SOCIAL, ECONOMIC AND POLITICAL PROBLEMS CHALLENGING THE RAYA COMMUNITY: THE CASE OF DISPLACED RAYA PEOPLE IN NORTH WOLLO

Abstract

The study examined a multitude of social, economic and political problems challenging the Raya community of displaced Raya people in North Wollo. For this purpose, the study pursued convergent parallel mixed research design. Following this, the researcher employed both qualitative and quantitative approaches to gather wealth of information. Interview schedule was used for collecting quantitative data whereas key informant interviews and focus group discussions were conducted for getting detailed qualitative accounts. Accordingly, ten key informant interviews and two FGDs were conducted with displaced government officials, political activists and selected youth members. The researcher applied simple random and purposive sample techniques to select representative sample from the total population. On top of that, displaced Raya people randomly selected from the refugee camp. Data were collected from 240 randomly selected respondents from the study area. Descriptive statistics such as frequency and percentage were used to analyze quantitative data and thematic analysis, particularly narration, was employed for qualitative data analysis. The study found out that a bundle of social, economic and political problems posed grave challenges the Raya community. The prominent social problems like linguistic discriminations, difficulty of social life, difficulty to secure social justice, cultural identity based abuses, defiance to Raya dietary and indigenous belief systems, resistant to cultural costume, unemployment, dwindle of educational achievement and dearth of infrastructure development actuated challenges the Raya community. Coupled with these, the study identified that economic problems such as economic marginalization, inequitable distribution of industrial plant, becoming non beneficiary from natural resource endowment, declined investment flow, and prohibition of local investors created challenges the Raya community. The study also uncovered that brutal and oppressive administration, assimilation policy of TPLF, extended corruption, dearth of human and democratic rights, negligence in the Regional administration and the appointment of administrators from Central and Northern district of Tigray were among political problems accelerated challenges the Raya community. From the results, one can conclude that a combination of problems transpired myriad challenges the Raya community.