SOMALILAND: The three musketeers

WHO CAN BRING THE CHANGE WE ARE LOOKING FOR?
Often i ask myself this question and never succeed answering it, for some people it might be so easy for them to answer this question because they already made up their mind about it, and whether that was for a personal interest or because they see in this or that party the change Somaliland needs, and let there be no doubt that no matter who wins in this election change is inevitable.

It’s true that we come from different parts of the country and represent different clans and that we support different presidential candidates. But we speak in one voice and say that the best way to make Somaliland stronger is to work together to address the urgent crisis facing our nation. This process requires honesty, give-and-take and genuine nationalism. Only In that spirit, we might address the common threats, and overcome them, and we must also be vigilant in upholding the beliefs and the values of our founders so it will live on in our time.

I must admit that it’s so easy to judge people when you are sitting on the other corner of the table, and also it’s so difficult to know the truthfulness and honesty of a politician, and maybe all politician shares that same element of being a deceivers. A wise politician once said, “in politics, everybody is a liar.’ And there is no doubt that the politicians are the same all over. They promise to build bridges even when there are no rivers.

I don’t like mocking or bickering, but we shouldn’t’t be shy to expose anyone and everything as long as we are not insulting the character or marking them as traitorous without having evidence and jurisdiction needed to pass such accusations, and as a democratic nation we should ask and request answers, and we do have the right to express and hear ideas about our candidates even if other people find those ideas to be outrageous.

Over the decades Somaliland People proved their tenacity, maturity, pragmatism, sensibility, wisdom, equality, freedom, civility and democratic and concessionary governance. These are the characteristics and attributes of Somaliland people, which are enshrined in their history. These are assets that the Almighty God gave it to them.

Somalia maltreated the Somalilanders from the beginning of the one-sided unification and treated them as second-class citizens in their own country. They were labeled as Somali ‘Qaldaan’, the wrong Somali. It was like the prison camp reminiscent of Apartheid South Africa, or the Belgian Congo at its most oppressive. It seemed inevitable that this level of cruelty could not but inflame a reactive liberation struggle.

The SNM personals, who establish the organization and fight the enemies of humanity, was true indisputable nationalist figures, who loved their country and people above any other thing, they sacrifice the most precious thing they have, and a lot of those heroes are dead today, but no one should take it for granted, Somaliland don’t owe anyone anything, those who struggle for it or die to liberate it, did their duty for their country, because they were a true citizens. It’s bad when someone comes, and asking for a payback for their loyalty it is a nasty and regretful thing to do. I know that we do a lot of embellishing so we don’t provoke this and that person, or that group or this tribe, and all of that not because we can’t, but because we don’t want problems for our country. but I believe that any fact that needs to be disclosed should be put out now or as quickly as possible.

SNM as any resistance party in the world had two functions first the political wing, and the other is the military wing. Now some of us might know a lot of things when it comes to the history of SNM, but when we talk about how heretic, and patriotic SNM was we are talking about those innocent civilians of Somaliland who were brutalized, and survived from the systematic barbarian holocaust war waged on them.

In 1980s, Somalia hired Rhodesian mercenaries to bombard Somaliland’s three major towns – Hargeisa, Burao and Berbera. Those who survived the bombings or the deliberate starvation were often rounded up, tied together using barbed wires and gunned down from a point-blank range. If that method was not cruel enough, they would often tie them together in barbed wires, bulldozed and were left to rot in the streets. Those who were lucky to survived and fled to neighboring Ethiopia was to experience starvation disease and the Ethiopian way of hospitality but nevertheless they were the lucky once. The pain is searing, everywhere you go there is a tragedy stores of people who lost their life’s, and you can still since the screaming voices of the innocent people when you visit the mass graves — the hurt, the humiliation, the degradation and the sheer brutality of the act of physically separating a mother from her children is a deep assault on our senses and on our most elemental sense of humanity. It is all bad and it is all pain and above all it is desperately sad when you feel great about what you have achieved to forget yesterday’s catastrophes and mass murders, and to accept the illusions that your struggle has ended.

In 1993 Borama Congress the Constitutional Committee recommended and was approved by the Congress that the key leadership positions in Somaliland would not be allocated on clan basis but would be contested by every Somalilander no matter the number of his/her clan.

The most important thing is to learn what one has to hold back when it comes to the issues of nation-building; what chuckhole were there; what mistakes one made; what more one needs to do in order to emulate the role of leadership. It’s by co-operation and engaging all parties that you can build a nation, and also through efficient administration that put the public interest above all, but not any leader is leader; the real leader is the one who gets his people from where they are to where they have not been.

Leaders must invoke vision and ideas that contribute to the unified sense of mission and thereby to the harmony of the whole. The art of creative leadership is the art of institution building, the reworking of human and technological materials to fashion an organism that embodies new and enduring values. Those leaders who do not are ultimately judged failures, even though they may be popular at the moment, therefore we can learn that nations are built by exploring new opportunities and elaborating ideas that will lead to prosperity, and that each exploration is only a means to the next.

Our politicians are product of a time and generation, it’s difficult for them to change their methods of practicing politics unless they find it not effective, and in order to make them realize that we should think wisely and have the adequate insight to decide intelligently who will meet our needs and represent us the best way to reach our goals for a better future, and we should make a reasonable effort to get the facts and reflect through it, few of us will have the greatness to bend history itself, but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total of those acts will be written the history of this generation. When we start electing our representatives on basis of what he could achieve for our country, and not by what tribe or benefit he represent for me, we can in our own ways, in our own lives, make a difference. let all of us co-operate and make change become possible, and reflect that in our way of dealing whit each other, and admit that there will be always a problem to confront and solve, otherwise there will be always this notion that we didn’t do enough for our homeland, and that we missed the opportunity to repair the roof when the sun was shining. It’s time to turn the page of these old policies of the past.
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Views expressed in the opinion articles are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of the editorial