FARMAJO TAKES SOMALIA INTO THE TUNNEL By Shukri SAID

March 11, 2021

Somalia worries the international community more and more about the worsening of the security, economic, health and now the political crisis.

The news of the umpteenth terrorist attack in Mogadishu came the day before yesterday. On March 5, a car bomb was launched against the Lul Yemeni restaurant, in the port area, causing about twenty deaths and over thirty injured. Less than a month earlier, on February 13, another suicide bombing at a checkpoint east of the Parliament building and Villa Somalia, seat of the country’s central government, had caused at least three other deaths and several injured.

The terrorist attacks of Al Shabab are intensifying in a delicate moment of political stalemate to further destabilize Somalia and prevent the arrival of the humanitarian aid that the serious health, climatic and economic situation requires.

The English variant of the Coronavirus has also taken hold of Somalia, generating a new wave of infections. There are no precise data on the progress of the epidemic due to the precarious health conditions of the country, but it is certain that a large number of people got sick and among the most illustrious victims there was also Mrs. Fadumo Ali Nakruma, a very well known Somali singer who contracted the virus while accompanying the presidential delegation – President Farmajo was a great admirer of her – to one of the many meetings held in Dhusa Mareb, a city in the central region of the country, to ﬁnd a political agreement with his opponents.

The ﬂare-up of the pandemic is also affecting the economy. Somalia’s most ﬂourishing market is the export of livestock to the Arab countries, but here we are witnessing a sharp slowdown of trafﬁc precisely due to the fears of the spread of Covid-19 between the borders. The other important sector of the Somali economy is agriculture which, however, saw the reappearance just a few months after last

November, of swarms of desert locusts that devastated not only the crops, but also the vegetationl, particularly in the areas of Gedo, Bay, Bakol and Hirshabelle. The hope lies in the upcoming rainy season (March-May) but it is feared that this year too they will have a reduced range, like last year, due to general climatic changes. Between locusts and drought,the Ministry of Agriculture has declared a state of emergency, but it will take some time before aid materializes because of the general framework of insecurity in which the country ﬁnds itself.

Save the Children, at the beginning of February, raised the alarm by reporting that about 2.7 million Somalis will face food shortages until mid-2021 and among these there will be about 840,000 children under the age of ﬁve who will have to cope with acute malnutrition. Among them, about 143,000 will ﬁnd themselves in dire need of urgent medical care in order to survive. Such a serious and cyclical situation would need a strongly cohesive and authoritative institutions to adequately interact with the international institutions to ask for support, but this is not the current state of the Somali government.

The central institutions have lapsed due to the expiry of the mandate received in the general elections four years ago and have not yet managed to ﬁnd an agreement for carrying out new elections. The outgoing President of the Somali Federal Republic, Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed, known as Farmajo, accuses above all the federated states of Puntland in the north and Jubaland in the south of not carrying out the resolutions of the meeting held last September 17 in Mogadishu, where an agreement was reached which was on the following 26 approved by Parliament in joint session with 252 votes in favor, two against and one abstention. According to the new legislation, the elections should have taken place on November 1, 2020 in accordance with the old clan system called “4.5”, further revised and corrected. But to Farmajo’s accusation of having his opponents reneged on their word, they replied that the provisions of the new electoral law envisages an unacceptable favoritism for Farmajo himself.

Precisely, in relation to the crisis with Jubaland, Farmajo broke the diplomatic relations with Kenya, accusing it of supporting President Ahmed Madobe, but this choice has compromised and set in motion a domino effect of many other services for the large Somali community in Kenya and many other relations because, given the climate of insecurity in which Somalia has lived for decades, many international institutions for its support are based in Nairobi and, among these, there can also be many of the services of the same Embassy of Italy in Somalia that are delegated to Kenya .

In view of the delays in ﬁnding a general agreement for the new elections, the Somali Parliament had also passed a law to adopt the extension of the existing institutions, but the oppositions contest this rule which is not reﬂected in the provisional Constitution and therefore consider illegitimate all laws passed after February 8, which is date the mandate of President Farmajo expired.

Some presidents of the federated states did not even bother to respond to the repeated invitations Farmajo sent them for a further clarifying meeting.

On February 19, the civil war was close to resuming when a ﬁreﬁght broke out between the federal army and the armed guards of the Presidential Candidates Committee for the new presidential elections – about twenty candidates headed by the former federal presidents Sharif Sheikh Ahmed and Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, Farmajo’s predecessors – who had provocatively occupied the monument to the unknown soldier near Villa Somalia. The shooting resulted with several casualties.

President Farmajo was elected as the guarantor of democracy and as a reassuring reconciler and peacemaker of the fractures that the civil war had produced in the Somali people. In this spirit, he should have presided the adoption of the Constitution and create the conditions, at least the biometric registry, allowing the elections to be conducted by universal suffrage. None of these goals were achieved and three and a half years of his mandate were lost due to the wrong choice of selecting Hassan Ali Khayre as Prime Minister who had a different agenda from that of the President.

However, the time lost due to the error in the choice of the Prime Minister cannot befall on the Somali people and we are now witnessing Farmajo’s entrenchment in the presidential chair whose authority and legitimacy have faded away after its electoral mandate of four years ago expired, favoring the centrifugal forces of the federated states. The refusal to dialogue aims to reach April 12 when Ramadan will begin, which will postpone any possibility of meeting by another month. Farmajo is not bothered by the setback since he considers himself still legitimately established, but this intransigence is taking root in the federated states which, in some way, favors their autonomy. Some federated states are looking with increasing sympathy at the choice of Somaliland, which declared itself independent since 1991, when the civil war broke out and has since refused to participate in the central institutions by self-managing. One of the knots of the current political dispute consists precisely in the choice of the parliamentary representatives of Somaliland, of which this State does not care, and that Farmajo would like to be selected in Mogadishu, thus inciting for manifest favoritism the rebellion of the antagonists.

The international community is lobbying to bring the opposing parties back to the negotiating table immediately, pressuring by reducing their ﬁnancial disbursements.

The concentric rage of terrorism, the epidemic, the economic and political crisis is pushing Somalia into a very dark tunnel from which one can only escape by tackling the problems with commitment, seriousness and favoring the good of the country. Starting with the political problem which is the ﬁrst being held in the hands of men of good will.

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