Ismail Ali Ismail (Geeldoon)

Mr. Hassan Sheikh Mahmoud was elected a year ago as the President of the Federal Republic of Somalia upon the lapse of a long ‘Transitional Period’.  He defeated the incumbent Sheikh Sharief Sheikh Ahmed fairly and squarely in a transparent electoral process. Although the independence, sovereignty, political unity and territorial integrity of Somalia were reaffirmed over and over again in all international fora discussing the Somali situation, the transitional governments were never recognized by the West.  But this changed, almost overnight, when the transitional period ended, Parliament was reconstituted through a democratic process, the President was elected in open, free and fair manner and a regular, fully mandated government came into being.

In mid-January this year President Hassan paid a visit to the United States and met Mrs. Clinton (then Secretary of State) as well as President Obama and some congressional members.  There and then it was announced that the US would deal with Somalia as ‘a sovereign state’ and would normalize its relations with it.  He also delivered a lecture on “The Future of Good Governance in Somalia” at the Center for Strategic and International studies” in Washington, D.C.  His performance  during the visit was good beyond expectation, but the recognition was due in large part to the democratic and open process that took place on Somali soil for the first time since the disappearance of the State in 1991, and brought him to power. Not surprisingly, US recognition opened a Pandora’s box of other recognitions.

Despite the proclaimed end of the very long “Transitional Period” Somalia is in fact still in transition: its constitution is yet being discussed and subject to controversy; the lower house of parliament, though constituted, has not been elected by universal adult suffrage; the upper house is yet to be formed; there are no political parties; there are only two constituent states (Puntland and Jubaland) to the federation; ‘Somaliland’ is still on the sidelines, pending its inevitable   cessation of secession; there is no national army to speak of (AMISOM is still there); the government’s actual territorial jurisdiction is severely circumscribed; there are only the shadows of institutions desperately trying to come back to life; dependency on external resources is so high that it militates against the country’s sovereignty; and, above all, the Shabaab are still well and active.   The road to normalcy, in these unenviable circumstances, is long, rough and rugged with many large and small potholes as well as bumps.  Sane and sober Somalis are aware of this.

Surely, the problems confronting the country under the leadership of President Hassan are both numerous and enormous. The Government is indeed like a diffident, resourceless midget facing an aggressive giant rudely awakened by a nasty civil war – a David, if you like, facing Goliath (Daa’uud iyo Gaaluut).  But this aggressive giant, unlike Goliath, has many powerful tentacles with such different names as ‘clannism’, ‘disunity and division’, ‘abject poverty’, ‘disease’, ‘illiteracy’ and ‘instability’.  Yet, the job of the Government is to cut each one of these tentacles and defeat the giant.

Of course, no government can cut all of them off in one strike, even if the wherewithal is abundantly available.  The giant, however, can be reduced to a manageable size by attrition.  To do this, the Government needs two things more than anything else: strategy and credibility.  It needs a strategy of fighting; and it needs credibility (which may accrue from strategy) for people to believe in what it is doing, and to support it.   By ‘Government’ I mean the Prime Minister (who is its acknowledged head) and his cabinet, not the President (who is the Head of State, not of Government).  Yet, we speak in Somalia of the ‘Government of Hassan Sheikh’, (Dowladda Xasan Shiikh), not of Abdi Farah Shirdon.  However, it is very important to make the distinction between ‘Government’ and ‘State’ in order to have and maintain a healthy polity.

The confusion is due in large measure to the way the President has been acting as an executive president rather than the ceremonial one he is supposed to be under the Constitution.  In an article on President Hassan’s visit to the US last year, I stated:

“ At his current age (the right age for prime minister) the President is youthful (he actually looks younger than his age) and seems fit as a fiddle.  With these personal attributes, however, lurks the danger that he might find it irresistible to overstep the confines of his ceremonial functions and meddle in cabinet affairs”. (Emphasis added)

Alas, the President has succumbed to the temptation of acting as an executive president.  He has been too visible: he has led nearly all delegations to other countries and international conferences on substantive matters; it is on open secret that he makes appointments to high-level political and civil service positions; and he has been in the thick of controversies respecting the establishment of new constituent states, including the long and debilitating imbroglio of Jubaland State whose formation turned out to be a Sisyphean task.  By acting as an executive president in contravention of the constitution and portraying his strong personality, the President has been unfair, not only to the country, the prime minister, the cabinet but also to himself by taking –unduly and imprudently – the heavy burdens of the State and the Government upon his shoulders.

An executive president is elected by the whole country, not by a few hundred parliamentarians.  He has extensive powers owing to having been elected nationally, and combines therefore the functions of Head of State and Head of Government.  Conversely, a president elected by the legislature, as was President Hassan, is essentially ceremonial (Italy, India, and Israel are but few examples) and acts, not like a politician in the thick of controversies, but like a statesman and a father figure who breaks deadlocks rather than create them.  That is the sort of president envisaged in our Constitution.  I am not saying here that because he is ceremonial he should not give the benefit of his ideas, his experience and his wisdom to the country.  He is in fact required to do so. But he should do so in a manner that guides and bolsters, not oversteps, the government.  Else, there will be confusion and a paralyzing struggle, as we have seen with his pedecessors, between him and the Prime Minister.

However, we are in a peculiar situation between now and 2016 when general elections are scheduled to be held, and when there will be, hopefully, political parties to contest them.   Then the leader of the majority party, if there is one, will, by controlling Parliament, more or less play a decisive role in choosing the president – unless he himself wants to retire to the presidency.   In the interim, we will, perforce, continue to have a prime minister who is not backed by a parliamentary party but, for all intents and purposes, serves at the pleasure of the president to whom he owes, first and foremost, his premiership.  And, Parliament being what is, the anomaly of having a president who is constitutionally ceremonial but functionally executive yet not accountable to Parliament, and a Prime Minister and Cabinet who function under his shadow and are nevertheless answerable to Parliament, will stay with us until the country steps into the new era of party politics.  I am highly gratified that in a speech about two days ago President Hassan vowed that elections would be held as planned in 2016 and that he, the Government and Parliament would not seek an extension to their mandates under the pretext of necessary preparations falling behind schedule.

It is not too late for President Hassan to change course and set the tone for a healthy polity and good governance, which are essential for the stability of the country. He has only finished one year of his four-year term.  We have been hearing for the last few months that a cabinet reshuffle was in the offing and the ministries would be nearly doubled.  This is welcome development because there has been criticism that the ministries were too few and too weak to shoulder the heavy responsibilities assigned to them.  Many of the ministers have neither government nor political experience, and they lack the benefit of a trained civil service and a developed private sector on which to draw.  There are educated Somalis all over the world who should be tapped as consultants/experts or recruited into the civil service and trained for high-level positions.  I agree with General Ulysses Grant, former President of the United States, that “No personal consideration should stand in the way of performing a public duty”.  While it is true that the main deterring obstacle to serving in Mogadishu is the rapidly deteriorating security situation, there are other opportunities for service elsewhere in the country.   However, nowhere else is the need for national service in the public sector more pressing now than in Mogadishu where the national government resides and national policies emanate from.

To be credible and effective in the remainder of his term President Hassan has to step back from the limelight, which he has so far monopolized.  He should let the Prime Minister, the cabinet, and the Parliament carry out their responsibilities in the public eye.  People should see all the institutions of the country work, as they should.  There have been press reports that the delay in finalizing the impending cabinet reshuffle is due to a deadlock in the haggling among the President, the Speaker and Prime Minister, each of whom wants certain individuals to be appointed to cabinet positions.   Speakers in the recent past have been part of the paralyzing problems we have seen, and were never part of any solution.  If the current Speaker who, unlike his predecessors, has behind him long government experience, long diaspora experience, academic experience (and experience is a function of age) and a high level of education is sidestepping the oversight responsibility of his institution in order to bargain for one or two ministerial posts and, probably, other top appointments, it will be difficult to have an accountable government.  The charge has already been made by at least one Member of Parliament that the functions of the legislative and executive branches seem to have been enmeshed.   It will be difficult for Parliament to take the Government to task if its Speaker is compromising his position by entering into deals with the President and/or the Prime Minister.  Surely, there is something here that cries out for rectification in the interest of ensuring effective checks and balances.

We are all aware that a coterie of politicians in Nairobi, some of whom are MPs, have been vociferous in their opposition to the President, the Government and the Speaker.  A healthy Opposition is always needed; for Opposition, as I said repeatedly before, illuminates the field of options and keeps the government of the day on its toes.  That was why Disraeli said: “No Government can be long secure without a formidable opposition”. Opposition is also an antidote to any proclivity to despotism.  But it has to be constructive and in the country, not outside it.  I know that it is a taboo in the United States for politicians to criticize the government when travelling abroad.  Again, our situation is peculiar: Mogadishu is not safe, and even MPs have to go Nairobi to air their views.  On other hand, politicians in general, and MPs in particular, must muster enough courage to take up residence in Mogadishu and try to improve how Parliament carries out its functions and hold the government accountable.  After all, it was their own choice to become MPs.  It is sad that at least a third of the MPs are either sitting in Nairobi all the time or roaming about elsewhere in the world to allow only a fraction of MPs (a mere quoram) in Mogadishu to pass legislation affecting so many people, including the constituents of the absentee MPs.

I am astonished that the President said in his address to a gathering in Mogadishu a few days ago that the federal system was necessitated by the lack of trust between clans, and that it could be reversed if inter-clan trust is promoted and established.  He also said that there were examples of countries   where federalism was adopted and the discarded after sometime.  The reality, however, is that if the central government is the creator of federalism it can easily change its policy and return to the situation ante.   But, if the federation is created by States coming together to form a union the federal government cannot override the wishes of the States and impose a unitary system on the country without risking upheaval and creating instability.  The President has the right of course to express his misgivings about federalism, but if he chooses to do so he will have to live with the accusation that he is not fully committed to the Constitution he was sworn to uphold.

In the course of his US visit early this year the President took the opportunity to address the Somali communities in Washington, D.C. and Minneapolis (MN) and made what amounted to promises. For instance, he stated that the era of sending centrally appointed district commissioners and regional governors to rule over peripheral areas had ended, and he emphasized that under the federal system the subnational and local levels would choose their own rulers; that the Government would be fully accountable to Parliament; and that they would abide by the Constitution and commit themselves to the federal system.  The reaction was a deafening applause.  I can now say with absolute certainty that the Government has done exactly the opposite under the guise of paving the groundwork for federalism: it has since then appointed governors to Gedo, Bay, and Hiiran.   From my point of view the Government should not constitute the States or manipulate the process of their formation, and should not have more than a catalytic role in these matters.

As I said in the foregoing, the country faces huge problems.  Of these the human problems are the most difficult.  No wonder someone perceptive observed many decades ago that, “The Americans can put a man on the moon, but they cannot integrate their schools”.  In what is euphemistically called “mis-speak” in current American politics, President Hassan said in his Washington address to the Somali Community that people should stop whining about what had happened to them in the past and that they should look forward instead.  He said so without the slightest mention of how that dark and disgraceful chapter of our history would be closed for those who had been displaced and dispossessed.   Reconciliation would be meaningless without the restitution of land and property to their rightful owners. Reconciliation is essential to national unity as national unity is essential to fighting the whole gamut of the huge and complex problems that together compose the giant I have mentioned in the foregoing.

It is heartening to note that President Hassan is strong on national unity, but home rule for every locality and every state seems now the only way to consummate that unity.  That means federalism.  The efficiency of the central government is contingent upon limiting itself to a few functional areas.  The bad news for President Hassan is that no one will go back to a discredited unitary system after tasting the sweetness of local sovereignty.

Ismail Ali Ismail (Geeldoon)
Email: geeldoonia@gmail.com

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Ismail “Geeldoon” is the author of, governance, The Scourge and Hope of Somalia. Mr. Ismail, is a former Somali civil servant, UN staff and a regular contributor of WardheerNews.