Doctors at the Kenyatta National Hospital attend to victims of the Monday evening explosions which happened at the Eastleigh estate in Nairobi. Six people were killed and dozens others seriously injured in the blasts. The attacks occurred at Sheraton Cafe and The New Kwa Muzairua Super Grill Centre along Eastleigh’s 11th Street at around 7.30pm.
Six people were killed and dozens others seriously injured in blasts in Nairobi’s Eastleigh estate Monday evening.
Most of those injured in the three explosions, were taken to Mother and Child Hospital, Guru Nanak Hospital and Kenyatta National Hospital, where 20 of the injured were admitted.
The attacks occurred at Sheraton Cafe and The New Kwa Muzairua Super Grill Centre along Eastleigh’s 11th Street at around 7.30pm. The two cafes are barely 300 metres apart.
According to the owner of Sheraton Cafe, Mr Patrick Gakuyu, people were watching the evening news when he heard two explosions followed by complete darkness.
He said when he tried to flee from the scene, he discovered that the door had been locked from outside.
“When I finally managed to get outside, I saw six bodies,” he said. Mr Gakuyu said he suspect the explosions were caused by grenades thrown into the cafe.
Nairobi County police commander Benson Kibue said initial reports indicated six people were killed and 11 others injured.
KNH chief executive Lily Koros appealed to Kenyans to donate blood to help the victims of the attacks.
On Sunday, a suspected terrorist died in the same estate after an explosive he was assembling went off. A grenade was also found in a church compound in Lamu on the same day.
Monday’s Eastleigh attack also follows the one that took place in Mombasa a fortnight ago in which six people were killed and scores injured after gunmen opened fire at worshippers at a church in Likoni.
Travel advisory
The Australian government has issued a travel advisory, warning its citizens of possible terrorist attacks in Kenya.
“There is a serious and ongoing risk of large scale acts of terrorism in Nairobi and Mombasa. We advise Australians to avoid unnecessary visits to public places in Nairobi and Mombasa at this time,” the advisory said in part.
A statement posted on the High Commission’s website indicated that in light of the current security environment, the level of advice for Nairobi and Mombasa has been increased.
“We now advise Australians to reconsider their need to travel to Nairobi and Mombasa due to high threat of terrorist attack and high level of crime. We also continue to strongly advise Australians not to travel to border regions with Somalia, Ethiopia and South Sudan, because of the extremely dangerous security situation,” the statement added.
Security has been heightened in different parts of the country recently following reports of planned terrorist attacks using vehicles laden with explosives.
Both covert and overt operations have been stepped up, especially in Nairobi and Mombasa, where Interior Cabinet Secretary Joseph ole Lenku also directed that an additional 500 officers be deployed.
A Toyota truck seized in Mombasa with six bombs is believed to be one of the three “dirty bomb” vehicles.
The bombs, which were safely detonated, had enough power to bring down a multi-storey building and cause massive civilian casualties.
Both Kenyan and FBI agents are racing against time to locate and disable the bomb vehicles, also known as Vehicle Borne Improvised Explosive Devices.
Kenya last Tuesday restricted all refugees to two camps after a weekend attack on a church near Mombasa.
Kenyans were also urged to report any refugees outside the overcrowded camps — Dadaab in the east and Kakuma in the northwest — to the police.
In Mombasa, police were given shoot-to-kill orders by County Commissioner Nelson Marwa three days after gunmen opened fire on worshippers at the Joy in Christ church in Likoni, killing six.
At least 15 others were injured, including a boy identified as Satrine Osinya who has a bullet in his skull. The boy was on Tuesday airlifted to the Kenyatta National Hospital in Nairobi for surgery.
In Eldoret, fuel tankers are being escorted to Uganda by police.
Ugandan police offered the service after intelligence reports indicated there were terror plots against the tankers.
Security sources who did not wish to be named said they had received information that terror attacks were planned in major places in Kampala.
Nairobi, March 31, 2014–The Committee to Protect Journalists calls on Somali authorities in the capital, Mogadishu, to release a radio journalist who has been held without charge since Sunday. Nuradin Hassan is an editor of Sky FM, as well as a news presenter, according to news reports and Sky FM.
Mohamed Khalif, chief inspector of the Central Investigations Department (CID), asked Nuradin to report to the CID for questioning on Sunday, but the journalist was detained when he arrived, Sky FM Director Mohamed Muse told CPJ.
News reports and local journalists, including Mohamed, said Nuradin was detained in connection with his report on Sky FM that said the passport of a British citizen-who works as an adviser to the prime minister-briefly went missing, disrupting his travel plans with the prime minister. Authorities said Nuradin had reported misleading information and questioned the journalist on how Sky FM obtained its information, reports said.
“Somali authorities continually harass journalists who portray the government in a negative light,” said CPJ East Africa Representative Tom Rhodes. “We call on the government to release Nuradin Hassan immediately.”
Abdirahman Omar, a spokesman for the government, told CPJ that Information Minister Mustafa Dhuholow was looking into the case.
Sky FM is a sister radio station to Radio Shabelle and part of the Shabelle Media Network. The Shabelle Media Network has often been harassed and its journalists targeted. In October 2013, heavily armed security forces raided its offices, arrested three dozen staff members, and confiscated equipment. In the past five years, unknown gunmen have killed at least nine journalists working for the Shabelle Media Network, according to CPJ research.
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CPJ is an independent, nonprofit organization that works to safeguard press freedom worldwide.
This in Order to avoid ‘unconstitutional’ extension
By Hassan Ali
The Representatives of International Donors based in Nairobi are said to have written a letter to H.E President Ahmed Mohamed Mahmoud (Silanyo) in which they call on him to assign a scheduled date in which the voter/citizen registration process will begin so as to put in place a robust and effective voter/citizen registration system to guarantee the integrity of each and every vote in the upcoming parliamentary and presidential elections.
According to Somali language Newspaper Geeska Africa had obtained through reliable sources reports stating that International community had in the letter to President Silanyo raised earlier concerns over the scheduled date for voter/citizen registration process which was expected to begin in the middle of 2014 or early 2015 so as to put in place effective preparations for the upcoming elections and in order to conducted them in a free, fair and secure manner, in accordance with International standards.
International donors in their letter to President Silanyo are said to have stated it would be almost impossible to hold elections on time in due to lack of any preparation by the current government and the present time limitation for elections to take place considering and the stretched table of the international community which is expected to play a vital role in preparing providing financial and technical support is crucial to the in any peaceful elections for the first democratic elections in Somalia which is due in 2016.
The Somaliland Government has allocated only 25% of the overall expenses needed while the remainder 75% will be funded by the International community which remains committed supporting Somaliland democratization process.
President Silanyo response to the international community is yet known. Opposition parties have been raising their concerns in the past regarding the election schedule agreed upon by all political parties and the National Election Commission.
The secrecy-obsessed regime in Ethiopia has a huge creepy dragnet of secret electronic surveillance programs to sniff out the deeply-buried secrets of the people of Ethiopia. They spend sleepless nights interrogating themselves about what the people could do to them. Who do they talk to secretly? What do they secretly say about them? Do the people secretly despise them as much as they think they do? (That’s an open secret.) Are the people secretly planning to overthrow them? Who are the secret conspirators? Where are they? In Ethiopia? Europe? America? Could the secret enemies be extraterrestrial Ethiopians from Planet X?
For the regime knowledge is strength. No! Ignorance is strength. The regime must find out by hook or crook. Bug the landlines. Intercept the mobile phones. Hack the personal computers. Filter the critical websites. What else? They rack their brains and spend sleepless nights not only because they don’t know but also because they do. They know what they have done; and now they want to know what could be done unto them, secretly. They turn and toss. In their nightmares, they are chased by the Truth. They wake up in cold sweat. Such is the secret night life of ignorant thugs in power in Ethiopiana.
Secrecy is the brick and mortar in the architecture of oppression established by the regime in Ethiopia over the past two decades. The regime is so obsessed with secrecy that nearly two years after the passing of Meles Zenawi, its “Great, Visionary, Heroic, Renaissance, etc., Leader”, there is no official word on the cause of his death. It is a highly guarded state secret. From their days in the bush, those running regime have cultivated a stenchy culture of official secrecy and corruption (what I call a “culture of secrruption” for readers familiar with my neologisms). In fact, they have refined official secrecy and corruption to an art form. They make decisions under the proverbial cone of silence and secrecy. A secret shadow government (a “state within a state”) of faceless, nameless and conscienceless power-brokers makes all of the important decisions in the country. The regime operators and their cronies stash their stolen millions in secret off shore accounts. Global Financial Integrity not long ago reported that since 2000, Ethiopia has lost nearly USD$12 billion in secret illicit financial outflows. A cloak of secrecy shrouds public works and projects contracts which are back-channeled secretly to regime supporters and cronies. The country’s best lands are given away (excuse me, “leased for 99 years”) for pennies to Saudi, Indian and Chinese “investors” in total secrecy. An Indian multinational actually claimed it acquired “2,500 sq km of virgin, fertile land – an area the size of Dorset, England-” in Ethiopia, together with generous tax breaks, for £150 a week ($USD245). (Yeah! Right. If anyone believes that, I have the Brooklyn Bridge for sale at rock bottom prices. Somebodies got big secret paydays from that deal.) The regime operators are secret (silent) partners in all of the investments and procurement deals they hand out.
Winston Churchill once observed that, “Russia is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.” I would say the ruling regime in Ethiopia is a riddle wrapped in secrecy inside corruption. It is comically ironic that the secrecy-obsessed regime recently sought membership in the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI), an international organization dedicated exclusively to promote openness, transparency and accountability in the global mining industry. It is like the proverbial Ethiopian wolf who sought membership among a flock of sheep by wrapping himself in sheep’s wool to keep his identity secret. (Could EITI be a pack of wolves wrapped in sheep’s wool?)
“They Know Everything We Do”
Last week, Human Rights Watch (HRW) released its report on the secret massive electronic surveillance program of the regime in Ethiopia. In its report entitled, “‘They Know Everything We Do’: Telecom and Internet Surveillance in Ethiopia”, HRW concluded, “The Ethiopian government is using foreign technology to bolster its widespread telecom surveillance of opposition activists and journalists both in Ethiopia and abroad… The government is using control of its telecom system as a tool to silence dissenting voices…” The report documents the regime’s “complete control over the telecom system… (and the fact that) Ethiopian security officials have virtually unlimited access to the call records of all telephone users in Ethiopia. They regularly and easily record phone calls without any legal process or oversight. Recorded phone calls with family members and friends – particularly those with foreign phone numbers – are often played during abusive interrogations in which people who have been arbitrarily detained are accused of belonging to banned organizations.”
The regime has gone to extraordinary lengths to “curtail access to information by blocking websites and bloggers that offer any independent or critical analysis of political events in Ethiopia.” The regime has used “mobile surveillance” and “frequently targeted the ethnic Oromo population.” It has used “taped phone calls to compel people in custody to confess to being part of banned groups, such as the Oromo Liberation Front.” The surveillance technology is provided by China which has been the “exclusive supplier of telecom equipment from 2006 to 2009.” A number of “European companies have also provided advanced surveillance technology to Ethiopia, which have been used to target members of the diaspora.” The report points an accusatory finger at the “foreign firms that are providing products and services that facilitate Ethiopia’s illegal surveillance are risking complicity in rights abuses.”
Redwan Hussein, an apparatchik in the regime’s “Ministry of Information”, regurgitated the now familiar litany of demonization against Human Rights Watch: “This is one of the issues that it [HRW] has in the list of its campaigns to smear Ethiopia’s image, so there is nothing new to respond to it, because there is nothing new to it.”
The regime is simply not constructed to handle the truth. Time and again, it has shown unwillingness and inability to defend against the truth; so it reverts to its favorite and predictable five-pronged PR tactic: Deny the truth. Dismiss the truth as “smear”. Disguise the truth. Divert attention from the truth. Denigrate the truth-sayers and truth-diggers. But resistance to truth is futile.
When the European Union Election Observer Group confronted the late Meles Zenawi with the truth about his daylight theft of the May 2010 election by 99.6 percent, he denied and dismissed the truth and denigrated the entire EU Group for preparing a “trash report that deserves to be thrown in the garbage.” In August 2005, Meles, following the electoral drubbing of his party by a coalition of opposition parties in May, unleashed his wrath on European Union parliamentarian Ana Gomes and her election observer group. “We shall, in the coming days and weeks, see what we can do to expose the pack of lies and innuendoes that characterise the garbage in this report.”
So it is with the HRW and its report on internet and telecom surveillance in Ethiopia. All the regime can say in its defense is, “It is a campaign to smear Ethiopia’s image.” Truth be told, when it comes to “fear and smear campaigns” and fabrication of falsehoods, the regime in Ethiopia takes the cake. In my commentary, “The Politics of Fear and Smear” in Ethiopia, I demonstrated the regime’s propaganda campaign of smear, falsehoods and defamation against Ethiopian Muslims protesting political interference in their internal religious affairs.
The Federal Republic of Dystopia Ethiopia
With every passing day, Ethiopia is becoming a hardcore dystopia (that would be the exact opposite of a utopia.) Dystopia Ethiopia is a frightening place. It is a place where thugs rule! It is a place where humans are dehumanized, civilization is barbarized, justice corrupted, ethnic cleansing practiced, people impoverished and hungry, the youth gagged, bound and canned, the environment destroyed, dams used to damn indigenous peoples and society in cataclysmic decline. If that sounds like George Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four” Oceania, it is not. It is “Nineteen Eighty-Four” in 2014 Federal Republic of Dystopia Ethiopia!
In Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four” Oceania, there is omnipresent government surveillance, public manipulation and thought-control by a regime under the control of a privileged “Inner Party” elite that persecutes all dissent and prosecutes freedom of thought as “thought crimes”. The state in Oceania thrives on deception, secret surveillance and mass psychological manipulation. The head honcho tyrant is an elusive “Big Brother” who is worshiped as a demigod. Orwell writes, “Nobody has ever seen Big Brother. He is a face on the hoardings and a voice on the telescreen. We may be reasonably sure that he will never die, and there is already considerable uncertainty as to when he was born. Big Brother is the guise in which the Party chooses to exhibit itself to the world. His function is to act as a focusing point for love, fear, and reverence, emotions which are more easily felt towards an individual than towards an organization.” The slogans of Big Brother’s party are: “War is peace. Ignorance is strength. Slavery is freedom.”
The “state” in 2014 Ethiopiana is uncannily similar to Orwell’s fictional Oceania. Big Brother Meles is the infallible and all-powerful leader from the “telescreen” when he was alive (he never mingled with people in the street) and now from the grave. To Big Brother Meles belongs, “Every success, every achievement, every victory, every scientific discovery, all knowledge, all wisdom, all happiness, all virtue, are held to issue directly from his leadership and inspiration.” To his party acolytes, Big Brother Meles the omniscient, was, is and will forever be the fountainhead of knowledge and wisdom. He is the source of all good and great ideas.
Meles’ handpicked replacement, Hailemariam Desalegn, in his eulogy at Meles funeral spoke of the “great and exemplary leader” who created the “grand vision of what we can achieve and become in the future.” He described Big Brother Meles as the man with the plan who led Ethiopia to stratospheric heights. Hailemariam said, the “wise, insightful and decisive leader established the EPDRF party and was the chief architect and engineer of Ethiopia’s developmental plan”. Hailemariam credited Meles for singularly designing policies and strategies for the country and creating an economy that produced 10 percent plus growth over a period of 9 years. Meles was the “Renaissance and heroic leader who gave Ethiopia economic growth and transformation. Even though he left us, his vision will remain nor only with the party but also every individual in the country,” eulogized Hailemariam.
Big Brother Meles is “superman”, if not demigod, in the imagination of a few of his powerful foreign Little Sisters. Clare Short, Tony Blair’s former Secretary for International Development and the current chair of the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative spoke of her unbounded admiration for Meles as “the most intelligent politician I’ve ever met in my life.“ Ditto for Susan Rice, the former U.S. ambassador to the U.N. and the current national security advisor to Obama. In her eulogy Rice said, “The Meles I knew was… the smartest person in the room, and most of the time Meles was right…” Big Brother Meles of Ethiopiana, like the Big Brother of Oceania, comes alive today not only on the telescreen, but also from the grave, to guide and goad his Little Brothers, “War is peace. Ignorance is strength. Slavery is freedom.” He taught his Little Brothers, “Surveillance is the soul of secrecy.”
Indeed, in Ethiopiana war is peace (though the society is seething with rage and rebellion but they can pretend it is all peaceful); ignorance is bliss (the less the people know, the happier they will be and therefore it is necessary to twist and distort the truth to keep the people ignorant) and freedom is slavery (“Secrecy is the freedom tyrants dream of”, said Bill Moyers.)
The freedom to think freely is the death knell of tyranny. The unshackled mind is the terror of the ignorant. In Oceania, 2+2=5, because everyone is manipulated to believe it to be so. In Ethiopiana’s voodoo economics, 6.5% annual economic growth= 11-15% annual economic growth, if there is anyone to believe it (that is, other than he World Bank and the International Monetary Fund). Orwell’s formulaic slogans for Nineteen Eighty Four Oceania have been updated for 2014 Ethiopiana: Poverty is prosperity; famine is feast; government wrongs are human rights; repression is expression and thugogcracy is democracy. Ignorance is illuminance. Ignorance in Ethiopiana is the national equalizer. The purpose of the state is to twist, stretch and massage the truth to keep the people ignorant, dumb and unquestioning.
Nelson Mandela said, “Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.” Knowledge, information, consciousness and enlightenment are the most powerful weapons in the hands of 21st Century men and women to change their lives, the lives of their families and communities and control the destiny of their nations. For the regime in Ethiopia, the reverse is true: Ignorance and secrecy are the most powerful weapons they can use to prevent change and cling to power. The singular motto of the “Little Brothers of Dystopia Ethiopia” is, “Secrecy is power. Secrecy is strength.” Secrecy combined with ignorance yields absolute power. Absolute power in the hands of the “ignorati” (willfully ignorant) ensures the manipulation, emasculation and subjugation of the masses. “Keep ‘em ignorant, impoverished, hungry and divided and they will be your door mats,” is the mantra of the “Inner Party” (the “state within the state’) of Ethiopiana.
As I have argued on numerous occasions, the regime knows that it is detested and contemned by the vast majority of the population. Thus, the sleepless nights. They have done everything to get a little peace of mind, but to no avail. They have undertaken vicious propaganda campaigns to pit one ethnic group against another. They have tried to create war between Christians and Muslims; and thank God, they have completely failed! They have unleashed a barrage of propaganda, misinformation, disinformation, indoctrination, worn out slogans and sterile dogmas from a bygone era to cling to power. They have tried to clothe their deplorable human rights record with bogus statistics of economic growth and economic development.
For over two decades, Meles and his gang have tried to keep Ethiopians in a state of blissful ignorance. At gunpoint, they have forced the people speak no evil, see no evil and hear no evil about them. Meles and his posse have spent a king’s ransom to jam international radio and satellite transmissions to prevent the free flow of information to the people. They have blocked internet access to alternative and critical sources of information and views. According to a 2012 report of Freedom House, the highly respected nongovernmental research and advocacy organization established in 1941, “Ethiopia has one of the lowest rates of internet and mobile telephone penetration on the continent. Despite low access, the government maintains a strict system of controls and is the only country in Sub-Saharan Africa to implement nationwide internet filtering.” They have shuttered independent newspapers, jailed reporters, editors and bloggers and exiled dozens of journalists in a futile attempt to conceal their horrific crimes against humanity and vampiric corruption. Their “growth and transformation plan” has succeeded in transforming Ethiopia from the “Land of 13 Months of Sunshine” to “Ethiopiana, the Land of Perpetual Ignorance and Darkness”.
All of the surveillance and spying program is part of an elaborate conspiracy by the regime to create the “Benighted Kingdom of Ethiopiana”, where ignoramuses are kings, queens, princes and princesses. The educational system in Ethiopiana is corrupted and serves as a system of indoctrination. By providing the youth with substandard education, the regime aims to permanently cripple them intellectually not only by denying them formal learning opportunities but also the chance to acquire knowledge on the Internet and transform their lives and take control of the destiny of their nation. In my September 2010 commentary, “Indoctri-Nation”, I criticized the Meles regime for politicizing education. The “Ministry of Education” (reminds one of Orwell’s “Ministry of Truth” (Ignorance)) a few years ago issued a “directive” effectively outlawing distance learning (education programs that are not delivered in the traditional university classroom or campus) throughout the country. (Interestingly, Meles and his top lieutenants got their “graduate education” using foreign distance learning programs.) The regime also sought to corner the disciplines of law and teaching for state-controlled universities, creating a monopoly and pipeline for the training of party hacks to swarm the teaching and legal professions. There is no academic freedom in Ethiopiana. I have previously commented on the lack of academic freedom in Ethiopian higher education and the politicization of education in Ethiopia. In my February 2008 commentary “Tyranny in the Academy”, I called attention to the lack of academic freedom at Mekelle Law School.
Why does the regime spy on the people?
The regime secretly spies on the people because it is afraid of the people. In 1962, President John F. Kennedy cautioned the American people, “We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.” The regime in Ethiopia is afraid of the people and seeks to overcome its fear through secret surveillance programs and open harassment.
What is tragically ironic is the fact that the official secrecy religiously practiced by the regime today is a constitutional anathema. The Ethiopian Constitution mandates government transparency and accountability under Article 12 (1) (“Functions and Accountability of Government”): “The activities of government shall be undertaken in a manner which is open and transparent to the public.” The regime has translated that constitutional mandate to mean, “The activities of government shall be undertaken in a manner which is totally secret and non-transparent to the public.” Secrecy is a powerful tool to deceive the people.
The great French man of letters, Victor Hugo observed, “You can resist an invading army; you cannot resist an idea whose time has come.” The Internet is an idea whose time has come. B.I. (Before the Internet) will never come back, only A.I. (After the Internet). The Internet, not ignorance, is the great equalizer and democratizer in the world. With an inexpensive personal computer or mobile phone, knowledge and information in any language are at one’s fingertips. The regime in Ethiopia is fighting a losing war against the invisible empire of ideas and knowledge. The Internet is the 21stCentury’s evergreen Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. The regime in its assumed divinity wants to impose an edict on the people of Ethiopia: “Thou must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will certainly die.” The Internet “Tree of Knowledge” shall give life to all those that have been rendered zombies by ignorant tyrants. The Internet genie is out of the bottle, and there is no way of putting it back. Neither telecom filters, electronic monitoring nor ownership of entire telecom systems will deter the determined “cyber-warriors” from empowering themselves with the truth, knowledge and information. In the Internet Age, resistance to truth, knowledge and information is futile!
Well, Big Brother Meles is gone (sort of) from Ethiopiana but he shall live on the “telescreen” and in the grave for his “Little Brothers” of his “Inner Party”. They shall go on visioning, watching, looking, peeping, observing, surveilling, ogling, listening, sniffing, and yodeling:
…The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just around the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know what no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now you begin to understand me.
Ethiopiana’s Inner Party should know a few truths about the 21st Century: Secrecy is impotency. Ignorance is indolence. Freedom is the essence of humanity; and the truth shall make them and all Ethiopians free. Orwell wrote, “During times of deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.” But what happens when silence is accepted as a revolutionary act?
“When an entire generation of Ethiopian scholars, academics, professors and learned elites stands silent as a bronze statute witnessing the tyranny of ignorance in action, the burden on the few who try to become the voices of the voiceless on every issue is enormous.” From my commentary, “Edu-corruption and Mis-education in Ethiopia”.
Oceania Ethiopiana! Welcome to the Federal Republic of Dystopia Ethiopia!
Professor Alemayehu G. Mariam teaches political science at California State University, San Bernardino and is a practicing defense lawyer.
Previous commentaries by the author are available at:
SEF London – The Somali Economic Forum (SEF) recently participated in the International Organization for Migration (IOM) and The World Bank Group Summits on Remittances as part of the African Institute for Remittances (AIR) Project. The first such Summit was held in Dakar, Senegal on 3rd March and the second Summit was held in Dare salaam, Tanzania on 7th March. At both Summits SEF Managing Director; Hassan M. Dudde was a speaker and panelist. The Summit included experts, well respected economists, World Bank, AU and IOM officials and including major government officials from both Senegal and Tanzania.
As a background to both summits the World Bank estimates that, every year, about 120 million people in Africa benefit from remittances sent by relatives and friends from the global African diaspora. In 2012 alone, 30 million African migrant workers sent close to US$60 billion in remittances. With scarce opportunities at home, the majority of migrants’ families in Africa depend on remittances for their survival, health, education, and sustenance.
Yet, both Summits emphasized the need for African states and international & regional bodies to better integrate their remittance operations aswell as adopting efficient methods to ensure the lowering transaction costs and leveraging the beneficial impact of remittances for African families. The Somali Economic Forum was invited due to the innovative role played by Somali remittance firms in pushing down transaction costs whilst at the same time providing an efficient and highly valued customer service. Indeed, during the Dakar Summit; SEF Managing Director Hassan M. Dudde was quoted as saying that; “Other states can learn a lot from Somalia when it comes to remittances.” Indeed, this is no surprise due to the fact that Somali remittance firms have offices all around the world to reflect the far flung nature of the Somali diaspora. During the Summit; experts and economists touched on the fact that Somali money transfer companies offer the most competitive prices not only in Africa but also the world.
In addition, Hassan M. Dudde touched on how in recent years there has been a structural shift whereby African commercial banks firms have repositioned themselves as commercial banks providing bank accounts, ATMs and other amenities found in Western commercial banks. As Mr Dudde touched on during the Summit; there have been various factors to explain this; firstly, this has been due to legislation in the US & UK which have called on major Western banks to close their accounts with African & Asian remitters. Their rationale for this was to prevent money laundering and the potential financing of terrorist activities. These same African firms have understood that a long term, sustainable plan is needed. A second reason for this restructuring of African remittance firms is to meet the ever growing demand for commercial banking activities and loans amongst Africans aswell as the shifting generational trend whereby second generation Africans in the diaspora will likely send far less money home.
Key recommendations that came out of both summits include;
The gathering of recommendations from Government officials,, Diaspora communities, Civil Society Organizations, Academia, the private sector and other public agencies with regard to the future activities of AIR.
The creation of a network among African governments and African Diaspora associations and platforms which are active in the field of remittances for the purpose of future liaison and information sharing.
SEF held an interactive Twitter Question and Answer session during both Summits by utilising the hashtags #SEFDakar and #SEFTanzania. The Social Media interactive session went viral with Twitter users around the world from Europe, North America, Asia and Africa tweeting their questions on Remittances and Somalia’s economy. Above all, SEF was able to show how social media can be utilised extensively to promote vibrant discussions regarding the economic development taking place in Somalia and throughout Africa.
All in all, both Summits were enlightening and informative and the Somali Economic Forum was pleased to attend and to share its policy recommendations for the billion dollar Africa remittances industry based on the success of Somali firms and methods.
(SomalilandPress)Amal Osman had come to Hargeisa not only to visit her uncle’s family but to also do some research for her PhD. Her thesis focused on a microcredit NGO, ran by a cousin of hers named Fatima, which gave small loans to help support female entrepreneurs. Fatima had, prior to living in Hargeisa, lived in Norway, where she had met, married and subsequently divorced her husband. After the dissolution of her marriage, like many independently spirited Somali women over 40, without an established career, she was faced with the difficult decision to either open up her own Somali related business or start an NGO. Having always viewed herself as being rather altruistic she decided pursue the latter and subsequently moved herself and her three small children to Hargeisa. Through, helping others she found a great deal of joy and satisfaction, and most importantly helped take away much of the bitterness of her failed marriage.
The morning after the wedding, Amal showed up to work and ran into Fatima at the gate of their office.
“Great news!” says Fatima beaming, as she closes her car door. “We’ll finally be able to get those computers we have so desperately wanted.”
“That’s awesome!” states Amal as she walks over to her. “Who’s the generous donor?”
“Sheeko Telecommunications. They are upgrading their systems and have decided to donate their old computers to various different charities, and they have selected us as one of those charities.”
Amal’s smiling expression faded to shock.
“The head of their company personally called on Thursday to inform me about the donation,” Fatima informs her as she began to walk towards the courtyard that led to her office.
“Ayub Dalmar?” asked Amal, following after her.
“Yeah! Do you know him?” asked Fatima.
“Not really. I just know he’s a jerk. I met him for like five minutes this weekend at a wedding and that was more than enough to last me a lifetime. Giving us his unwanted computers—-the nerve of that guy! Well, we don’t want any of his charity.”
“Ah—-Yes we do. Hello—you’re the one that is always going on about how desperately need computers for our clients. Imagine how much good we can do with them. We can final start giving those computer classes, you’ll always talked about.”
“We can hold off on that idea for a little while longer. I’m sure something else will come along.”
“No it won’t. Do you know how hard it is to get a donation like that? Next to impossible. Why are you so against the idea anyway? I thought you would be thrilled.”
“Because, our organization is setup to help improve the lives of improvised Somali women—-he has a very low opinion of and despises all Somalis and in particular Somali women. Taking anything from him would be like PETA taking money from a butcher. It’s just wrong!”
“Surely not!” protests Fatima.
“This is probably just some publicity stunt, you know,” Amal states. “And look at the timing of the offer— right before Ramadan—-He’s probably trying to paint himself as this generous businessman—-I bet he’ll have this place full of cameramen and journalist.”
“Well, I’m meeting with him this morning to discuss the offer and if I feel his views are not aligned with ours, I can always refuse.”
Just then they turned the corner and saw Ayub Dalmar standing a few feet away.
“Mr. Dalmar, how good of you to come so early,” says Fatima as she greets him.
“I thought you said to meet you at your office at 10:00am, if so, than I’m right on time,” he replies.
“Oh, but you know how we Somalis are, you tell us 10 and we show up at 11. It’s so refreshing to meet with someone who is actually punctual,” Fatima remarks.
“I think it rude and inconsiderate to waste other’s time,” he replies, with his usual somber tone of voice. “Somalis lack of respect for other peoples’ time has always irritated me.”
“It’s not being disrespectful— but rather just a cultural difference,” Amal states. “We, Somalis are a proud and free spirited people and refuse to be shackled to anything—-even time. This belief in being unshackled steams from our nomadic days. When one is living on the big open gazing lands, one has no conception of time, the hours and minutes simple melt together.”
“Which, I suppose, explains too the shocking lack of progress and development amongst the Somali people in general,” he says.
Amal’s, jaw drops, and Fatima, seeing that she was about to boil over quickly ushered Ayub into her office, before she could reply.
To make matters worse, when Amal got home that evening she was reminded that her uncle had invited the Bashirs’ over that evening for supper. Khadra had also extended an invitation to Zahra and her family. She had two motives for doing this, the first was that she felt her daughters would appear at an advantage when compared to Zahra’s daughters, and the second, that Zahra would have to return the favour and invite them over when she invited the Bashirs over to her home.
A third benefit occurred to her after she saw Ayub, whom she had spent the whole of the morning bashing on the telephone to her friends; with the attendance of Zahra’s family, the dinner party was so large that no one need trouble themselves to speak with him.
After discovering that Ayub was the son of the famous owner of Dalmar group of companies, Mr. Ismail managed to seat himself beside him at dinner, for nothing made Mr. Ismail more proud than the sight of a successful enterprising Somalilander. He spoke consistently, about the “the wealth of investment opportunities in Somaliland”, and the “need to attract more Somalilanders to invest in business in Somaliland” and “how someday Somaliland would a great economic power!” Ayub not troubling himself to appear at all interested simply gave the occasional monosyllable reply.
After dinner, the gentlemen rejoined the ladies in the living room, for it was the custom in Somali culture that ladies and gentleman eat separately. Ayub utterly bored began to study the people around him, passing unfavorable judgment on each one, when his gaze arrested by Amal Osman who was in the middle of relating a story to Zahra’s daughter Ubah, and his cousin, Salma. Her face was bright and animated, her eyes sparkled intelligently and her lips were curved into a very pretty smile. He remembered what she had said to him that morning, and smiled to himself as he did. And though he had convinced himself, last night, that he had found her utterly unattractive, this evening he decided he would be generous and say that she was in fact not unattractive. Though, he would hardly call her a beauty, as he watched her for a little while longer he felt that there was something almost bewitching about her. He continued to observe her throughout the evening, with a great deal of interest and curiosity.
The prisons in Somaliland and Puntland are part of a security solution to a problem that is, at its heart, economic and political — a worrying mismatch
By Jill Keenan
Sunday, March 30, 2014
Mowlid Ahmad Abidoon stands quietly in the small prison cell where he has lived for nearly two years. Slot windows on one wall let in only a little sunlight, leaving his face almost entirely obscured in darkness. Yet there are splashes of colour all around: The room’s bunk beds are covered in sheets with bright floral and geometric patterns, over which hang canopies of blue mosquito nets — cells within the cell.
Clad in a striped polo shirt and prison-uniform pants, Mowlid estimates that he is about 20 years old; the last traces of baby fat still cling to his cheeks. He insists that he shouldn’t be behind bars. “I’m a fisherman, not a pirate,” he says flatly, as though he has delivered this speech a hundred times before.
Court documents from Seychelles say otherwise. On December 6, 2009, Mowlid and a band of fellow Somali pirates used firearms and explosives to attack the Topaz, a Seychelles Coast Guard patrol vessel. (Seychelles, an island nation, is about 825 miles southeast of Mogadishu, Somalia’s coastal capital.) They were arrested, convicted and sentenced to 24 years in prison.
That’s how Mowlid ended up in Hargeisa Central Prison, home to 29 Somali pirates. The prison was born of necessity. Pirates are often tried in countries like Seychelles and Mauritius, in whose waters they are caught, but those states don’t want to keep the convicted in their jails. The Somali government can’t reasonably take them, given its extreme volatility. Yet one place has been eager to house pirates: Somaliland, a self-declared independent (but internationally unrecognised) republic in northern Somalia that wants to prove its state-like qualities and relative security in the tumultuous Horn of Africa
So the United Nations invested millions of dollars to build a prison in Hargeisa, Somaliland’s capital. Opened in 2010 and run by local authorities, it was the first new prison in the region in 30 years.
Today, outside the prison’s main entrance, a sign warns visitors what they cannot bring with them: hand grenades, knives, assault rifles. Inside, inmates compete against guards in basketball, while feral kittens roam the dusty grounds. In the prison’s open kitchen, a huge pot of stew bubbles over a fire. Aside from spirals of barbed wire and armed guards atop open towers, there isn’t much obvious security.
Beneath the veneer of calm, however, the prison is nearing capacity. The facility can hold 506 prisoners, and it already has 480. (Pirates are housed alongside other criminals.) Mowlid, like many inmates, shares his cell with nine other men. Meanwhile, some 1,350 pirates currently incarcerated abroad await repatriation to Somalia. It’s clear that neither Hargeisa nor Somaliland generally will be able — or even willing — to take them all.
The solution, according to the international community, lies in another autonomous region in Somalia: Puntland, which encompasses the country’s northeastern coastline. The UN provided funding to upgrade and expand a prison in the port city of Bosaso, and, another UN-backed facility was to be opened in Garowe, Puntland’s capital, this year. But Puntland isn’t Somaliland. It is a less stable and more corrupt place.
Perhaps most worrying, however, is that it’s also considered the heart of Somalia’s pirate culture.
“Puntland is pirate land,”explains Michael Frodl, the founder of C-Level Maritime Risks, a Washington-based consultancy. “If I were a Somali pirate, I’d do everything I could to get sent to Garowe.”
Piracy began spreading rapidly in the waters off Somalia in the early 21st century because of civil war and poverty — offering a chance to make money amid an economic wasteland of opportunity.
In a typical operation, pirates armed with guns and other weapons approach commercial ships in skiffs, hijack them, and demand a ransom, a chunk of which they often pay to wily financiers. But even if Somali pirates can be considered products of circumstance, some have also become torturers and murderers:
Freed hostages have reported pirates hanging captives by their feet, submerging them at sea, staging mock executions, and locking them in freezers.
Reports of appalling violence, along with hundreds of millions of dollars in losses to shipping companies, have prompted the international community to focus on repressing, arresting, and prosecuting Somali pirates.
In 2008, the UN Security Council adopted a resolution calling on countries with ships in the region to use military force against pirates. Nato and the European Union (among others) police the Indian Ocean, and private, foreign-funded security operations have also joined the fight. Meanwhile, shipping companies have fortified their vessels to repel attacks, using everything from armed guards to razor wire.
Their efforts have worked. There were only 15 reported attacks in 2013, according to the International Chamber of Commerce, down sharply from a peak of 237 in 2011. Analysts around the world have touted the drop as a huge success.
But while the most visible manifestations of piracy have diminished, the root causes of the phenomenon remain unaddressed back on dry land. Amid continuing political and economic instability, organised gangs of pirates still exist, looking for susceptible targets, and a new generation of young men like Mowlid could easily turn to a life of maritime crime.
Indeed, according to a 2013 World Bank report, “Current and proposed onshore or offshore policies for curbing Somali piracy are either ineffective or unsustainable.” As a result, the report states, “whether they [pirate attacks] will continue to be suppressed is a major question.” Similarly, Jon Huggins of the nonprofit Oceans Beyond Piracy, has called the recent gains against pirates “fragile and reversible” and has warned against “emphasis[ing] too much the declining numbers of attacks.”
The prisons in Somaliland and Puntland, in other words, are part of a security solution to a problem that is, at its heart, economic and political – a worrying mismatch. Ending piracy once and for all will require more than military might on the high seas and the threat of incarceration.
According to the World Bank, it will require incentivising — through both law enforcement and development initiatives — the local leaders enabling piracy to change their tune. Then there is the matter of jobs. “Ultimately, we need to get these Somali men, often youth, quality employment,” says Michael Shank, an adjunct professor and Somalia expert at George Mason University’s School for Conflict Analysis and Resolution. The UN Development Programme has pegged the unemployment rate for Somali youth between the ages of 14 and 29 at 67 per cent — one of the world’s highest.
Pirate prisons alone certainly cannot address this problem. Although inmates can complete training programs in trades like construction, metalworking, and plumbing in the Hargeisa and Bosaso facilities, it’s unlikely they will be able to use their newfound skills upon release. Even fishing jobs are largely out of reach. Shank explains that, in addition to “ransom pirates,” there are “resource pirates.” The latter, however, aren’t Somalis.
They are foreign fleets that threaten East Africa’s waters with overfishing and toxic-waste dumping, making it impossible for many Somali men to make money the way their fathers and grandfathers did.
“To put the problem of piracy in perspective, ransom pirates made $60 million (Dh220 million) in their most lucrative year, while commercial-resource pirates illegally harvest up to $450 million in fish annually,” says Shank. “Any sustainable solution for this problem, then, must address this exploitation.”
Ironically, pirate prisons may also be generating new security risks. Pirates in Hargeisa and Bosaso are held in the same facilities as members of Al Shabab, the Somali group with ties to Al Qaida, and juveniles are housed alongside adults. That means there’s a very real risk that impressionable, disillusioned young men could be radicalised — young men like Mowlid, who, if his estimated age is correct, was only about 16 when he and his friends attacked the Topaz. “I don’t see any future,” Mowlid says of his life.
John Wilcox, a prison adviser for Somaliland with the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), says roughly 12 of the Hargeisa prison’s inmates are members of Al Shabab. There is a covert prison intelligence programme in place to ward off radicalisation, but Wilcox still worries that the facility could become a breeding ground for extremists.
“A lot of these guys don’t have father figures,” he says, alluding to another socioeconomic problem in Somalia: the disintegration of clan and family structures because of conflict and hardship. “And with Al Shabab in here, we certainly don’t want this to be the place where they find one.”
Radicalisation might be less of a concern if prison inmates were certain to remain behind bars. But in November 2013, Bosaso’s prison was attacked by Al Shabab militants carrying at least one rocket-propelled grenade; they killed three people as they sought to liberate fellow extremists from their cells.
The UNODC was quick to point out that, had it not been for its recent investments in Bosaso, the attack could have been worse. “However, we cannot close our eyes to possible attacks,” says Manuel de Almeida Pereira, a programme coordinator with the UNODC in Garowe. “We remain, of course, worried.”
It’s not just Al Shabab that threatens the prisons’ security: Puntland has a reputation for tolerating and even enabling piracy. Although Puntland’s former president, Abdul Rahman Farole — in office from 2009 until January 2014 —made repeated public pledges and some concrete efforts to undermine, arrest, and convict pirates, a 2012 report by the UN Monitoring Group on Somalia and Eritrea called into question “the authenticity of the Puntland authority’s commitment to fighting piracy.”
Gangs have reportedly paid off local communities in order to dock hijacked ships in Puntland’s coastal cities during ransom negotiations, and Puntland government officials have been known to receive pirate money in exchange for protection agreements and information about the location of foreign ships.
A 2012 Chatham House study also found that ransom money contributes heavily to the region’s economic development, particularly in provincial capitals. “Puntland’s political elites are therefore unlikely to move decisively against piracy,” the report concluded.
The decision to invest in greater detention capacity in Puntland — like Somaliland before it — was due largely to a lack of alternatives. (It didn’t help that, due to an ongoing border dispute, Somaliland has refused to imprison pirates born in Puntland, saying it must deal with its own problems.) But the large-scale transfer of pirate prisoners from abroad hardly seems like a safe solution.
Pirates have had success bribing their way out of custody throughout Somalia. The UN is working to ensure that prisoners are not unlawfully released from the facilities it funds, but some experts are worried that pirates may still slip through the cracks in Puntland.
“Pirates are basically being sheltered by the regime in exchange for protection money,” Frodl, the maritime risk consultant, says. “Those jails might hold a few foot soldiers, but if you tried to incarcerate any high-level pirates in Puntland, they’d buy their way out in a week.”
Mowlid, who grew up in the town of Barawe, south of Mogadishu, perks up slightly when asked about the Puntland prisons. Puntland might be better, he agrees. In Somaliland, he has never been able to have a visitor, and he misses his family. Puntland would be closer to home. A few of his fellow inmates nod. A transfer might be nice.
But that’s not what they really want to talk about. As the minutes pass, they shift in their seats, ignoring the bottles of fruit juice and water a prison guard has passed around.
“How can you help us?” demands Ares Isse Karshe, a 40-year-old pirate who was captured with Mowlid. He has a thin, ragged beard with hints of gray. When I explain that I can’t help him, he leans back in his chair and says nothing.
Across the room, Mowlid is willing to speak — but only a little. He claims once more that he is innocent and that his right to a fair trial was violated.
“Please leave us alone,” Mowlid says finally, looking down. “We give up the sea. It belongs to you now.” His fingers have curled into fists.
Jill Keenan is a New York-based journalist who writes for the Washington post
As Abraham Lincoln once said, “You can fool all of the people some of the time and some of the people all of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.”
On 3rd March 2014, President Ahmed Silanyo unwittingly put his signature to a highly controversial decree regarding the formation of a Ministerial-Level Committee and a Taskforce responsible for the registration of Somaliland citizens for the purpose of issuing them with Voter/National Identity cards. The decree sharply divided the nation along clan lines and promptly elicited blistering condemnation from members of Arab clan who has been stealthily excluded from both the ministerial committee and the task force.
When civic and political leaders of Arab clan knocked on the Presidential Palace door and demanded an explanation from the president as to why they were singled out, the president was totally flabbergasted, groping for an answer. It was quite obvious that the president was caught off guard by the legitimate criticisms leveled against him.
Unfortunately, it was none other than the president’s most trusted aides who pulled the rug under his feet. The next morning, in the cold light of day, everyone realized that the whole thing stinks.
It has now emerged that the ministerial committee and the task force was secretly formed in a smoke filled room, outside the collective decision-making process of the government, by a tightly-knit group of clan fundamentalists within the cabinet who have the president’s ear. They selectively drew up a list of names, hand-picked individuals, which would make up these two important committees.
The ministerial committee and the task force was formed in such a way that some clans are disproportionately over-represented in both committees, others are woefully under-represented while others were completely excluded from the equation as if they do not exist. The whole thing was built on the idea of: scratch my back/and I will scratch yours. But the architects of this deceitful enterprise forgot one thing: that the people of Balligubadle who have been completely excluded from these committees won’t be shutting up or falling into line or be bullied into submission.
At first sight, the suggestion from the political parties, Electoral Commission and other stake holders that voters should be required to show photographic ID at polling stations appears sensible. Yet a closer scrutiny serves to establish that it is not so straightforward. The rationale for the move is to reduce the incidence of multiple registrations.
If the past experience is anything to go by, the result of the voter/nationality ID registration exercise undertaken in October/November 2008, with a supplementary registration in January 2009 had produced a Voter register with a high proportion of invalid and duplicate entries and efforts to clean the register using an Automatic Fingerprint Identification System (AFIS) and a Facial Recognition System (FRS) had completely failed.
According to the Electoral Reform International Services (ERIS), ‘Babies’ were registered and pictures which had clearly been taken elsewhere and held up to the camera “False Photos” were used by clans to outdo one another in their outrageous attempts to inflate their respective population counts.
Ghost villages with no more than few inhabitants and goats were suddenly bursting with non-existent people [ghost voters].
According to ERIS, the frauds and duplicate registrations took place during the registration process, partly because the registration officers came under pressure from local civic leaders. These civic leaders were, in turn, taking their orders from their clansmen belonging to Ministerial Committees and Task forces like these.
It is important to point out that the illegal and duplicate registrations did not simply happen in a vacuum but was facilitated by the registration officers under pressure from government ministers and other representatives responsible for the voter registration process. The winners, those with the highest number of registered voters, are almost always the clans who are disproportionately represented on such committees and registration officers.
Of course, there is no easy way to change the local cultural and political realities so as to eliminate this in the future. However, the only practical way to prevent these fraudulent practices is to set up a system which rapidly detects such frauds and duplicates, for the culprits to be immediately exposed, and for there to be public consequences.
According to ERIS, the errors and corrupt practices during both the main and supplementary registrations, including: registration of babies, children who were clearly under age; registration of individuals who were not present, using pictures taken elsewhere; deliberate multiple registrations, at the same or different registration centres, using different names.
Needless to say, it’s an absolute insanity to repeat the same mistakes and expect different results. So far, the government has not lifted a finger to put in place a mechanism and/or measures to prevent the recurrence of these wanton corrupt practices.
Far from it, it is quite clear that those who formed this Ministerial Committee and the Task Force had one thing in mind: to repeat the same wanton corrupt practices that got us into this mess in the first place.
What is different now is that some clans struck a secret pact and are planning to beat all other clans in their burning desire to inflate their numbers through deliberate and outrageous multiple registrations. The stage is set for another round of wanton corruption.
If the planned voter/ID registration system is going to be fair and free from manipulation as government officials would have us believe then surely there is nothing to be afraid of. But the brutal truth is that the system is far from being fair or free from manipulation and no one knows better than the very men who formed these committees.They are the ones who are mortally afraid of the very system they want the public to believe in. Why would the rest of us have the slightest faith in the system then?
This is the reason why the Ministerial-Level Committee and the Task Force was deviously formed in such grotesquely unfair manner in its clan composition. The name of the game is inflating your clan’s population count.
Now that this Ministerial Committee and Taskforce is completely tainted and discredited, the majority of the people will have no choice but to refuse to let the government pull the wool over their eyes. The western donor countries must not equally allow themselves to fall for the ruse perpetrated by the clan fundamentalists within the cabinet who are masquerading as honest, God-fearing and Law-abiding government functionaries.
The western donors must lean hard on the Somaliland government to come clean on its abysmal failure to set up a fair system that treats all members of the public fairly and squarely. Funding a fundamentally corrupt system for a democracy’s sake will not only do a great disservice to the Somaliland people but will put the last nail in the coffin of the country’s democratic system as we know it. The donors must insist that public trust and confidence in the system be restored as a pre-condition for funding. Expediency in such matters probably poses a greater threat to Somaliland’s survival than anything else.
If the planned system is perfect in anyway then one representative for each Somaliland clan in all committees will suffice otherwise no clan will have the right to register members of other clans and this will eventually mean the death knell of the registration process. If the process is to be successful, no clan in Somaliland should be left behind.
Winning with deception and bluff is not an option: we have seen this movie before.
Washington -The Executive Director of SONYO, Mr. Saeed Mohamed Ahmed, being part of the International Visitor Leadership Program participants, has taken meetings and interactive sessions with high profile members of the US government. He attended an official breakfast at the Congress whereby he participated in a congress discussion on African youth leaders as change agents. The breakfast was provided by the Chair of the Congress Sub-committee on African Affairs. In addition, the Executive Director of SONYO has visited to the Office of the United States Agency for International Development whereby the Chief of Policy, Outreach, Strategy and Evaluation Unit of the African Bureau received and cordially welcomed the delegation to the USAID Headquarter in Washington DC. Saeed has also attended a debriefing session that was hosted by the Federal Electoral Commission. In the evening of yesterday, Saeed Ahmed was highly welcomed by the Somaliland Mission in USA and the Somaliland Community in US.
The forum held at the Congress was a great opportunity for the African Youth in the International Visitor Leadership Program (IVLP). There were high profile diplomats including ambassadors, heads of missions and executive officers of development agencies who all attended in both the Congress breakfast and forum and who attentively listened to the expressions of the IVLP participants. The Executive Director of SONYO daringly interacted with the Congresswoman and had a brief but effective interactive and introductory discussion with the Congresswoman. Saeed told the MP that Somaliland youth today need stood up to have prepare themselves for the leadership of their country by benefiting from the home-grown democracy and peace that Somaliland has been building for the last twenty years. He encouraged the Congresswoman to draw the attention of US policymakers to the significance of investing in the growing generations of Africa and in particular to the support of the empowerment and employment of the Somaliland youth who form the majority of country’s population and who embrace the peace of Somaliland—which is not only good for Somaliland but also good and safe for the whole East Africa region and the even rest of the world. The Congresswoman admired for the initiatives of the youth and how SONYO is also dedicated to “think strategically, act proactively and operate vibrantly”.
The African youth leaders in the IVLP program also visited to the USAID Office. The Executive Director of SONYO, being part of the International Visitor Leadership Program participants has delivered a very brief word on the status of the Somaliland youth, their needs and their way forward to getting empowered to their potential. Mr. Saeed, the Director of SONYO also praised the significant role of the USAID when it comes to the consolidation of the civil society initiatives on the ground. He said: “USAID has done a great and wonderful job. It supported many social and economic growth projects that were conducted in Somaliland for the last two decades. The current Somali Youth Leadership Initiative (SYLI) is one of those projects. However, USAID is needed more than it imagines. USAID needs now to acknowledge that long term, locally-owned extensive programs need to be meaningfully funded and implemented in Somaliland so as to address the key and the hot issues of unemployment, absence of recreational and resource facilities and inadequate availability of spaces and opportunities for the youth to exercise their potential and voice up their concerns”.
The debriefing session at the office of the US Federal Electoral Commission was also imperative and learning opportunity for the IVLP participants. The US federal level elections were analyzed and debated upon. In addition, the challenges that still face most of African states and hinder them from pursuing fair and free elections were also discussed upon.
SONYO Director Meets The Kenyan Ambassador to US H.E. Elkanah Odembo and Botswana Ambassador to the United States, Madam Tebelelo Seretse.
The Executive Director of SONYO had also got a “welcoming banquet dinner” from the Somaliland Mission in the United States and the Chairman of the Somaliland and the Chairman of the Somaliland community in the United States. On behalf of SONYO Umbrella leadership, we are so grateful to Ambassador of Somaliland to US, Mr. Rashiid Gaaruf and Chairman of Somaliland Community in US, Mr. Haashi Ismail, for their warm welcoming and encouragement by standing side by side with SONYO Umbrella in US to support our honoured CED does his job smoothly with full motivation.
Hargeisa-The ongoing projects of the UN Joint Programme on Local Governance (JPLG) which is implemented by concerned civic authorities has that of Hargeisa deeply involved on the construction of a vital ‘Irish’ drift bridge to connect the fledgling Ayah estates to the city.
The Boqol-jirre bridge, which will go a long way to ease transport in an area which has hitherto been cumbersome and almost impossible to cross both during dry and wet periods, has works on its construction at an advanced stage.
The project which commenced by the beginning of the year is expected to end by mid-year.
Because of the heavy sand and associated silt deposits along the river-bed, it has been had for normal commuting to be feasible in the area since come rain or sunshine, vehicles, save for the fore-wheeled powered, could not ply the route which happens to be the main one to the area.
But now, thanks to the JPLG efforts, faster developments will definitely be achieved since roads are a major catalyst to progress anywhere. This is even more pleasant and a blessed gift to the widespread Ayah estates’ residents whose numbers have more than trebled over the past six months alone.
With an exemplary coordination team led by the city Mayor Cllr. Abdirahman Aideed alias Soltelco, the municipality has been able to stick to the JPLG programme with prioritized projects.
It is worth noting that the JPLG’s main objective is to facilitate by precisely strengthening local governance hence enhancing decentralized services.
Led by the President through hands on job by his Vice, the larger framework is legally outlined in the country’s constitution.
The Mayor has his numerous chores not only monitoring the JPLG projects but also supervising similar programs initiated by his council, the latest being the Massalaha road and that of Koodbuur district which connects the road to sunshine school from the junction at Kulmiye office premises.
He did inspection tours at both sites on Friday the 28thof March 2014.
Despite the fact that the Boqol Jire project started later than was first scheduled, it is expected that it would complete well within the stipulated periods of six months.
The contractor, WCCO is headed by Eng. Asha Ali Warsame.
The JPLG liaison officer for Hargeisa city engineer Abdikhadar Abdillahi Ali has been at the fore front of the programs.
He happens to be amongst the two Somalilander engineers who benefitted fromspecialized engineering training on international road construction and maintenance at the ATTI College in Songea, Tanzania.
The course was sponsored by Japanese International Corporation Agency (JICA) hence coordinated by ILO which happens to be one of the five partner agencies of the JPLG. The others are UNDP, HABITAT, UNICEF and UNDPCF.
Activities are financed by Denmark, DFID, EU, SIDA and Switzerland.
The government is herein a major implementing partner.
Seven districts are the selected exclusive areas working with JPLG currently – (Berbera, Borama, Burao, Gebiley, Hareisa, Odweine and Sheikh). Erigavo is conspicuously not included, probably because of the bad terrains that impede communication.
Previously the bridges and roads constructed under the auspices of JPLG partnership in Hargeisa region are the Adadley Irish crossing, the Jeelka-Daami tarmac road, the Ga’anlibah-Mohamud Heibe drift and now the Boqol Jire one is in progress.
In evidence, the MohamudHeibe-Ga’anLibah drift has been seen as a god-send present to city residents and motorists. It has become one of the busiest roads in the capital, hence have immensely eased traffic congestion and burden off the main Hargeisa bridge road towards Total area.
Going by the city engineer, more projects are in the pipeline and or hopefully going to be milestones.
The fast spoken and fairly slim engineer is quick to point out that much of the efforts could not have been realized has it not been for the good coordinating efforts of the Presidency and also within the civic authority itself One of the main objectives of this project is to develop the administrations of different sectors of Somaliland such as Education, Health, and different districts nationwide.
Eng Abdiqadar Abdilahi Ali who is optimistic of further fruits to be accrued by not only the Hargeisa Municipality but Somaliland at-large urged all stakeholders to follow the exemplary style in which the youthful City mayor has managed to familiarize thence proper administration of the JPLG within the very short period following assuming office.
It is noteworthy to point out that numerous partners including the community have been able to make great strides in road constructions countrywide, thanks to the ongoing national mobilization to the cause led by the President H.E Ahmed Mohamed Mohamoud and spearheaded by the Presidency Minister Hon. Hersi Ali Hassan.
Several efforts in such projects are going on in tandem hence supplement each other.
The Hargeisa Municipality, for instance, eked into its pockets and carpeted the stretch of its portion of the Berbera- Addis Ababa highway.
