(3 minutes read)
Ethio Telecom is being privatised incrementally. The process, which was started in May 2021, when the government granted a second cell phone license to the Kenyan operator Safaricom-led consortium, which included, among others, Vodafone, and Japan’s Sumitomo Brook Taye, will now be taken forward.
Now Ethio, which was fully owned by the government till 2021, is going for a further privatization process as announced by the ministry of finance. It is reported that the new proposal is to privatize 45 percent of the capital.
The privatization of Ethio Telecom is one of the cornerstones of the reform package announced by Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed when he came to power in 2018. It is part of the drive to modernize Ethiopia’s heavily state-run economy.
Launched in June 2021, the partial privatization of Ethio Telecom was postponed indefinitely to March 2022, presumably due to disturbances in the Tigray region and the unfavourable macroeconomic variables being faced by the economy.
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Ethiopia is the second largest populated country in Africa, after Nigeria, and has 120 million people. Its economic conditions deteriorated considerably over the past two years due to the Covid-19 pandemic, and the deadly conflict between the federal government and rebel authorities in the northern region of Tigray. A peace agreement was signed between the parties in November 2022, which would have given traction to the Horn of African country to go ahead with the privatization program.
