While sitting in a street in a grocery in Bole Sub-city of Addis Ababa, on 21 May 2025, I noticed the grocery owner in an emotionally charged conversation with his friend. The heated discussion was over a disagreement with nearby church administrators. As a customer present at the time, I intervened in their exchange to inquire further and gain details about the nature of the issue since the topic directly tied to my academic engagement with the subject, particularly with an issue I recently published titled, Religious Informality: Understanding Religion in the Urban Public Sphere in Addis Ababa.
The grocery was owned by a nearby church, which also possesses more than 100 similar shops, cafés, restaurants, groceries, stores, and supermarkets. The grocery owner told me that one of the church administrators had demanded a bribe of 100,000 Ethiopian Birr, threatening to terminate the rental agreement if refused. He further recounted a case involving a nearby shop, where an operator paying a rental fee of 30,000 Birr per month had allegedly secured the rental by providing 1.5 million Birr to a group that included members of the church administration who facilitated the process.
Religion has a double-edged role in urban planning and development. There is substantial literature acknowledging that religious institutions play a key role in Addis Ababa’s urbanisation and development by investing in social services such as schools, healthcare, and sanitation, and by engaging in peace-building activities. Religious actors, in principle, play an important role in reinforcing respect for the rule of the land by teaching moral responsibility, obedience to lawful authority, including government and its urban planning standards, and encourage their followers and citizens to comply with such regulations.
However, evidence indicates that religious institutions engage in or facilitate the formation of different types of urban informality in the city centre and peripheral parts of Addis Ababa. There were numerous cases where religious institutions directly involve in or facilitate informal practices. For instance, one can observe places of worship overcrowded by people who engage in informal street vending, informal shops built for permanent or temporary services with standard or sub-standard materials, owned and managed by the religious organisations, begging at almost all places of worship, informal places of worship under construction or maintenance, in both the city centre and peri-urban areas, even though the latter have no or few residents and limited infrastructure, residential buildings being used for or converted into places of worship, sold, rented out or gifted for the purpose, informal land transaction, mosques and churches built contrary to the city planning standard, and unregulated and being the main source of sound pollution around residential neighbourhoods, to mention a few. It was also observed that religious institutions make business by renting out shops, groceries, rental properties, and even larger commercial enterprises such as supermarkets and cooperative ventures and generate revenue, but all of them do not be required to pay taxes and there is no law enforcing this.
Furthermore, while Ethiopia follows the policy of secularism (article 11 of the present constitution), in practice, the informal presence of religion in political affairs is pervasive. For example, there were cases where religious actors were active in conflicts. They sometimes serve as platforms for political mobilization (being against or supporting the government rather than maintaining neutrality and playing a mediating role), contributing to a contested understanding of secularism. When the city administration attempts to regulate the informal practices, religious protests often follow.
Due to such informal processes, there is a heightened tension and emerging conflicts, for example, between the religious institutions and government, religious institutions and individuals, between different religious institutions, and between the same institutions. Hence, religious institutions operate not merely as spiritual entities but also as influential political, social and economic actors, both formally and through informal processes. They are powerful socio-economic actors. The government often considers religion as sensitive and don’t want to touch them, because they can easily challenge the state authority, and as a result, regulatory frameworks are either absent or not implemented.
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this Insight reflect the perspectives of the contributor and do not necessarily represent the official position of Institute for Peace and Security Studies.
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Contributed by Asebe Amenu (PhD) Researcher |