I was, for reasons best explained by being a distracted nerd, reading the comments[1] in tzdata[2] the other night. Ethiopia is one of the time zones they shrugged at and gave up because it was impossible to represent in the structure of the database. They also - for reasons that presumably make sense for an agricultural country close to the equator, but probably double as a cheerful up-yours[3] to the colonisers - like to use solar time, starting from sunrise/sunset rather than the meridian, which puts their clocks about 6 hours out of phase with EAT.
Thankfully, none of this has anything to do with Bob Geldof.
[1] The whole thing's about 10% time zone definitions, and 90% comments containing citations of the relevant historical research. It reads as a protracted saga of frustrated engineers sifting through the strata of colonial history in a seemingly futile quest to make computers do clocks properly.
[2] "Tzdata, tzdata: Gives you an excuse for getting up later." Software that unisex computers use to do things like leap seconds and work out whether Bulgaria was doing daylight saving on the 23rd of July 1981, and if so, by how much.
[3] See also: Belgium, who have form for this sort of thing.
