Narrative Brief Biography of Dejazmach Woldesemait Gebrewold and his Contributions to Good Governance and Development of Wolaita, South Ethiopia, 1963-1970

Based on the aim and objectives of the study, this work adopted a qualitative research method. Qualitative research method best fits for exploring the life of individual, social phenomena, events and get new knowledge. The study adopted a biographical research design.
Levinson (1986) said the following about the biographical research፡
The biographical method is the only one that enables us to obtain a complex picture of the life structure at a given time and to delineate the evolution of the life structure over a span of years. It is well suited for gaining a more concrete sense of the individual life course, for generating new concepts, and in time, for developing new variables, measures and hypotheses.
Biographical researches of individual life histories fall into the category of retrospective longitudinal research techniques (Solga, 2001), which are employed to describe patterns of change and the quality (course and scale) of those changes over time (Menard, 2002). The design helps to assess the changes of Wolaita introduced by the governor. The data employed in this paper were collected when the writer was at fieldwork in 2016 and 2017. The data gathering techniques employed were detail interview of key informants and assessment of secondary sources and archival documents.
Denzin (2009) categorizes two types of life histories: complete and topical. The complete life history grasps the entire life of the subject; the subject’s past remodeled in all of its complexity, grounded on the personal story of the individual. The topical life history focuses on specific thematic periods in someone’s life; for example, the period of his education. The present work utilized the topical life history type that emphasizes on the work life history of the person particularly when he was governor of Wolaita in the 1960s. The study carried out 9 face-to-face semi-structured in-depth interviews with older citizens whose all ages are between 65 and 92 years old to uncover the life history of the subject and his contributions in line of good governance and development.
The number of informants is believed to be appropriate and limited to nine persons only because the persons are selected purposely and they are key informants who lived and worked in Wolaita in the study time. They had worked and contacted with the governor in different times and had sufficient knowledge of the subject under study. The study is not only depended on the interview but also on analysis of written texts and archival sources, for example autobiographical writings, letters and publications. Crosscheck of data accuracy has been made to prove the credibility and authenticity of the sources. The primary sources analyzed were available from the hands of individuals and the library of Addis Ababa University. The available data are analyzed by using descriptive and historical content narrative analysis methods. This data contains the photo of of the Wolaita man, map and letter.