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by Said Shiiq, PhD
Thursday, December 18, 2008
“Cagtii meel joogi weydaa-ba mar beey ceeb la kulantaa.” Somali adage.
Writing someone’s career obituary whilst breathing is a dicey predicament, but in rare circumstances, it’s sufficiently apt. This is especially the case when the matter is about the person’s tumultuous career: I’m talking about the besieged President of the Transitional Federal Government (TFG), Abdullahi Yusuf.
Delusional, he really is. But that doesn’t quite capture the depth of his quagmire. Now in his late 70s, Mr. Yusuf is literally and figuratively fighting for his life. The fraudulent parliament he collected four years ago is impeaching him. The Ethiopians, with whom he entrusted with his back and sold his soul to for the past three decades, are, remarkably, deserting him. The Kenyans, where his own children run a mini-TFG, is now branding him, his family and his cabal, a group non-grata. Perhaps more brutally, the Americans publicly said that they sided with Prime Minister Nur Adde. The world had enough of his towering madness.
It’s a culmination of a stunning reversal of fortunes against this brutal warlord. A man who brazenly takes credit for disorienting a unified Somali nation 30 years ago, Yusuf’s repulsive legacy is coming to a screeching halt. Like the aforementioned Somali adage goes, he’s reacquainting with an obtrusive embarrassment he long danced around.
A bloody career that began with a failed coup, in 1978, followed by an admitted treason and defection to Ethiopia, spanning to a civil war, a stint with piracy, and crest with the murderous conquest in Mogadishu two years ago, is being encircled in Baidoa. Abated by two dozen cronies, that career is on life support. Even the pro-Yusuf voices in Puntland should be construed a desperate plea to keep him away from his former turf, lest his swerves back violently.
Pathologically speaking, Yusuf is hardly sane. On top of the foreign object lodged in stomach in the form of liver, Yusuf is clinically a psychopath. It’s marked by a rousing narcissism, which came to light when he claimed that he attended a Russian college for “the white and rich people” as appose to Dr. Abdulqasim Salad Hassan, whom he condescendingly said attended a university for “Negros.”
To his credit, Yusuf is a master of clan politics. In addition to naming top security, diplomatic and presidential positions to a very close knit of clansmen, who are invariably incompetent, he tried to influence international institutions in their hiring process. In 2007, while I was with a delegation of aid organizations in Baidoa, he demanded that I disclose my clan identity to him before we could proceed. The meeting adjourned quickly, because I refused to entertain his obsession.
Yusuf’s grandiosity is clearly ending. A telling inaction is observable: He’s not flying to Addis Ababa as he routinely did post crisis. Instead, he went to Garoowe—and may well be returning to there soon. Good luck Puntland!
Who should take credit for his demise?
Two shrewd men to come to mind: Nur Adde and Sh. Shariif. Through the Djibouti Agreement, they formed a formidable alliance anchored in the quest of peace and true reconciliation. Yusuf hoped to cast the sham “reconciliation conference” in Mogadishu in 2007 as a genuine peace process. With the exception of the fat cow (Saudi Arabia), which bestowed him with a whopping $32 million, no one took him seriously.
Unlike Ali Ghedi, the impatient and woefully inexperienced former PM, Nur Adde is a statesman, whose guiding principle is peace. On that basis, he embarked on an international campaign to sell his agenda. His call was heeded by a moderate figure in the opposition Sh. Shariif Sh. Ahmed.
Together with an honest UN broker, Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, they forged a new centrist coalition in Somalia. Irked by this arrangement, however, are the extremists on both sides, led by two ruthless colonels: Mr. Yusuf, and Sh. Hassan Dahir Aweys. Oddly, the two principally agree that the Djibouti Agreement is the antithesis of their greedy careers.
But Yusuf fails to grasp the depth of the abyss he’s in this time around. With the twilight of the Bush Administration dawns a new era in the world, undefined by the War on Terror. Yusuf milked the terrorism mantra to the fullest. Fortunately, Sh. Shariif’s return to Mogadishu and the imminent Ethiopian withdrawal effectively renders him toothless.
As he defiantly continues to make noise, his demise is unfolding precipitously. Like Kenya, IGAD, the AU, the EU and more importantly, the UN are likely to brand him an obstruction to peace—a label that will eventually seal his bloody legacy. To those he murdered over the years, the climax of Yusuf’s demise will be when, due to travel ban and asset freeze, his over-medicated body suffers untreated, causing his artificial liver to rotten in his sinful body.
It may well be the same day that peace finally blossoms in Somalia.
Said Shiiq, PhD, is an independent consultant and commentator. He can be reached at [email protected]