Following World War II, Emperor Haile Selassie renamed the town after Biblical Nazareth, and this name was used for the remainder of the twentieth century. In 2000, the city officially reverted to its original Oromo language name, Adama, though "Nazareth" is still widely used.
In 2000, the government moved the regional capital of Oromia from Addis Ababa to Adama, sparking considerable controversy. Critics of the move believed that the Ethiopian government wished to deemphasize Addis Ababa's location within Oromia. On the other hand, the government maintained that Addis Ababa "has been found inconvenient from the point of view of developing the language, culture and history of the Oromo people."
On June 10, 2005, the Oromo Peoples' Democratic Organization (OPDO), part of the ruling EPRDF coalition, officially announced plans to move the regional capital back to Finfinne (the Oromo name for Addis Ababa). This announcement occurred during the aftermath of Ethiopia's most democratic elections to date, in which the governing coalition lost all of its seats in Addis Ababa's municipal administration (see Ethiopian general elections, 2005). The opposition parties speculated that the move was intended as a way to split them along ethnic lines by inciting the largely non-Oromo residents of Addis Ababa to oppose the return of the Oromia government to the Ethiopian capital. The only comments from the opposition that the move inspired, however, was that the original move to Adama had been a massive waste of money, not to mention lives, as the government had cracked down on Oromo students who had protested the move from Finfinne to Adama. In any event, non-Oromo groups did not oppose the return of Oromia government offices to Addis Ababa
