Published On: Mon, Sep 10th, 2012

Somalia elects new president in rare vote (Reuters)

(Reuters) – Somalia’s lawmakers voted overwhelmingly on Monday for political newcomer Hassan Sheikh Mohamud to be the country’s next president, with the streets of the capital erupting into celebratory gunfire.

The country’s lawmakers were voting in the first poll of its kind in decades. The vote was billed by the United Nations as a milestone in the war-ravaged country’s quest to end more than 20 years of violence, graft and clan feuds.

Mohamud, seen as a moderate, unexpectedly defeated incumbent President Sheikh Sharif Ahmed after two the four candidates who made it to the second round of voting opted out.

One of them, outgoing Prime Minister Abdiweli Mohamed Ali who threw his weight behind Mohamud’s candidacy, said the result heralded a new era for Somali politics.

“Somalia voted for change,” Ali told Reuters, adding it was too early to say if he would take part in the new administration.

There has been no effective central government control over most of the largely lawless country since the outbreak of civil war in 1991.

Monday’s vote was seen as a culmination of a regionally brokered and U.N.-backed roadmap to end that conflict, during which tens of thousands were killed and many more fled.

The capital, which until last year witnessed street battles between al Qaeda-linked al Shabaab militants and African soldiers, is now a vibrant city, where reconstructed houses are slowly replacing bullet-riddled structures.

But despite being on the backfoot, the militants still control swathes of southern and central Somalia, while pirates, regional administrations and local militia group also vie for control chunks of the largely lawless Horn of Africa country.

The outgoing president conceded defeat after the onlookers in the hall where the vote was held spontaneously stood up and sang the national anthem.

Jabril Ibrahim Abdulle, director of the Centre of Research and Dialogue, a local non governmental organization where Mohamud worked for eight years, said the result highlighted Ahmed’s failure to quash the Islamist insurgency and improve living standards.

“He is benefiting from the fallout over Ahmed. This vote shows that the Somali people were yearning for change,” Abdulle said.

“His emphasis will be on institution-building and reconciliation. His biggest challenge will be the expectations of the people.”

Touching a Koran with his right hand, Mohamud was sworn in as president within minutes of his poll victory.

Somalia’s president heads the executive while the speaker of parliament is considered the country’s most powerful politician and steps in if the president is unable to fulfill his duties.

D-DAY FOR SOMALIA

“It’s D-day for Somalia,” lawmaker Abdirahim Abdi had said of the election in which more than two dozen candidates ran. “It’s a turning point for Somalia and everyone’s been waiting for it.”

Members of parliament marked their ballot papers behind a curtain before casting them in a clear box in front of foreign envoys and hundreds of Somali men and women as well as being broadcast live on television.

“Any elected president must cope with security first, then the reconstruction of social infrastructure, resettling the numerous (refugees) around the country and the liberation of the rest of the country from al Shabaab,” said student Bashir Ali Abdikadir.

Mohamud will also have to tackle Somalia’s reputation as the most corrupt country in the world.

In July, a U.N. Somalia monitoring group report said it had found that out of every $10 in revenue raised between 2009-2010 $7 had never made it into state coffers.

Despite the possibility that the entire process of selecting a new parliament whose members then elected the new president may have been flawed after allegations from a diplomatic source that lawmakers were being offered bribes, many Somalis were elated their country was holding an election of sorts.

“It’s something we have to witness and be a part of, even if we’re not voting. We’ve been through a very difficult labor and we’re finally giving birth,” said Najmah Ahmed Abdi, who runs a Somali youth forum.

“The (lawmakers) have a momentous responsibility on their shoulders. Tomorrow will be like when U.S. President Barack Obama was elected. We hope we get our own Obama.”

(Additional reporting by Mohamed Ahmed; Editing by Richard Lough)


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There have been no elections in Somalia since 1967 and there won’t be any this year either. But the country has a new parliament (appointed on the advice of clan elders) who have elected a new president, and the new government actually now controls a significant part of the country. The world’s only fully “failed state” may finally be starting to return to normality.A failed state is a horrendous thing: no government, no army, no police, no courts, no law, just bands of armed men taking what they want. Somalia has been like that for more than 20 years, but now there is hope. So much hope that last month the United Nations Security Council partially lifted its embargo on arms sales to Somalia in order to let the new Somali government buy arms, and last week the U.S. government followed suit.The new government replaces the “Transitional Federal Government”, another unelected body that had enjoyed the support of the UN and the African Union for eight pointless years. Then last year a World Bank report demonstrated the sheer scale of its corruption: seven out of every ten dollars of foreign aid vanished into the pockets of TFG officials before reaching the state’s coffers.Fully a quarter of the “national budget” was being absorbed by the offices of the president, the vice-president and the speaker of parliament. The fact that after all that the TFG still only controlled about one square kilometre (less than one square mile) of Mogadishu, the capital, while the rest of the shattered city was run by the Islamist al-Shabaab militia, an affiliate of al-Qaeda, also contributed to the international disillusionment.That tiny patch of ground, moreover, was being defended not by Somali troops but by thousands of Ugandan and Burundian soldiers of the African Union Mission in Somalia (Unisom). More than 500 of them had lost their lives defending the useless TFG, and the foreign donors were losing faith in the mission. But the Unisom soldiers did achieve one major thing: they fought al-Shabaab to a standstill in Mogadishu.In August 2011 the Islamist militia pulled its troops out of the capital. That created an opening, and the international community seized it. It ruthlessly initiated a process designed to push the TFG aside: Somali clan elders were asked to nominate members for a new 250-seat parliament, which was then asked to vote for a new president and government.It was obviously impossible to hold a free election in a country much of which was still under al-Shabaab’s control, but this process also had the advantage that it allowed the foreigners to shape the result. The corrupt officials who had run the old TFG all re-applied for their old jobs, but none of them succeeded.The new president who emerged from this process, Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, is a former academic and human rights worker who only entered politics in 2011. No whiff of corruption clings to him, and he has worked tirelessly to bring about national reconciliation. And he has the wind at his back: just after he was chosen last September, a Kenyan force evicted al-Shebaab from Somalia’s second city, Kismayo.That still leaves about 95 percent of the country’s territory and three-quarters of its population beyond the government’s direct control. Al-Shabaab still rules in most rural parts of the country, and Ethiopian troops and their militia allies control much of the western border areas. Pirates with a lot of guns and money effectively dominate much of the north.One whole chunk of the country, calling itself Somaliland, has declared its independence (and runs its affairs much more peacefully and efficiently than any other part of Somalia). No other country recognizes its independence at the moment, but it used to be a British colony, quite separate from Italian-ruled Somalia, and in principle it can make exactly the same case for independence as Eritrea did when it broke away from Ethiopia.The worst problem facing President Mohamud is the venal and cunning politicians who have exploited the clan loyalties that pervade every aspect of Somali life to carve out their own little empires. Some are frankly and unashamedly warlords; others, including all the senior officials in the defunct TFG, masquerade as national politicians but work for their own interests.They have not gone away, nor have the clan rivalries that kept the fighting going for 21 years. Drawing up the rules and sharing out the power for a new federal Somalia (none of which has yet been decided) will give them plenty of opportunities to make trouble for the new president and regain their former power. Mohamud definitely has his work cut out for him.Nevertheless, he has strong UN and African Union support, and he now has a chance to create a spreading zone of peace in the country and start rebuilding national institutions. So last week the United States declared that it was now willing to provide military aid, including arms exports, to Somalia. Weirdly, that actually means that thing are looking up in the world’s only failed state.Gwynne Dyer is an independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries.