Ahmed Shide Leaves the Finance Ministry for the Speaker's Chair

Ahmed Shide was elected Speaker of the House of People's Representatives on Monday, moving out of the Finance Ministry he had led and into the chair of the chamber for a five-year term. Fana reported the vote was unanimous. He replaces Tagesse Chafo.

Ayelech Eshete, most recently State Minister of Education, was elected Deputy Speaker in the same session, also unanimously.

The reform programme loses its finance minister

Ahmed was the government's most visible economic official through the period that reshaped how money moves in and out of Ethiopia: the shift to a market-determined exchange rate, the IMF programme that accompanied it, and the external debt restructuring. Birr Metrics described him as one of the central figures behind the reform agenda.

Speaker is a senior post, but it is not an economic one. The move takes the official most closely identified with the reform programme out of the ministry that runs it, at a point when the programme still has unfinished business — the Fund said separately on Monday that the foreign exchange changes do not amount to opening Ethiopia's capital account, and that wider liberalisation should wait.

Why the vacancy matters more than the appointment

For a business importing inputs, servicing foreign debt or waiting on a tax ruling, the Finance Ministry is the counterparty. Continuity there has been the quiet assumption behind a lot of planning since the float. That assumption is now open.

Open

No successor at Finance has been named. Nor has the government said whether the portfolio will be filled from inside the ministry, where the reform's technical work sits, or from the party's wider bench.

Sources: Tikvah Ethiopia, 5 October 2026, Fana Television, 5 October 2026, Birr Metrics, 5 October 2026, Birr Metrics, 5 October 2026