In Cameron Crowe’s Jerry Maguire, Cuba Gooding Jr.’s Rod Tidwell delivers the now-iconic demand to Tom Cruise’s sports agent: “Show me the money.” It’s a line that cuts through the drama with brutal clarity. Tidwell, teetering between triumph and obscurity, forces his reluctant agent into a relationship defined by tension, grit, and unlikely loyalty. Against all odds—and despite their cultural, temperamental, and professional differences—the two claw their way toward redemption, eventually securing both financial reward and personal vindication. The lesson is simple, if sobering: at the end of the day, results matter.
I was reminded of this recently at a local road transport authority office, where I had gone to finalize the title deed of a vehicle. To my surprise, the experience began with efficiency that rivaled any European bureaucracy. Staff at the information desk handled inquiries with speed. Ushers guided clients to a ticketing machine, ensuring orderly queues. Clerks at their windows served customers briskly and with courtesy. On the wall, a framed mission statement declared a commitment to “fast and efficient services,” and, for once, it didn’t feel like empty rhetoric. The office ticked with the precision of a Swiss watch.
And then the lights went out.
A sudden power cut plunged the once-vibrant office into paralysis. Computer screens went dark, the queueing system sputtered with error codes, and the staff—moments earlier a model of coordination—sat idle, waiting. When the power flickered back on, hope briefly returned. But the outdated operating systems meant it would take more than 30 minutes before the machines could fully restart. A steady trickle of clients became a bottleneck, the corridors clogged, and the air thickened with frustration.
The irony was painful: a well-trained, disciplined workforce was being undermined by something as basic as unreliable electricity and outdated equipment. A system designed to deliver efficiency became the very source of inefficiency.
In 2015, the World Bank reported that electricity was the second largest obstacle to doing business in Ethiopia, accounting for 10 percent of constraints—second only to lack of access to finance. A study published in ScienceDirect the same year underscored the point: in sub-Saharan Africa, firms suffer frequent, prolonged, and unpredictable power outages that make planning and production nearly impossible.
Closer to home, research by Shibiru Ayalew of Addis Ababa University’s Faculty of Technology, and a research fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, quantified the price of these interruptions in Oromia. His findings were staggering: a firm’s average monthly cost from power outages amounts to 51,777 birr. That is nine times its electricity bill and equals 2.22 percent of gross monthly revenue.
Electricity, however, is only one part of a larger problem. The cost of inefficiency in Ethiopia is written into daily life, often in ways so normalized that they pass without scrutiny. Consider what happened on a major artery of Addis Ababa not long ago. A tent erected for a mourning or lekso, blocked traffic along the road stretching from Bisrate Gabriel roundabout toward Sost Kutir Mazoria. This single household’s tragedy became, quite literally, a citywide inconvenience. For a day or two, hundreds—possibly thousands—of motorists were forced into detours, bottlenecks, and extended traffic jams.
The economic impact of such disruptions is not abstract. A rough calculation illustrates the scale: if 500 vehicles are delayed for 20 minutes during rush hour, and each consumes an average of 0.67 liters of fuel during that time, the city loses 335 liters of fuel—worth more than 41,000 birr—in just a quarter of an hour. Extend that delay to an hour, and the figure balloons to over 164,000 birr. Multiply such interruptions across 15 major junctions simultaneously, and the cost climbs to nearly 2.5 million birr every 15 minutes. That is before factoring in lost labor hours, missed business opportunities, and the broader drag on productivity.
What makes these figures so troubling is not just the scale of the losses but their recurrence. Power outages, internet disruptions, traffic gridlock, and water shortages are not exceptions in Ethiopia; they are features of the system.
I once overheard a young man lamenting to his friend how a simultaneous internet, power, and water outage had plunged him into a depressive mood. His friend quipped that expecting all three amenities at once was itself a luxury—that he was a dreamer for wishing so.
Joke aside, the real absurdity is not in the expectation but in the fact that an economy can afford to hemorrhage billions through such constant interruptions, delays, and detours of basic services—resources the rest of the world takes for granted. While we in Ethiopia tolerate these failures as part of life, shrugging them off with a mix of humor and resignation, elsewhere they are treated as emergencies. In functioning systems, outages are mitigated, disruptions are anticipated, and breakdowns are addressed immediately—not because continuity is cosmetic, but because it is essential.
Show me frequent electricity blackouts. Show me recurring water shortages. Show me erratic internet connections. Show me roads blocked in the middle of rush hour for maintenance that could have been done at night. Show me thoroughfares shut for private mourning tents, or traffic police idling for hours over a minor fender-bender. Show me lanes lost to religious processions, roadside vendors, or any activity unrelated to their purpose. And I will show you millions—and eventually billions—silently wasted, the collective tax of inefficiency paid by an entire economy.
Show me a city where electricity flows reliably, where the internet does not sputter, where an ATM works without glitch, where water runs without interruption, and where roads are managed with foresight—and I will show you a city that understands the true cost of waste. A city that sees the iceberg beneath the surface and steers clear. Because it was not the tip that sank the Titanic, but the hidden mass beneath—the part nobody accounted for.
Contributed by Bereket Balcha