Addis Neger

There is nothing innocent about development, especially development in a politically tortured country like Ethiopia. What is happening in the capital and in the rest of the country is part of a larger and more fundamental process: the reconfiguration of state and society. This goes in line with EPRDF’s, and all revolutionary regimes’, idea of rupture with the past and their belief in a fundamental reorganization of the present-future. The danger is the process, and the end-product, have been less democratic, less developmental, and less empowering. It seems that there is little changing; power is still alluring in its violent magnificence; and the past, in its autocratic essences, is still invading and shaping the present….This is nothing peculiar to Ethiopia. It had happened and it is happening in Africa and in the rest of the developing world. The politics of urbanization and urban modernization constitutes and is constitutive of the political-economy of state making. In the Ethiopian case, what is taking place in Addis Ababa mirrors the larger processes at work nationally: the democratization of disempowerment, the disenfranchising of development.