London (Sunatimes) In the twenty first century, Somalia
has become a symbol for the characteristics of failed states, and it is an
ideal example for universities and research centres to explain how nations
suffer when their states fail. Hunger, famine, violence, conflicts and wars are
the features which Somali speaking nations are labelled, and as a result, some
commentators questioned the rationality and humanity of the Somali people.
However, that assessment was proven wrong in Somaliland which is just another
corner of the Somali speaking people in the Horn of Africa. They have
repeatedly and continually proven, to the whole world, that the Somali-speaking
people are capable of establishing governmental institutions without outside
help. Somaliland, a former party of the failed union of Somalia, has enjoyed
two decades of peace, democracy and social improvement since its inception in
1991. Schools are open, hospitals are operating and ordinary people are
struggling to earn their living. The key factor which underpins these success
stories is their hard-won peace which, ordinary men and women throughout the
country have paid everything for its realisation. Nevertheless, peace is an
important factor for human life but it is not enough for development, thus the
debate lies could we do better? I argue that we would be able, and still have
the opportunity to perform better. But most of the people are sceptical the
ability of Somaliland politicians to bring development.
It is a sad truth that after twenty years of stability
and democratic consolidation there is no significant development in the areas
of infrastructure, human development and good governance. As a result, our
children die for a lack of adequate health care, our youth are extremely
unemployed, orphans sleep in the streets, mothers are struggling to feed their
children, elderly people have no state care, the corruption is high as it was
ever and the whole system is simply sick. To our regret there is no foreseeable
strategy or policy that neither this government nor opposition parties offer to
tackle those challenges. Above all, the nation is internally fragmented by the
politicians who, for their own narrow interest, use tribes as the mechanics of
politics. While this is the fair assessment, we have never critically
questioned why certain things linger in the way they are. For example, why we
are continuing to drag into the poverty and underdevelopment? One possible
explanation could be that we have a defected political system coupled with a
lack of intellectual contribution, but this paper argues that we are victims of
leadership deficit, a term recently employed by the noble peace prize winner
Wangari Maathai in her book Challenges for Africa to describe the inability of
African leaders to develop their nations. To underpin this argument, I will
examine the national institutions, political parties and the current
administration to shed light on the failure of our leaders.
In our system of governance, we employed the American
presidential system, which in the17th century the founding fathers of United
States had put in place a complex power sharing system between the Congress and
Presidency to protect both the interest of regional states and federal level,
and still today it is one of the most complex systems in the world. To begin
with, it was wrong in first place to say that our system is similar to that of
the United States, because, there is no commonality between our society and
that in the United States what so ever. Yet, we have established a system
identical to that of the US in name, and we put in place different institutions
which we intended to become the source of power. Two houses of parliament,
presidency and higher court, those are the legal sources of power in
Somaliland. Unfortunately, those institutions do not exercise their
constitutional responsibility accordingly. First, the upper house was
established to be a form of reconciliation tool, but it has evolved to as a
legislative institution without the appropriate mechanisms, for example members
of that house do not have the educational capacity to formulate or evaluate
national legislations, and they do not have expertise who could aid them to
perform this critical task. Second, the Lower house is democratically elected,
there are more educated members compared to the upper house, but because of
their incompetence and corruption they do not have any significant influence in
the system.
Third, the higher court is poorly functioning with the
fact that it is always in line with the president in office. Finally, the whole
power lies at the presidency, but without appropriate checks in the system
combined with the lack of vision, advanced age and alleged medical conditions
of the current president everything is worsening. For instance, many people
understand that there is competing ministers who have different motives mainly
tribal and financial interest. However, the few ministers who could contribute
to the better system that we all wish, have been constrained by two factors,
first, they lack the cultural and governing experience, second, they did not
establish themselves as a team and this worsens the already sick system that we
have put in place. On top of that, the constitution is vulnerable for different
interpretations which add to the weakness of the system, and as we experienced
in many occasions, it is a source of constant conflict.
In addition, the present-day flooded political parties
give a wider picture of the deepening political confusion in our country.
First, as Haywood writes, “political parties are organized association of
people working together to compete political office and promote agreed upon
polices.” If we take that definition, one of the characteristics of political
party is offering alternative policy, but what we have seen in our political
parties both the newly established ones and the three incumbent parties is on
the contrary. They do not have polices that can help them to lead the country,
and I will argue that a number of factors contributed to this inadequacy.
First, political parties are out of touch as there is no link between them and
the wider society since they are based on tribal affiliations. Hence, they are
not able to establish energetic membership system that could attract the mass
population. Second, there are no proper regulations, procedures, policies,
decision making process, effective structure and internal democracy within the
parties, so, they lost the trust of the public support. Third, they lack the
necessary financial resources which could enable them to employ experts that
can help them to conduct researches to produce a meaningful manifesto. Fourth,
they do not provide ideological thought to establish the difference between
them and the other political parties. Consequently, both the members and
supporters give their loyalty to the leader because he/she has created
individualistic drama, and this leads the parties to become short lived.
Historical evidence suggests that our political parties
are not able to present themselves as representative national forums. They
rather look as the property of individuals. For example, all the current three
political party leaders failed to be accountable either to the public or their
party members. We witnessed UCID, andtheir internal disgraceful split, UDUB, where the corrupted ex ministers
are still on the show, and on top of that, we remember that the Chairmanship
was managed outside the party system in Kulmiye, and that is an indication that
they lack the features of political parties. Moreover, the upcoming political
parties have similar problems at hand, and we do not expect them to offer real
alternative policy. For example, one day I turned on the TV, and coincidently,
one of the leaders of the forthcoming parties was giving a speech to a group of
people in a well-furnished hotel. I was listening twenty minutes, unfortunately
I did not grasp what he was trying to offer for the nation “This party will
implement your dreams, your aspirations and your hopes” he said. But this is
the vague message that someone would come across on daily basis if he/she
follows Somaliland politics. However, if anyone tries to put that empty
rhetoric into context it tells nothing. That is a clear elucidation of how our
politicians today lack the vision, passion, integrity and the basic
characteristics of a leadership, because they cannot transcend the manipulation
of tribes for their personal ends. They do not have the prescriptions that are
required to counteract the deepening social problems that we experienced for
decades. Sorry to say, but we are naive if we anticipate the emergence of
politically meaningful parties from this contest.
Similarly, the current administration is another
example of the product of leadership failure. It is now 18 months since the
current government was in power, and if, in any occasion, their achievement so
far is asked, government officials and non-officials including the first lady
would play the following answer by default. We increased the salary, changed
the Somali shillings from Burao, provided free primary schools and the national
TV is on the air, and each minister or others have already provided those
answers more than twenty times, so what is next, please carry on. When it comes
to the foreign policy they could not invent new answers but barrowed answers
from Egal and Rayale, our trip was successful, the international community are
looking at Somaliland, in other words, it is a continuation of old lies and
dishonest that we have experienced for the last two decades. The recent trip to
Djibouti and what happened afterwards explicitly explains the foreign policy of
this government. Primarily, it looks that their actual job is attending
different ceremonies that people hold at hotels for a range of purposes, from
wedding to student graduation and travelling to world capitals without significant
aftermaths of those trips.
Additionally, the issue of Somaliland has recently
attracted some academics to consider the shortcomings of the various
administrations that we have installed. Most of the scholars have highlighted
the inability of Somaliland leaders to deliver the appropriate policies to
pursue both locally owned development and coherent foreign policy. For example,
a number of Professors from a range of Universities including Cambridge have
carried out a research in 2011 and produced a report entitled “African Game
Changer” to locate why Somaliland did not manage to persuade the international
community to get a diplomatic recognition. Among the factors they underlined
was a ‘leadership deficit’ and they put it in this way “Until now a combination
of narrow self-interests and lack of appropriate diplomatic method on Hagiasa’s
part has trumped the reality of Somaliland self-determination” This assessment
underpins once again, that our problem has its roots in our leadership failure.
In my view, unfortunately we are learning neither from
the history nor from our own experiences, and that is why we are trapped into
poverty and bad governance, therefore, we should take part of the blame as a
society. The division and clan politics is not new, For example, Douglas James
was a secretary for the British administration in Somaliland between 1916 to
1921, it is almost a century ago, in an article he wrote in 1925 he described
our society as a clannish, divided and primitive, and that observation is
factual until today, because our leaders employed tribes as a mechanism to
pursue their interest and divided the society, and we as a society did not
question why we are locked into this box of tribalism. To our despair today our
politicians are engaged in the same method of politics which hold us behind for
centuries, because they have no political ideas or innovations to attract the
population. At this point, we are suffering at the hands of those politicians,
but only the mothers who lost their beloved sons in the sea, the university
graduates who ended up in jails at Libya in their way to seek better life,
elderly people who have no care in our cities, disabled people who worry about
every morning where to earn the bread and parents who struggle to feed their
children can reveal the pain of having leaders who do not have vision to
transform the society to the better.
Then, unless we sensibly side-line the failed
politicians, combined with the influence of tribal leaders, and democracy takes
root, the peace would be increasingly volatile and unpredictable, and above all
we will remain relatively weak, poor, ignorant and backward. Furthermore, the
persistence of tribal influence in our politics is a further manifestation of
the incompetence of our leadership. The scope of our understanding in the
negative implications of tribal politics should be broadened, and we should
know that we live in a machine age where the tribe is irrelevant, simply,
because people like us are competing technological advancement and exploring
what is going on the moon, while we are competing over for instance, how many
ministers from our poor tribes should be appointed to a bogus ministerial
posts. In particular, the recent events in Erigavo and Sameel are clear
indications of the vulnerability of our peace because of the negative
implications of tribal politics.
In our modern history, we had over 50 years of dead
politics characterized by tribalism combined with reckless incompetent and
failed ruling political class. Thus, it is clear that they were not able to
deliver the better life that we deserved. Therefore, I would conclude this:
both the human experience and history directs us that nations are built by the
dreams and hard work of people with vision, honesty, determination, integrity
and passion, and we are not in a short supply of such people. Therefore, we
need a bottom up building program to transform our society which starts from
intellectual debate to locate the better way forward, and this paper has only
underlined the scale of the challenges to lay out the debate. But on the other
hand, there are more encouraging signals, for example, the majority of our
population are young people under 30 of their age who strongly believe the
education as a path to development, and as a result, I hope they will demand
their individual rights rather than the ambiguous tribe rights. Finally, some
people may argue that we are on the right route to development, but those
people are expected to provide the timeline that our youngsters can wait to get
an adequate employment opportunity which is the base of development. In my
view, politicians have run out of time, and, I believe that the time has come
to challenge the ruling class who could never deliver their promises or carry
our collective aspirations. Otherwise, we will go down the dark side of the
history.
By Khadar Hussein Abdi
Bristol, UK.
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A reflection of leadership failure in Somaliland
It is a sad truth that after twenty years of stability and democratic consolidation there is no significant development in the areas of infrastructure, human development and good governance