Is Saylie (Saylici) Silanyo’s Sarah Palin?

Just as US voters have asked whether Sarah Palin is ready to become president so are Somalilanders about Silanyo’s choice. In the US Presidential elections, Senator John McCain stunned even his closest allies when he picked Sarah Palin as his running mate for Vice-Presidential candidate. Sarah Palin was the little-known governor of Alaska, a state with just three electoral votes in the US Electoral College of 538.

She has been a governor just two years after serving as the mayor of Wasilla, a small town of just over 5000. Sarah Palin, 44 years old, was thought to appeal to a narrow group of conservative voters, a group cool to John McCain. She had very little national appeal and no experience outside of Alaska.

It quickly turned out that her worldview was also limited. She received her first passport in 2007 in order to visit an Alaskan National Guards contingent serving at the Kuwait-Iraqi border. In spite of these shortcomings Sarah Palin energized the conservative base. Her rallies dwarfed those of her boss. Women, including some supporters of Hilary Clinton, suddenly found an alternative to Hilary in the attractive, self-described hockymom. Many of these women activists were looking for a female to break the glass-ceiling in politics. Only one other woman, Geraldine Feraro, a Democrat ever appeared on a national ticket, but she lost.

Soon after the initial euphoria, people started asking serious questions. Sarah Palin, initially shielded from the media flunked her first interviews. It became clear that she knew very little of foreign affairs and was clearly unprepared for such a high national office. Many of Hilary Clinton’s women supporters soon found out that they did not share many of Palin’s conservative ideals. John McCain, if he wins the elections, would become the oldest first term president in US history. He is 72 years old now and has had three prior incidents of the skin cancer melanoma, a disease curable when caught early.

Even Republican supporters of John McCain started asking "what if" questions. Is Sarah Palin ready to become the commander-in-chief of the most powerful nation in the world? The answer turned out a resounding "no". Joe Klein, a respected journalist who had known John McCain for a long time said that McCain’s choice of Sarah Palin destroyed his faith in the Senator’s judgment. He is not alone in that critique even in Republican activist circles.

Somaliland appears to face a similar dilemma. Our veteran politician, Ahmed Mohamoud Silanyo, Chairman of Kulmiye, has selected the young Mr. Abdourahman Saylie (Saylici in Somali) as his running mate. From a look at his bio, Abdourahman Saylie has even less experience than Sarah Palin, who could at least boast that she is the governor of a very rich State with a budget in the billions of dollars. He has had no national experience whatsoever and not the world experience required to move Somaliland forward in a historically critical period.

Like Sarah Palin, Saylie was chosen to fulfil a simple arithmetic in the forthcoming elections; to split the clan base of the incumbent president. Saylie who hails from the same clan family as the President was expected, the logic went, to split his sub-clan from that of the President, thereby weakening the president’s Awdal region support. Even the likelihood of that scenario turning out true is doubtful. Many people point out that at the end Awdalities (Awdalians?) will not be dumb enough to dump an incumbent president for a constitutionally powerless vice-president.

As they say in Somaliland, would you pick 50 cents when you can get a dollar? More importantly, the rest of the country is asking questions quite similar to what US voters are asking. The veteran Ahmed Silanyo is not a young man, older than John McCain some say.

Would Saylie be able to step up to the plate if needed? He has spoken only of the fact that he has support within his own sub-clan. He appears to care little about pressing national issues. His sole reason for claiming the high post of Kulmiye’s VP nomination has so far been his insistence that he can get more votes in Awdal then Mr. Abdourahman Aw Ali, the veteran SNM fighter and former VP of Somaliland.

Up to now Saylie has shown no interest in national issues. The verdict of Somalilanders appears to be similar to that reached by many US voters. Saylie is not a man who should be a heartbeat away from Somaliland’s presidency in this critical period. Silanyo, who may have destroyed his party in insisting that Saylie be accepted as his running mate has never explained to the public why he chose a neophyte for that post, but analysts understand that he was only concerned with political expediency without thought or care to what happens to the nation.

The irony of it all is that like his predecessor the late Mohamed Ibrahim Egal, Silanyo is picking an untested political neophyte to bulldoze Muj. Abdirahman Aw Ali, a man who was for many years the only Awdalite fighting with the SNM. Egal could be excused because he was not in the SNM, but Silanyo, the former chairman of the SNM, who once boasted that he will die with other SNM veterans is a different matter altogether; and the reason many SNM followers have so vehemently protested Silanyo’s pick of Saylie over Muj Aw Ali.

Both John McCain and Silanyo may have made the same calculation or perhaps miscalculation.
 

Omar Darood Hassan
Norway - Askim
Email: darood2@hotmail.com