E was bitten badly by the Decode bug. In 2000 he bought 30m kronas’ worth of shares – more than 230,000 pounds at today’s exchange rates – when prices were at their peak. They are now worth considerably less than 10,000 pounds and he faces bankruptcy.

One evening a small column of white, four-wheel drive cars passed through the villages of the Great Rift Valley in southern Ethiopia, in a chocolate smell of long-dry earth wetted by the early rains. To the local people it must have looked like one more foreign aid agency on the move.