness that has lifted us out of the animal kingdom and made us human. Ethiopia’s leaders — the political, intellectual, and social elite — must learn to perceive time as a scarce national asset, equal in importance to, if not more than, natural or financial capital. This requires:

1. Long-term vision: policies measured in generations, not pseudo-electoral cycles.
2. Continuity of institutions: protecting accumulated gains from regime changes.
3. Accountability for delay: recognizing time lost to corruption, indecision, and conflict as a measurable cost.
4. Time-literacy: cultivating awareness of how nations rise by compounding time — not resetting it.

Only when the political class internalizes that time is the ultimate resource — the very substrate of national development — can Ethiopia hope to escape its cycle of squandered decades.

Conclusion

Ethiopia’s tragedy over the past half-century is not just political misfortune; it is a profound temporal failure. Its elite have not merely misused time — they have failed to apprehend it. Because they cannot perceive time as a resource, they cannot feel the loss when it slips away. And because they feel no loss, they assume no responsibility.  Meanwhile, the clock has continued to tick — silently but relentlessly — as other nations have turned their decades into capital, institutions, and prosperity. Ethiopia’s hope lies in developing a new generation of leaders capable of measuring wealth not only in terms of minerals or money, but in how wisely a nation’s time is spent!

Editor’s Note : Views in the article do not necessarily reflect the views of borkena.com  

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