The Ethiopian government announced on Thursday a broad campaign against corruption and economic crime, presented as a direct response to threats facing the macroeconomic reforms the country has pursued in recent years. Speaking at a press briefing in Addis Ababa, the Minister of Government Communication Service, Enatalem Melese, outlined the measures taken against individuals, companies and networks accused of plundering national resources and disrupting the country’s financial systems.
According to the minister, these actors, who allegedly operate both within Ethiopia and abroad, bear direct responsibility for several economic troubles the country is facing: shortages of foreign currency, persistent inflationary pressure, the growth of contraband trade, and artificial shortages of essential goods. Enatalem Melese stressed that Ethiopia had, despite this backdrop, achieved notable development progress in recent years, while acknowledging that corruption remains one of the main obstacles standing in the way of the country’s economic trajectory.
The sectors targeted by this operation are numerous. The first concerns sports betting and online gambling, where thirty-eight companies stand accused of concealing customer data in order to dodge taxes and hide part of their revenue, in the process facilitating financial flows the authorities consider illicit. The owners of these firms have been placed in detention and their bank accounts frozen, a move that reflects the government’s determination to act swiftly and firmly on this front.
The mining sector, particularly sensitive in Ethiopia where the gold trade has long attracted informal trafficking, has also come under heightened scrutiny. A hundred and eighty-three people are now facing prosecution for alleged involvement in illegal gold trading and related smuggling activities. Those implicated include civil servants, members of the security forces, local producers and foreign nationals, underscoring the scale and diversity of the networks involved. Authorities carried out several significant seizures, recovering illegally mined gold, gold-processing equipment, foreign currency and firearms.
The fuel sector has not been spared either. Thirty-eight officials suspected of taking part in illegal practices tied to fuel distribution have been held to account. More broadly, over six hundred and fifty individuals, along with filling stations and supplier companies, are currently under investigation in a sector deemed strategic to the country’s supply chain.
This announcement comes against a backdrop in which the anti-corruption drive has increasingly reached senior figures within the Ethiopian state apparatus. The country had already been rocked a few months earlier by the arrest of its finance minister, accused of illegally awarding a tender worth more than twenty million dollars to a foreign company. That precedent lends particular weight to Enatalem Melese’s statement that the corruption problem is not confined to a single sector but runs through various segments of society, driven by coordinated networks operating both inside and outside Ethiopia’s borders.
For the government, this campaign rests on three main pillars: modernizing oversight systems, strengthening the institutions responsible for enforcing the law, and instilling greater discipline in the exercise of public responsibilities. The minister also called on the Ethiopian public to join the effort, urging citizens to report corruption they witness, refuse any form of bribery, and decline to cooperate with those engaged in illegal activity.
What remains to be seen is whether this judicial and administrative offensive will succeed in durably curbing practices that the government itself admits run deep across several parts of the Ethiopian economy, in a country that is also striving to stabilize its currency and rein in persistent inflation.
The timing of the crackdown is not incidental. Ethiopia has spent the past several years pushing through a sweeping macroeconomic overhaul, including the liberalization of its foreign exchange regime, a shift that exposed long-standing distortions in currency markets and created new opportunities for those seeking to profit illegally from the gap between official and informal exchange rates. Officials have repeatedly linked the persistence of black-market currency trading and smuggling networks to the slower-than-hoped pace of price stabilization, making the fight against these practices central to the credibility of the broader reform agenda.
Whether this latest wave of arrests, detentions and asset freezes marks a turning point or simply another chapter in a longer struggle will likely depend on how consistently the government follows through, and on whether the institutions it says it is strengthening can operate independently of the political pressures that have shaped past anti-corruption efforts in the country.