Somali leaders must get the basics right to secure country

By The Star Editorial Board

After a brief lull, mostly during the Holy month of Ramadan, al Shabab militants are once again on the offensive, carrying out vicious attacks on government offices and military bases, the latest being the Bar Sanguni attack on Monday in which the group said it had killed 27 soldiers, although the government denied the claim.

The Qaida-linked group has also earlier this month, attacked a building housing ministries of interior and national security in the nation’s capital, Mogadishu, and killed more than a dozen people after its assailants passed through several security checkpoints before reaching their target. 

These back-to-back attacks are painful reminders that there’s something horribly wrong with the nation’s security strategy. 

Since 2009, when President Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed took office, each Somali leader has pledged to rid the country of the Shabab militants in his first term. But the group — despite its weakness — remains as lethal as ever, with its fighters now having the audacity to attack every part of the country, including the presidential palace, the nation’s symbol of authority.

Al Shabab’s decade-plus existence threatens the survival of the Somali nation, as a united entity, making a mockery of past and present governments’ assertions that the nation is moving in the right direction. 

Instead of routing out this bloody terrorists, the Farmajo-Khayre government is busy inking dud trade deals with foreign nations and attending time-wasting submits in secure European cities. 

The current government promised to be a breath of fresh air and perform differently on security, but it seems, like its predecessors, to be groping in the dark. Its early setbacks have dampened the spirit of many who had hoped to see a real change in Somalia.

President Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed Farmajo and Prime Minister Hassan Ali Khayre must change tack and take their responsibilities of running the nation seriously if they want to turn things around. The public’s patience with their breathtaking carelessness toward the nation’s security, sovereignty, territorial integrity and the public’s concern over the future direction of the country is running out. Somalis are particularly enraged by their leaders’ dearth of depth, poor judgment and obsequiousness to foreign leaders, especially Ethiopia’s Abiy Ahmed, whose country is our biggest geopolitical and geostrategic adversary. 

The bulk of the responsibility to manage the country’s affairs falls on Prime Minister Khayre, whose power includes “formulating the overall government policy and implementing it. That doesn’t mean the president is blameless, or that there is no recourse to holding the two leaders accountable for their failures.

As they say the squeaky wheel gets the grease, so let’s call Farmajo and Khayre out for their incompetence. Keeping silent is not an option. When our leaders drift or allow themselves to be exploited by other nations, we shouldn’t feign helplessness or cover for them, but take a stand and keep our foxy leaders’ feet to the fire.

Somalis can solve their own problems without the input or support of foreigners. It happened in 2006, when a group of united Islamic courts ousted the US-financed warlords and restored peace to Mogadishu for the first time since 1991. At the time, no foreign country was party to this success story that pleasantly surprised Somalis, but shocked Somalia’s enemies who later ousted the courts and turned the sense of optimism into a profound despair.

Whether Farmajo and Khayre can repeat the courts’ achievement is far from certain, as their statements of change are more about allaying the rising public concerns than a strategy to actually change the status quo.

That’s anticlimax.

On February 8, 2017, when Somali lawmakers elected Farmajo as the nation’s president, he gave the impression of a man with a magic wand to end the country’s insecurity, corruption, bad governance and foreign interference. Unlike many Westernized Somali politicians, he was proud of his Somali origin, even though he had an American passport. His statements told of a fervent exponent of nationalism who, like many Somalis, is angered by the around-the-clock foreign influence in the internal affairs of the country.

His actions immediately after taking the oath of office warmed the hearts of his admirers: He was shown holding talks with the much-loathed AU civilian leaders and military commanders, telling them that al Shabab terrorists should be eradicated within two years. The Ethiopian embassy and its cameras planted inside the Blue House were plucked out. Farmajo became an overnight national sensation, with his admirers coining the phrase “take me to Farmajo.”

But as the man was settling into his office, al Shabab’s mortars started raining, as ever, on his office-cum-residence, perhaps to warn the new occupant that he wasn’t going to have an easy ride. When the actual work of running the nation began in earnest and the man’s leadership skills were put to the test, he failed to live up to the expectations of his admirers, quickly putting a black mark against his name. His words gradually lost their meaning, as there were little matching actions on the ground.

Then the cascade of mistakes poured forth: National forces arrested an opposition leader, Abdirahman Abdishakur Warsame, after killing five of his bodyguards. Next, masked gunmen attacked the house of Senator Abdi Hassan Awale Qaybdiid. But the handing over of a Somali national, Abdikarim Sheik Muse Qalbi-dhegah, to Ethiopia was the straw that broke the camel’s back. 

This unprecedented action stirred furor across the country, prompting lawmakers to investigate the government’s move and finally found Farmajo-Khayre administration culpable for the illegal rendition. 

Despite that uproar, though, the Somali government issued no official statement on Qalbi-dhagah’s matter beyond President Farmajo’s evasive utterance that further outraged Somalis of all political stripes. When a Somali citizen asked President Farmajo in a live BBC Somali TV program what had come of his zeal before the election, Farmajo said his is like an elder man’s role: To supervise the government and provide it with a vision. 

“I believe that I have brought (picked?) a good prime minister who is equal to the task. And as I see it, the government is doing a good job,” he said.

Some die-hard Farmajo supporters may argue that fixing Somalia is not a sprint, but a marathon with many pitfalls along the way. But Somalia won’t ever get a good leader if its citizens shy away from shaming their bad leaders. It’s the noblest duty of every citizen to correct the mistakes of his president as much as he can. 

The country needs a leadership that can change its security trajectory, instead of begging foreign powers to help build up a national army. It’s indefensible to let poor, cash-trapped 5,000-plus ruthless al Shabab militants to wreak havoc across the country.

This deteriorating insecurity is emblematic of a larger governance malaise, which, if not cured, can eventually tear the nation asunder.

Last week, President Farmajo accorded five self-seeking regional administrators the honor of representing Somalia in an international conference in Brussels, Belgium, itself a theater of the absurd and masked attempt at re-colonization by the 28-nation bloc.

It’s easy for some to argue that the participation of these “presidents” are crucial for the success of internationally-backed Somali conferences, but such a proposition ignores the fact that having President Farmajo along with other “presidents” technically means that Somalia is no longer a one country, but emirates, namely Puntland, Jubaland, Hirshabelle, Southwest and Somaliland as well as Farmajo’s land, Mogadishu or Banadir region.

Semantics are very important at international forums. Countries that are a part of the European Union are referred to as “member states.” So referring to Somali regions as “member states” has the connotation of being independent countries. 

Why did President Farmajo accept to be dwarfed by bureaucrats drawn from his own country during such an international gathering is unfathomable. 

Looking back at 2012, when the international community rammed a faulty constitution down Somalis’ throats, helps us understand why we’ve such a dizzying number of presidents and cantons in the first place.

Many Somalis have, at the time, warned that the West’s aim was to break the country into a smaller, clan-based fiefdoms that can easily be manipulated. While Somalis wanted a system that transferred resources to remote regions outside the capital, the so-called international community wanted splitting Somalia into self-governing mini-states.

But to turn such a system into a reality, the financiers of the provisional charter — mainly the EU – have to embrace gullible politicians under the pretext of helping Somalia. The Somali-EU communiqué addressed Somali regions as if they’re separate entities: “We also call on all FMS (federal member states) to hold their elections in line with agreed (upon) constitutional term limits,” it said. The same goes for the northwestern Somali region: “We urge the FGS (Federal Government of Somalia) and Somaliland administration to resume dialogue as early as possible to seek a peaceful solution to their differences.”

The overall strategy of the Brussels gathering was to entrench division among Somalis and encourage the open-ended presence of the African troops in our country. The EU deceptively hides itself behind the cloak of humanitarian issues and calls for political inclusivity and women’s issues.  It’s “committed more than €1.73 billion”  for the AU force between March 2007 and December 2018, when Somali soldiers go for months without payment. 

“To take stock of the outcomes” of the July conference, the EU is planning to hold, in three months’ time, a Somali submit that will be followed by another one — yes, you read it correctly — in six month’s time.

History is replete with high-level international Somali conferences that produced zilch results, except for playing Somali leaders who, like colonial collaborators of yesteryear, see no problem in being a part of the foreign-led malevolent efforts to tear their country to shreds. Isn’t it the EU the alliance that made – according to its own internal memo – illegal to employ any ethnic Somali at its construction site in the nation’s capital? Isn’t the US the country that banned Somalis from traveling to its territory? All these anti-Somali decisions best illustrate the little respect the West has for Somalis.

The Farmajo-Khayre administration has to get the basics right by drying up the swamps of the nation’s lawlessness, such as the venal politicians willing to sell the country’s assets to foreign nations, presence of foreign forces and military bases as well as the myriad private security companies in the country whose sole objective is to continue earning filthy lucre at the expense of Somalia’s national security.

If the West — specifically the European Union and the United States — wanted, ever, to help us, it could have done so in the last 30 years. It’s the means to locate each and every al Shabab terrorist in the country, but the West’s agenda is not to starve the beast, but to allow it turn into a Trojan horse to destroy the country. These “placeholders” — that is, al Shabab militants — are pampered and even protected to keep Somalia in a perpetual state of chaos.

If President Farmajo and Prime Miniser Khayre seem not to understand these madcap machinations, we should, and save our country, urgently. Let’s stay alert to and Argus-eyed about the threats facing our nation from seemingly friendly countries and quislings in our midst.