Abyssinia Springs is a product that is bottled in a plant up in an area popularly known as Frensay Legasion. With a daily production of 40,000 bottles, the product has travelled so far in that it is no longer considered to be a luxury. In fact, in a city where almost half of its residents suffer from a short supply of water, bottled water has become a necessity.

Indeed, ever since Highland Springs hit the market a little over five years ago, as a pioneer product of such items, bottled water has become a permanent fixture not only in Addis Abeba. Travel in any direction of the country would reveal that the demand for bottled water is increasing phenomenally; even towns far away from the capital have small kiosks carrying any of these brands: Highland, AquaAddis, AquaSafe, Abyssinia, Real or Cool. That is due to an environment that permits competition among these enterprises.

The emergence of dozens of bottling companies has created jobs for thousands, and the companies do pay tax to the government. Not to mention their magnificent contribution in helping the country save scarce foreign exchange that used to be spent on foreign imports of products such as Evian from France and Masafi from Yemen. Although this may not make a serious dent on the balance of payment deficit, which is now at 4.1pc of the GDP, theirs is a small contribution in not exacerbating the gap in the trade balance.

There are yet more positive contributions by two companies, owned by the same individual, which have become visible in a fledging industry. Ethio-Japan Nylon and Woinua Curtail Trading Plcs. are two of the 60 garment factories operating in the market; and part of the 16 that are involved in the export sector. Every month, the companies send four containers of their products to Europe, significantly contributing to the eight million dollars revenue the nation earned from the exports of garments in 2006/07 budget year.

Both these companies are now confronted with problems that their respective managements had not anticipated a few months back but which have seriously hampered their efficiency and productivity. Following the power load shedding that suddenly began in April 2008, denying users 10 days of electric power supply within a month, these companies now say the cost to their businesses has become increasingly unsustainable. Delay on shipments has subjected the garment factories to a loss of 40,000 Euro. And they are not alone in this predicament.

The bottling companies have also had to cut down their daily productions: Abyssinia downsized production by half, and Highland reduced its daily output of 100,000 bottles by almost 40pc. This is partly the reason why bottled water seems to be slowly disappearing from supermarket shelves in Addis in the past few weeks.

The overall impact of the latest series of power interruptions is not limited only to the loss of production at a few of these companies, or to the supply constraint it has created on their market. It is much greater. Significant decline in productivity and the additional cost the interruptions put on companies that have to use generators to power their operations, have caused a one percent loss on the GDP, according to an estimate made by Fortune's analyst. In just one quarter, there has been a loss of 280 million dollars from national productivity due to power load shedding.

The response to this crisis from the state utility company is inept, to say the least. If there is anything these sudden power interruptions expose, it is not so much the 15pc increase in national power consumption or the 20pc loss of water from the dams to evaporation, as the managers of the state owned Ethiopian Electric Power Corporation (EEPCo) would have the sceptical public believe. Rather, it reveals their inability to understand their business, to conduct regular and credible assessments and to forecast this shortage as accurately as possible so that they could have forewarned their subscribers about the calamity to come. They did not.

Many businesses are now furious with them; and rightly so. EEPCo's response in managing the crisis is not only insufficient, but also appears to be disingenuous: It hardly sticks to the publicly announced schedules, and power interruptions have become erratic and more frequent. Often, the power corporation switches power off after midnight, without first informing the public. A company that was part of the millennium frenzy a few months back, lightening up every building that put up neon lights in Addis, has now subjected pretty much of the city to darkness.

And EEPCo seems to lack imagination on how to distribute the little power that it does generate. For instance, it could have scheduled the load shedding for half a day from one area to another, instead of subjecting an entire neighbourhood to a full day of dullness and lack of productivity.

Neither is the government's response to all this satisfactory, it is perplexing in some ways. Its attitude borders to what amounts to be helplessness, as it simply sees the problem as temporary, and one that could be resolved when the dams under construction start to generate more power. It does little to help companies cope with the crisis in the meantime, such as possibly providing them with fiscal incentives by lifting duty and excise taxes from generator imports. That would have made the purchase of generators affordable, although the spending on diesel would be additional cost to businesses.

Whatever response has come from the state so far has been limited to compelling the power company not to interrupt power to those businesses involved in the export sector.

Companies such as Ethio-Japan Nylon and Woinua Curtail Trading Plc, as well as Abyssinia and Highland, may have encountered similar handicaps that are not of their making. Yet they are not at par in the treatment they receive from the government, which should be equally accountable to all in a quest for a solution.

The garment factory is lucky enough to be on the list of the 150 companies in the export sector, in addition to the 90 flower farms, and can consequently enjoy power non-stop as opposed to those that manufacture Abyssinia and Highland; the latter are left out from the instruction the Minister of Trade and Industry, Girma Birru, gave to EEPCo a few weeks ago to continually provide electric power to exporters.

He certainly has good reason to have done that: His ministry wants to see the export revenue the country earns grow by at least five per cent annually. Take, for instance, the 1.7 billion dollars revenue targeted for this budget year. There is a great deal of doubt whether this is a target that could be met within the remaining one quarter, judging from the nation's export performance in the past three quarters.

That the country grossed the one billion dollar mark within the three quarters is indeed a remarkable achievement, for a few years ago, this would have caused top officials of this government to jump from their seats with joy. But seen from what the Ministry has planned for the three quarters, the recorded earnings reflect a shortfall of 280 million dollars. If the Minister and his team of trade experts are nervous that an industry constrained by a series of power interruptions would fail from meeting its target, such a move is very understandable.

There is hardly anything wrong if the government uses policy instruments to support this sector as a way of dealing with the challenge posed by power failure. There are several other encouraging incentives, including tax holidays as well as duty free imports, that it has been granting to industries of its liking as many other governments across the world would have done.

But when such preferential treatment is done at the expense of other industries, whether or not they are involved in sectors the state thinks promote its policy agenda, it becomes unfair and screams of a double standard. A state is supposed to be equally accountable and supportive to the various industries, whether it is a garment factory or a water bottling plant.

Instructing a monopolistic firm under its strong grip to advance its policy agenda is, of course, not new to a government like the Ethiopian one. Ironically, its leaders do not see anything wrong in holding a state monopoly of key economic sectors such as land, banking, telecom and transport and using them to promote their agenda. If Minister Girma instructed the power company - a giant state monopoly with the exclusive rights to transmit power - it only falls in this pattern. Their view of what the state should be doing in managing the country justifies their actions.

The Revolutionary Democrats who hold power in Ethiopia are far from building a liberal thinking state that is small but efficient. For them, a state is a political, economic and military machine that goes beyond contract administration in a society: In itself, it is a powerful instrument to bring the kind of change they envision.

This view is not new to Ethiopia, thus they cannot be accused of introducing something different. A feudal and hierarchical society for many centuries, a state is everything in an Ethiopian's life; it has been a provider as much as it has been a protector. It has been an arbiter as much as it has been a player itself. The Revolutionary Democrats simply continue to be custodians of this traditional view of a state by both those in the government and the governed, but to a varying degree. They are different from their predecessor because they decided to implement a quasi-free market economic policy due to whatever motive they had or incentives they were given.

Their record in the past was very mixed, though, ranging from publicly declared intentions to build "white capitalism" to a complete reversal to a developmental state; and from the privatisation of the 1990s to the re-assertiveness of the state in the economy by creating mega corporations in the mid 2000s.

The latest decision to force the utility company to provide uninterrupted power supply to the export sector is only a reflection of this absence of ideological clarity on the role of the state in the economy.

In an open society, the state should not be allowed to be everything in citizens' life. It should have the limited role of discharging the common good upon delegation from voters. It should limit itself to writing laws that guarantee the right to life and to own property, and enforce them irrespective of economic actors' propinquity to its agenda. The rule of law should be applied uniformly and indiscriminately.

In managing the economy, the state's primary role ought to be in ensuring that there is indeed sufficient room for just, free and unfettered competition in the market that could serve the self-determined demands of individuals. This is a kind of system - as competitive as it truly could get - that can help businesses make the most efficient and rewarding use of scare resources available in a poor country such as Ethiopia.

If there has been any short supply in Ethiopia in the past, it could not match the need to have such a government. Ethiopia has never experienced a government that is limited in its role; if there have been problems, these ought to be because of the large dose of paternalistic states prescribed around here. Although it still appears to be too early for Ethiopia to have a libertarian state, and there is no group that dares to advocate these ideals openly in the current political landscape, it should be a government of such nature - bound by its ideological convictions - not to intervene, through discrimination, in the market.