Paving Over the Poor
Amhara Archive
Addis Ababa is being remade for the twenty-first century ; at least that’s how the government describes it. The “corridor development” plan promises wide roads, new business districts, and modern housing. What it’s delivered so far are bulldozers in the city’s oldest neighborhoods, many of them predominantly Amhara, places rich in culture and community memory.
Thousands of people once living in these areas now sleep in doorways, under flyovers, or in crowded informal shelters. They are the human cost of progress: workers, mothers, children, elders pushed into homelessness with nowhere to go.
According to the U.S. Department of State, the corridor projects “displaced tens of thousands of residents and businesses … with little to no warning or compensation,” illustrating “weak property rights and a lack of legal recourse.”
At the same time the city moves ahead, the government proposes a law to penalize begging and those who give money to people begging on the streets. So the twin forces: neighborhoods cleared, people pushed out; then visibility of poverty punished. All under the banner of “urban renewal” and “public order”.
Amnesty International has urged a halt to the initiative, citing “forced evictions in at least 58 cities” and violations of housing and cultural rights.
When you walk through Addis Ababa today, you see the result: the newly homeless begging for coins on the very streets built from the wreckage of their homes. The same state that took their roofs now threatens to fine or jail them for asking for bread.
Five centuries ago, Thomas More wrote in Utopia:
“For if you suffer your people to be ill-educated, and their manners to be corrupted from their infancy, and then punish them for those crimes to which their first education disposed them, what else is to be concluded from this, but that you first make thieves and then punish them.”
Replace “thieves” with “beggars,” and the sentence reads like a government memo from Addis Ababa. The city makes the desperate, then calls them criminals for existing.
Many of the cleared neighborhoods were deeply Amhara in culture; dense with old churches, communal compounds, and small economies held together by trust. Their destruction didn’t just uproot lives; it erased part of the city’s history. Now, the survivors have become beggars in the shadow of their former homes.
Urban renewal could have meant new homes, fair compensation, and a second chance. Instead, it created a new class of outcasts and declared war on anyone who dares to help them.
A city that punishes begging after manufacturing beggars has lost more than its moral compass. It has lost its humanity. Addis Ababa’s streets might look cleaner soon, but the silence will be heavy; with hunger, with loss, and with everything a city should never pave over.
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