Tom Gardner in Mogadishu
The drive from Mogadishu airport to the presidential home at Villa Somalia should take about 15 minutes. It rarely does. Every few hundred metres there is a police roadblock. Nothing can be left to chance: lethal explosions at checkpoints are commonplace.
To avoid security breaches, nobody except Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, the recently re-elected president, and a few aides, know about the Observer’s visit. We arrive in a bulletproof Hilux behind a Jeep carrying seven soldiers and a mounted machine gun, along a road lined by shipping containers padded with sandbags and walls topped with razor wire. It is eerily quiet.
Arriving at the airport earlier that morning, lugging a weighty flak jacket and a helmet, it seemed rude to bring them to wear them in front of a man who has survived multiple attempts on his life – including one inside the presidential compound – and governs what is arguably the most dangerous country on Earth.
A posse of unsmiling young men in Ray-Bans guard the entrance to his office, where Mohamud is sitting alone at a modest wooden desk, facing a portrait of Somalia’s first post-independence president, Aden Adde. Dressed in a simple blue suit, shirt collar open, Mohamud appears distinctly relaxed and offers an enthusiastic handshake.
Being president of Somalia – a country whose name is still used widely, if slightly misleadingly, as shorthand for “failed state” – could seem a uniquely thankless job.
Mohamud has the unique distinction of having done it twice. His first government, between 2012 and 2017, was the country’s first elected, non-interim administration since 1991, the year Somalia’s long-ruling military dictator, Mohamed Siad Barre, was overthrown in a coup. Almost immediately after his election Mohamud survived an assassination attempt at a hotel where he was meeting Kenya’s foreign minister. On another occasion, terrorists belonging to al-Shabaab, al-Qaida’s richest and most lethal affiliate, which controls much of the country, blew up a car at the gates of Villa Somalia. One of the fighters got to within 100 metres of the president before being shot dead.
Re-elected in May, Mohamud is, according to his own intelligence agency, al-Shabaab’s “No 1 target” once more. Just days after this interview, the jihadists carried out twin car bombings in Mogadishu that killed at least 100 people. One of the targets was the education ministry, which is headed by Farah Sheikh Abdulkadir, Mohamud’s closest friend in politics (he survived the attack).
The president denounced the killings as revenge for the victories his new government has scored in what he describes as a “total war” against the jihadists. His government recently recaptured a number of strategic territories. But the gains it has achieved are fragile, and Somalia still faces a daunting array of challenges – not least accelerating environmental degradation and deepening hunger. Somalia regularly finds itself at or near the bottom of global rankings for corruption, poverty and state fragility.
Inside the Somali bear pit of politics, the 67-year-old Mohamud cuts an unusual figure. Throughout all the blood-soaked years that followed the spectacular collapse of the central state in 1991 – he never left. All but one of his 20 children was born here. That marks him out from his most recent predecessor, Mohamed “Farmaajo” Abdullahi Mohamed, in particular, who spent most of his adult life in upstate New York, alongside a great many of Somalia’s educated elite. As Mogadishu descended into anarchy in the wake of America’s botched intervention in the 1990s, most fled abroad.
Mohamud, then a teacher and businessman in the capital, remembers this period as one of looting and killings, marauding militias and sleepless nights when “you never know when a shell might land in your house”. He recalls the death of an old friend, struck by shrapnel from a bomb that landed a few metres from him. “They were very difficult times,” he says. “We did not think we would survive.”
With a postgraduate degree from an Indian university, Mohamud was exactly the type of Somali who might have flourished in neighbouring Kenya, or have been granted a visa for a safe country in the west. Yet he felt uncomfortable abroad. “I never had this idea of going outside … Mogadishu is the place I belong,” he says. With characteristic optimism, he assumed that the clan conflicts that raged back then would be short-lived, a brief interlude before the restoration of a strong central government. “The warlords said good things were coming, and we believed them,” he says. “Unfortunately, it was just the beginning.”
Mohamud became a civil society activist, putting his soft diplomatic manner to use by mediating between the warlords who had carved Mogadishu into sparring fiefdoms. It was dangerous work. Several of his colleagues were assassinated. He recalls one day in 1998 when a group of militiamen beckoned him to enter an open doorway as he passed.
Inside, he found a body sprawled on the ground: “At first, I thought it was somebody sleeping.” The militiamen robbed him, but let him free when they discovered he was from the same clan.
Mohamud’s star rose in the 2000s when he founded a private university and became the de facto leader of the civil society organisations that had stepped into the vacuum left by the collapsed state. By the middle of the decade, jihadism was on the march and neighbouring Ethiopia had invaded. Somalia had sunk to its nadir. The jihadists, who would later metastasise into al-Shabaab, fought Ethiopian soldiers street-by-street, block-by-block, leaving “dead bodies everywhere”. The future president and his friends spent days collecting them from the rubble.
A succession of “transitional governments” were established to keep the peace, though their control extended barely a few hundred metres beyond Villa Somalia. Demoralised, Mohamud and his friends started debating among what to do next. “We’d ask ourselves, ‘How many more years can we wait?’” Mohamud concluded he had few options but to enter politics. In 2010, he established Somalia’s first political party since the military coup of 1969.
In those 12 years, Somalia has made some progress. Al-Shabaab has been pushed out into the countryside, and the five federal state governments (excluding the breakaway would-be state of Somaliland), which were established or strengthened in Mohamud’s first term, have grown. Later that afternoon, as he is driven in his motorised cavalcade, there is a boulevard festooned with banners commemorating the founding of one of Somalia’s prosperous telecoms firms: even in the absence of a state, businesses have found ways to thrive.
Source: The Guardian
