Negasso Gidada
Encyclopedia
Dr. Negasso Gidada Solon (born 1943) was the President of Ethiopia
Ethiopia
Ethiopia , officially known as the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, is a country located in the Horn of Africa. It is the second-most populous nation in Africa, with over 82 million inhabitants, and the tenth-largest by area, occupying 1,100,000 km2...

 from 1995 until 2001. He is the son of Gidada Solon, one of the first local ministers of the Protestant church in the Dembidolo
Dembidolo
Dembidolo is a market town in southwestern Ethiopia. Located in the Mirab Welega Zone of the Oromia Region, this town has a latitude and longitude of with an elevation between 1701 and 1827 meters above sea level....

 area in western Ethiopia.

Dr. Nagasso holds a doctorate in social history from the Goethe University in Frankfurt-am-Main and is currently a part-time lecturer of history at Addis Ababa University
Addis Ababa University
Addis Ababa University is a university in Ethiopia. It was originally named "University College of Addis Ababa" at its founding, then renamed for the former Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie I in 1962, receiving its current name in 1975.Although the university has six of its seven campuses within...

. The title of his doctoral thesis is "History of the Sayyoo Oromo of Southwestern Wallaga, Ethiopia, from about 1730 to 1886". He is married to Regina Abelt
Regina Abelt
Regina Abelt was the First Lady of Ethiopia from 1995 until 2001, and a German citizen. She is the first person to hold such a government position while being a citizen of a different country.-Background:...

, a German nurse and midwife. Being the First Lady of Ethiopia while holding the German Citizenship earned Abelt considerable, yet unwanted, attention by the German and European tabloid press.

Political career

In Europe, he was an active member of the Oromo Liberation Front (OLF)Yenegasso mengedDr Negasso had been Minister of Information in the Transitional Government of Ethiopia
Transitional Government of Ethiopia
The Transitional government of Ethiopia was established immediately after the fall of the Dergue regime. It was led by Meles Zenawi of Ethiopia. Zenawi remains the prime minister of Ethiopia to this day....

 and Central Committee member of the Oromo People's Democratic Organisation (OPDO) when he became president on 22 August 1995. He left office when his term expired on 8 October 2001. Before the end of his term, he was expelled from both the OPDO and the EPRDF
Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front
The Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front is the ruling political coalition in Ethiopia. It is an alliance of four other groups: the Oromo Peoples' Democratic Organization , the Amhara National Democratic Movement , the South Ethiopian Peoples' Democratic Front The Ethiopian People's...

 coalition on 22 June.

In the 2005 general elections
Ethiopian general elections, 2005
Ethiopia held general elections on May 15, 2005, for seats in both its national and in four regional government councils. Under pressure from the international community, Prime Minister Meles Zenawi promised that this election would be proof that more democracy would come in this multi-ethnic...

, Dr. Negasso was elected to the Ethiopian House of People's Representatives
House of People's Representatives
The Federal Parliamentary Assembly of Ethiopia has two chambers. The lower house is the House of Peoples' Representatives with 547 members , elected for five-year terms in single-seat constituencies.-Speakers of the House of Peoples'...

 as an independent from Dembidolo in the Mirab Welega Zone
Mirab Welega Zone
Mirab Welega is one of the 12 Zones in the Ethiopian Region of Oromia. This zone is named after the former province of Welega, whose western part lay in the area Mirab Misraq now occupies....

 of the Oromia Region
Oromia Region
Oromia is one of the nine ethnic divisions of Ethiopia...

.

In July 2008, Dr. Negasso became a founding member of the Forum for Democratic Dialogue (FDD), a new coalition of opposition parties and activists. Then in November 2009, he announced he had joined the Unity for Democracy and Justice Party (UDJ), one of the eight parties in the FDD, "to try to unite Ethiopia". At the time of his announcement, he also asked forgiveness from Ethiopians for deceiving them that Ethiopia's current constitution was ratified in 1995 with full participation of all political parties in a democratic manner. "There were a number of political parties that were excluded from the process," he said during the ceremony when he and Siye Abraha were officially inducted into the UDJ.

External links

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