An open letter to Mr. Dahir
Rayale Kahin, President of Somaliland
My cousin, Mr. President, let go with dignity
At the outset I should congratulate you on a work well done. Your
overall perf ormance is highly commendable, given to the
difficult circumstances prevailing in the region and the
insurmountable challenges you face at home. The fact that you have
maintained the peace and stability of such an impoverished,
unrecogni zed and tribal house of cards over seven years is nothing
short of a miracle.
You did this through your
renowned patience, your tolerance and your prover bial choice
of prayer over power even when your life was at stake. It is not my
intention here Mr. President to enumerate your achievements nor
pinpoint your failures, but I have no doubt that history and people
will remember you with kindness and appreciation.
It is the ending, however, like anything else in life that lingers
in memory. This is why I would like to urge you today Mr. President
to quit. I know this is not an easy thing to do and I am sure the
knee jerk reaction of your inner circle to my advice will be an
outright anger and a total dismissal. They may not even bother to
read this piece to assess my reasoning. Only the title will suffice
for them to negate me and consider me as a newcomer trying to jump
on the bandwagon of the Rayale bashing brigade.
Mr. President, it was not easy for me as well to write this piece.
It is only after a long deliberation that I concluded as Martin
Luther King Jr. said that “in the end, we will remember not the
words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.” So I decided
not to watch you in silence while you teeter on the edge of a steep
and resounding downfall but to raise a friendly voice and warn you
about the dangers I see from my vantage point of being an outside
observer able to see the cracks on the wall. The cracks are wide and
deep Mr. President for every observer to see. The signs of the
imminent collapse of the house of cards are everyone. I know you
cannot see them Mr. President because your inner circle advisory
have built a fortified wall around you; a wall that hides you from
seeing the political reality of the country but cannot definitely
protect you from the oncoming deluge. And when that moment comes,
when the fake levees break, all your inner circle advisers will
disappear and you will be all alone to face the flood.
Mr. President, history is replete with examples. I don’t want to
give you exam ples, but you are heading on the road to infamy;
the road taken by many unfor tunate kings and leaders who were
blinded by the false walls built around them by their kitchen
cabinet members. It is not easy to hear the rumblings and com
motion outside when all you hear and see is what happens in the four
walls of your palace when all the reports and stories that reach
your desk tell you that everything is fine and that people still
glorify you.
Mr. President, I am sure you think you know everything and nothing I
say would be of any value to you. But one thing that you may not be
aware of is that you have been on the chair too long. The fuss,
however, is not all about the chair Mr. President; it is about
being the custodian of the only source of income.
Seven years are not a big deal if
your country was wealthy, if the majority of citizens had jobs and
if the government was only one of several sources of income. The
problem here as in many other less developed countries is that the
government is the only source of income. And this is why the hungry
public can be easily incited by equally hungry opposition
politicians to rise against the gatekeepers of the state treasury.
It does not matter if the treasury is empty, what matters is that
the State’s begging bowl should be passed around. This is why seven
years is too long for the begging bowl to remain with one person or
one group. This is the source of all wars in Africa as I have
expressed it a long time ago in a poem I addressed to my son while
he was still in the womb “dhawrtay isku laayeen tolkay dhiigna loo
qubaye, waxa dhagarta loo galay anaan dhiilka lay shubine…”
Mr. President, I urge you to quit not because I see the opposition
figures as better leaders and definitely not because you would not
be able to defeat them in a national election. I am calling you to
quit because I want you to expose the opposition leaders and deny
them the only cause they have for plunging the country into a chaos
and civil war. You have invested a lot of energy and time to prevent
the house of cards from falling apart. It was never an easy task,
but with your sagacity and patience you have managed to hold the
cards together despite the forces that were trying to pull them
apart. It is therefore your interest Mr. President to see that
status outlive you and pass it on while the house still stands
despite the damages it sustained through the years. And the only
feasible way you can do that is to call it a day. You can do this
with finesse in a televised speech to the nation. You can explain
your reasons for quitting with all clarity and transparency. It will
be your greatest legacy. It will be a speech worth listening to and
I promise you it will go down in memory as one of the greatest
moments of the history of Somaliland. Anyone who comes after you
would then be just an irrelevant appendage. I say this not because I
want to slight the importance of the opposition but because I see
all they care about is how to reach the chair. Instead of building
their political careers on smart political agendas and well planned
national strategies, they hung their political destiny on one single
objective – to dethrone you. They have shown that they can
unscrupulously stoop too low, even to the point of appealing to
tribal sentiments and inciting civil war to see you go. They use the
conventional explosive tools of tribalism, poverty and ignorance to
convey their message.
Unfortunately, Mr. President, this kind of acrimonious message is
making inroads to the hearts and minds of the hungry nation. And
there is one way you can reverse the tide, one way you can pull the
rug out from under the opposition’s feet. It is simply to quit. If
you want to bring change, you can bring it by letting it go. If you
want to see in retrospect how good or bad you did during your term
there is no better way than to quit, let others take the reins and
watch their performance from afar. Sometimes Mr. President we must
let go our beloved children to allow them to forge their own way.
Somaliland has been your child for seven long years, it may be time
for you to let go to see whether you were a help or hindrance to its
growth and development; or as the anony mous saying goes
“Sometimes you have to let go to see if there was anything worth
holding on to.” So let go Mr. President, let go to show the world
that Somaliland is not just another African country with a leader
unwilling to pass the power.
Bashir Goth
bsogoth@yahoo.com
|