Just after we landed in Ethiopia, I switched on my cell phone. No signal. “Temporary glitch,” I thought. Hardly.

It turns out Ethiopia is one of the few countries in Africa that has no roaming agreements with other nations. In most African countries practically everyone from basket weavers to donkey herders has a cell phone. In Ethiopia, only the few and proud have them. That’s because government-owned Telecom is the sole provider of mobile phones. The wait to get one is typically 1-1/2 to 2 years.

Standing in line for two years for a cell phone? It sounds like something out of the Soviet Union.

In fact, almost every taxi on the streets of Addis Ababa is an old, Soviet-made Lada – basically a bathtub on wheels. (Below is my driver, Merid, and his Lada.)

ABRAHAM MCLAUGHLIN

Also, hammer-and-sickle icons dot the city. They’re symbols of Ethiopia’s past, when communism was the official ideology. But even today, the regime has its roots in Albanian communism, complete with a ruling-party central committee. It has shifted somewhat toward a free-market approach, but entrepreneurs, as one businessman told me, are still seen as “parasites.”

There’s also government paranoia. Phones of diplomats, reporters, others are regularly bugged. Some whisper it’s akin to Cuba or North Korea. That’s probably a bit much. But the government’s paranoia and inefficiency may be partly to blame for why “the water capital of Africa” – as one diplomat described Ethiopia with its four major rivers – has regular droughts and mass starvation.

Not that government is totally to blame. Most people, for instance, live more than a day’s walk from any road. That makes trade pretty difficult. But being here, I realized government is part of the issue.

If it takes two years to get a cell phone, imagine trying to get a piece of injera (bread) every day.