Shame of Somali leaders fiddling while their country is on the verge of famine

By The Star Editorial Board

MOGADISHU — Somalia is technically on autopilot at a time when a fierce battle against al Shabab terrorists is raging in certain regions and the danger of famine is increasing each day.

Prime Minister Hamza Abdi Barre, the head of the executive arm of government, is in Ethiopia, where he initially attended a high-level forum on security in Africa.

President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, the commander in chief of the armed forces, is in the United Arab Emirates in a secret visit that his office didn’t even officially announce.

Speaker of Parliament Sheikh Aden Madobe is in Austria — only God knows where else he will go next.

This brazen irresponsibility amid major crises highlights Somali leaders’ lack of the milk of human kindness, of vision, of compassion and of empathy for their people.

In a country with functioning institutions, the presence or absence of top leaders shouldn’t be a big concern, but in Somalia, the absence of President Hasssan, Premier Hamza and Speaker of parliament Madobe all at the same time has an important bearing on the running of the country’s day-to-day affairs, especially when the leaders’ full attention is required to avert a famine that’s staring Somalis in the face.

On Friday, Oxfam, an aid organization, said Somalia is facing its “worst hunger crisis in living memory, with the number of people experiencing acute hunger already surpassing the number affected in the famine of 2011, when more than a quarter of a million people died.” The agency added that “almost one in six people in Somalia are now facing extreme hunger.”

Other organizations have been sounding the same alarm for months, with the UN’s World Food Program now saying that 7.1 million people face acute food insecurity, 213,000 of whom face catastrophic hunger.

“As local staple food prices continue to rise sharply and livestock prices decrease significantly, access to food is rapidly diminishing among poor families,” the UN’s food agency said. It estimated that “1.5 million children under 5 suffer from acute malnutrition, of which 386,000 face a high risk of disease and death.”

It’s unconscionable that there is little concrete, government-led campaign to meet the needs of the millions affected by the drought. Outrageously, there is a push by the Hassan-Hamza administration to downplay the danger of the looming famine for political reasons. Already, it’s curiously scrapped the ministry that used to handle the humanitarian issues in the country, where, according to the UN food agency, seven out of ten Somalis live on less than US$1.90 a day.

It appears that saving lives is the least of the Hassan-Hamza administration’s concerns.

President Hassan, Prime Minister Hamza and Parliament Speaker Madobe are on the gad, putting up at luxurious hotels in foreign countries that cost thousands – if not tens of thousands – of dollars, when almost half of the their people is in need of an urgent humanitarian aid.

The Somali public mustn’t tolerate this disgraceful behavior from their undependable leaders who deliberately decided to abandon their country and people at their time of need. This is the very irresponsibility that kept the country in chaos for three decades and is now deepening its trouble.

President Hassan and Prime Hamaza are unlikely to turn the country around if they persist in their wrong-headed policies, which are long on rhetoric and short on results. The declaration of a war that is geographically limited and clannish in its outlook with no solid strategy against well-armed al Shabab militants at the very peak of a humanitarian crisis underscores the current administration’s lack of seriousness on how to correct the country’s security ills.

On Thursday, Reuters, citing a survey conducted by humanitarian agencies, reported that 59 percent of more than 98,000 children screened in a Baidoa district, who were between the ages of 6 and 59 months, had acute malnutrition.

Prime Minister Hamza and President Hassan and other Cabinet members are well aware of these damning statistics about the drought and other gloomy data on every facet of life in Somalia — only 32 percent of school-going children are in primary schools — but they don’t seem to have a plan, or perhaps they’re simply clueless.

The Hassan-Hamza’s administration has failed to rise to the occasion. In fact, it’s shaping up to be the worst administration in post-civil war Somalia, even though it’s in office for five months. It has no vision to fix the country’s myriad problems, nor are its leaders, who seem to have abdicated their responsibility, serious about salvaging a country wracked by decades of wars, misrule and foreign interference.

Patriotic parliamentarians must team up and hold the trio — Hassan, Hamza and Madobe — accountable before more lives are lost in a new famine.

More than 250, 000 Somalis, almost half of them children, died in 2011 as a result of the slow response by the Somali government and international aid organizations. Nearly half of them died before the official declaration of famine.

The world must do everything to prevent the same tragedy from happening again – even if incompetent Somali leaders balk at uttering the F-word.