Ahmed Said

The transitional federal Government (TFG) of Somalia watches the clock ticking as its mandate expires this August in 2011.

The row heated up when Somali PM responded saying the people of Puntland support the TFG but it is the Puntland administration that is causing the problem for personal gains. The speech prompted anger from Puntland demonstrators, who were chanting for support for the Puntland administration and calling for the resignation of president Sheikh Shariif and the TFG.

The Somali Transitions Federal Government (TFG), since its formation a few years ago, there has been a chaotic realm of political confusion, corruption, and cute rows between top officials, which habitually follows a road to zero where things fall into self-fulfilling prophecy of negativity and lack of tangible accomplishments in the must-do tasks the government should be doing instead of being engrossed in internal feuds that divides it into entities of self-interest groups and individuals. So far, this has reflected on the usual political bickering that happen between every president and prime minister that sit in the presidential palace of the TFG. The list of the presidents and prime ministers of the TFG who fought over political differences is too long; Abdualhi Yusuf Vs Geedi, Nur Ade Vs Abdulahi Yusuf, and recently, Sheikh Sharif and Sharmarke; the question is, will the same something happen between president Sharif and the new prime minister, Mohamed Abdulahi Mohamed (Farmajo)? Or things will be different where the president and the new prime minister focus on the huge challenges that the TFG currently faces, which is the dysfunctional traits of the TFG itself, which controls a few street in Mogadishu, plus the stiff armed opposition waged by the Islamists, who control most of Southern and central Somalia? The answers to those questions will be provided by the happenings of the future but how things develop will not be left to chance but how the TFG and its president and prime minister handle their political posture and cooperation will be the key. However, the status quo of the TFG sounds like a smoker who finds it hard to quit smoking; for instance, from the Sharmarke´s government and beyond, the TFG failed to organize itself to a degree where it can expand its control beyond the few streets it controls in the capital; the TFG failed to give its institutions the synergy they need to work together. The TFG fall into a hole of bad habits where corruption, lack of focus on important things and lack of fulfilling its mandate creep in. In a nutshell, eight months left for the TFG and the challenges ahead for the new prime minister are immense, such as forming a cabinet with quality than with quantity. Well, will the TFG quit its bad habits? Or it will be like a smoker who finds it hard to quit smoking?

This feud between the top Somali officials might encourage the Al-Qaeda-linked Islamist rebels of Al-Shabab to step up their attacks on the government. Al-Shabab has being trying since 2008 to overthrow the UN-recognized government led by moderate Islamist Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed, which controls only a few streets of the capital, Mogadishu.

To say how to restore nationalism in Somalia is quite simple; to stop doing all the negative things that the Somali people and others have being doing to Somalia since the civil war started and beyond, but implementing that is quite difficult without collective involvement and honest reconciliation for and by the Somali people. If the Somali people don´t recognize that as a nation their internal power is indispensable in creating a peaceful and prosperous future for Somalia, then foreign dependence is secondary to any internal option of national diligence; the Somali people are the only mighty forces who can dig themselves out of this tragic black hole of uncertainty, and as integral as the Somali collective involvement is the Somali individual´s participation in this operation of digging Somalia out of this black hole so that the lost Somali nationalism can be restored.

Holocaust Denial is not yet a crime in the United States, but if here you publicly deny the Holocaust, imagine how many people you are offending or ask yourself what benefit does your Denial of the Holocaust bring to the world? On the other hand, if you hate those who petpetrated the Holocaust, then were all the German people under the Nazy Germany guilty or some of them were guilty like Hitler? So, again you are right if you want to draw cartoons depicting those who petpetrated the Holocaust, but it would feel unwise to draw cartoons indiscriminately insulting the whole nation of Germany. The same logic applies here; you are right if you want to draw cartoons that inhumanely depict terrorism, but it feels unwise and incosiderate to draw offensively pointless cartoons that trash Islam and Muslims without showing any informative or artistic values.

At this context of the Information Age Technology, no matter what side, group or argument you belong to or what ideology you believe in, honest dialogue and truth searching research are the only answers to the seemingly unmovable obstacles that separate the Muslim world and the West; the extremes and the moderates of both the Muslim world and the Western world should acknowledge that propaganda, hatred and violence will never have clear winners or achieve anything positive other than prolonging destruction and mistrust; this will only create more losers who are blind to the two correct highways to a beautiful world, which are peaceful co-existence and productive cooperation; this planet belongs to every human being no matter what culture or religion, so it is our collective responsibility as wise human beings to preserve it for our future children to inherit a destruction-free world from us, a world that constantly enjoys collective harmony between the human race.

After Al-Shabab´s take-over of Kismayo in October this year, cracks of division in Hizbul Islam were emerging implicitly from the background as to ways to reverse Al-Shabab´s expansion to Hizbul Islam-held territories; due to morale undermined by clan lines in its fighting forces and the generally rigid position of Al-Shabab, Hizbul Islam failed to hold together its allied coalition to effectively counterattack Al-Shabab. Instead, after the Al-Shabab´s capture of Kismayo, Hizbul Islam´s leader, Sheikh Aweys, gave simple interview to BBC Somali Service shunting aside the real questions as if he were a hostage; these days Sheikh Aweys seems to have stopped being prolific with his usual political propaganda against the West, the Somalia´s Transitional Federal Government and the African Union Peacekeepers in Somalia. He rarely talks to the media…

As soon as Al-Shabab took over Kismayo last week from Hizbul Islam, they started implementing their strict version of the Islamic law by carrying out amputations on three men accused of robbery in southern Somalia. In Kismayo Al-Shabab masked men used machetes to cut off the limps of those three men whom were not allowed to appeal or have access to lawyers. Al-Shabab controls much of Central and Southern Somalia and operates openly in the capital, Mogadishu, confining the government and approxsemately 5000 African peacekeepers to a few blocks of the city.

The jump in piracy off the Indian Ocean coast of Somalia is more dangerous than ever before overtaking the traditionally-piracy-plagued area of Straits of Malacca in south east Asia.

In the modern history of the mankind, there have been many civil wars in which a million or more people were killed and contrarily, peace was restored and the people involved in those civil wars were reconciled with each other and re-erected their government systems without falling into further anarchy and civil disorder; one example is more than enough and it is Rwanda; however, the case of Somalia has become more complicated than that of Rwanda though the problem of Rwanda was bigger, and since the UN was established in 1945, there has not been a single member state which lacked central government for almost two decades; Somalia is the only one. To sum up the essence of this article in a few words, clan addiction is a silent killer of the Horn of Africa nation of Somalia, and the solution to stop this silent killer is in the hands of the Somali people themselves...

If every Somali citizen uses his or her good judgement, there will be no bias in favor of or against any clan, because clan-based ignorance is a disease that keeps us from seeing the big picture, which is the fact that we're one people with one language, one religion, one culture and one country. The clan thing is really an obstacle to peace.

There are certain areas you don't have to leave out of truth searching: try to come to your own conclusion without anybody else telling you what to think about the news, do enough research before something that is not right shapes your thinking, and always keep your head above water to avoid drowning in the baseless development of certain news.