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Posts by Heruyan Gogot

In the Name of Whose Development?

by Heruyan Gogot | 8:04 pm | 11 Comments

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.

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The Specter of Insecurity and the Making of Hostages

by Heruyan Gogot | 12:18 pm | 5 Comments

The specter of war and famine is an architecture of blackmail. Fear and distortions are its underpinning. Emancipation should begin with its dismantling and this can come from at least two sources, among others. One is the economic and political liberation of the peasant. In a country where land and famine are used as a political resource, the ending of famine which entails the liberation of land and the empowerment of the peasant means the beginning of the end of tyranny

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The May 23 ‘Election’ and Its Significance by Default

by Heruyan Gogot | 11:12 am | 5 Comments

Is it an absolute necessity to have ideology (socialism or revolutionary democracy) to shape and guide the entire spectrum of our life as individuals and as a nation? If we say that there is such a need, why then should we privilege ideology at the expense of other organizing frameworks like patriotism or solidarity? I understand the history of this development, the student movement and its subsequent elevation of ideology as the sole organizer of social and political practice in Ethiopia. But is it not time for a rethinking or the unlearning of some of our received notions, knowledge or belief systems?

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