Ethiopia’s own transport numbers still point in one direction. In the 2025/26 financial year the country moved 17.57 million metric tonnes of import and export cargo, and Djibouti handled 96.7% of everything that crossed a maritime gateway, about 15.34 million tonnes, according to State Minister Denge Boru at the Ministry of Transport and Logistics, as reported by Birr Metrics. Berbera took just 2.74%, while Tadjourah sat at 1.23% and the Mombasa–Moyale corridor at 0.56%. Road haulage carried 80.2% of freight inland; the Ethio-Djibouti railway moved 18.9%. Fuel alone accounted for 4.23 million tonnes of imports. Those are concentration numbers rather than diversification numbers; they describe a single-corridor bill of lading dressed up as multimodal reform.
That concentration matters more this month because Bab el-Mandeb is again pricing like a war zone. The National, citing ship-tracking tallies, reported Friday traffic through the Gate of Tears roughly halved as Houthi forces tightened control around Perim Island. ET Business View framed the same Perim and Dhubab advances as a direct war-risk problem for a landlocked importer that still leans on the Djibouti corridor for almost all seaborne trade. Cape diversion freight and higher insurance premia do not stay at the quay. They show up in Mojo as delayed containers, dearer fuel, and thinner margins for factories that never saw the Red Sea.
Abiy Ahmed’s government keeps talking about sovereign sea access and alternative Gulf of Aden options. The ministry’s 2025/26 table says Berbera remains a thin second lung under stress. Until war-risk underwriters treat Bab el-Mandeb as ordinary water again, and until any non-Djibouti port carries real share when the strait is hot, Abiy Ahmed’s sea-access rhetoric sits beside a logistics map that still funnels Ethiopia through one foreign quay.
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