New Somali president may usher in change in the war-torn nation
“We’ve definitely seen a vote by the parliamentarians for a change of direction,” Ahmed Soliman, Horn of Africa researcher at Chatham House, said. Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, an academic and activist, won 190 votes against 79 for the outgoing president Sharif Sheikh Ahmed, who had been seen as the favorite.
J. Peter Pham of the Washington-based Atlantic Council noted that “by all accounts the newly chosen president of the so-called government of Somalia is an admirable individual who is well known and respected by local and international non-governmental organizations.”
But he warned that “one must avoid the temptation — already succumbed to by some stakeholders — of allowing enthusiasm of the moment to cloud the realities of what actually happened.”
“The parliamentarians’ did not so much vote for Hassan Sheikh Mohamud as against the incompetence and corruption of Sharif Sheikh Ahmed,” he said, adding that the lawmakers who voted “were hardly legitimate representatives of the Somali people.”
“The MPs didn’t want another four or five years of Sharif and it’s been very clearly displayed by 70 percent of votes going to the new president,” Chatham House’s Soliman agreed.
Sharif, who had seemed confident of re-election, was dogged by allegations of corruption during his tenure. Soliman said it was too early to say whether the new president will be able to consolidate his position with the parliamentarians “and move forward and build a Cabinet.” Pham said Hassan Sheikh Mohamud will be presiding over “an entity more known for stealing foreign aid than using it for the good of the Somali people.”
“While the new president may well want to change this, he will have to fight power interests, both old (the functionaries who have carved power bases for themselves) and new (people who spent tens of thousands of dollars last month to become parliamentarians will want to recover their investments).” For Abdirashid Hashi, an analyst with International Crisis Group in Nairobi, the new president’s resounding victory was also “a protest vote” against Sharif. Hassan “is very passionate about Somalia,” Hashi said. “He has a good feel for what’s going on the ground,” he said.
A vendor on the streets of the capital echoed that sentiment.
“The new president is a person with credibility. He has been in the country without fleeing in the past 22 years,” Hassan Abdi said, noting that the new president had not “come with a laptop like those from the diaspora.”Hashi stressed however that the new president faced a daunting task.“There is some optimism about him but he has to gain lots of support” notably that of the international community and “there are huge challenges in front of him,” he said.
Pham said one handicap could be that the new leader “does not appear to have a force behind him, military or political. Thus he is weak in comparison to the real power brokers in Somalia.”
British Prime Minister David Cameron hailed as a “significant moment” the election of Hassan Sheikh Mohamud but warned the country faced a long road to democracy.
The Al-Shabaab Tuesday dismissed Monday’s vote as illegitimate.
“The process in which Hassan Sheikh Mohamud was chosen was run by the enemies of Somalia,” Sheikh Ali Mohamud Rage, spokesman of the Al Qaeda-linked Shebab, said.
He said the group had “nothing personal” against the new president but that “the whole process is like an enemy project.”
Hashi said some Al-Shabaab leaders, who hated Sharif because they saw the Islamist outgoing president as a traitor, might be less harsh on Hassan. Ahmed Soliman noted that under the transitional authorities, bringing the Al-Shabaab to the negotiating table had been discouraged, notably by Britain, the United States and the UN Office for Somalia.
n Agence France Presse
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