Hardly has the infant corporate sector in Ethiopia had a dividing personality as dividing as Kebede Temesgen became to the powerful shareholders and directors of the Bank of Abyssinia. He has come to be a centre of gravity in stories of power, influence, suspicion and boardroom intrigue.

A week after his painful dismissal from his executive chair with no dissenting voice - literally - the Board of Directors have miserably failed to maintain their unanimity. According to gossip, one of them even said his voting in favour of firing Kebede was one of the mistakes he would live to regret the rest of his life.

Maybe collective memory has betrayed them that Kebede will continue to confront them inside the boardroom, as a member of the Board of Directors, at least up until the next general assembly, scheduled for November 2006. Should majority of them inside the Board come to agree, they do not have to wait all that long. To their utter disappointment, particularly of the chair, Philipos W. Mariam, they found unseating him from the Board unexpectedly impossible.

The directors, who were acclaimed to be extremely professional, appeared to have little appetite to resist pressure from seven of the most powerful shareholders of the Bank. They are hopelessly divided, to say the least.

Nor do the G7 have a position anywhere close to each other on both the decision to summarily dismiss the President and his fate inside the Board. They too are dangerously divided; some of them are no longer in speaking terms, claims gossip.

Most of them claim to have a position not to interfere in the internal affairs of the Board. Yet, each of them point fingers at each other for violating this cardinal rule they claim to have established when they hand picked the current directors.

Clearly, the management has had the backing among the G7 members; some of them were the first to be called by Kebede right after he learnt his dismissal. It is also true that others in the G7 were determined to lay the ground for Kebede’s humiliating departure, irrespective of their hate for him or if they were genuinely convinced that he was a liability to the Bank in the long term.

Kebede is not a popular man around town: for many he is rough, blunt, politically incorrect and in-your-face. He himself admits that he is not all too familiar with diplomatic nitty-gritty. There appears to be a general consensus among the majority of the G7 that he had to go. It is the “how” that has brought the infighting, thus led to their demise as a group. Their falling apart is a delight welcomed by their archrivals within and outside the Bank.

Although some in the Board seemed to have failed to understand Kebede’s nerve to still appear before the directors that have unanimously fired him, he and his supporters in the G7 enjoy the pleasure of embarrassing them; they also make a point that some of the directors and their allies in the G7 are too weak to do anything about it, said gossip.

This scenario will likely remain the case until the next general assembly makes sense out of the ongoing fiasco, which appears to be a moment when Kebede and his allies are waiting to strike back. Interestingly, they have too powerful and strategically minded opponents that are stocking their arsenals, to fire back. It seems time is ripe for power brokers and king makers in the list of Abyssinia’s shareholders, if they give it a bit of a thought.