Somaliland: How Will History Remember Siilaanyo?

[Deeq A.]

Many historians are now wondering whether Siilaanyo, in fact, will be remembered as the very worst president in all of Somaliland history.

Which raises a question for today: How will Siilaanyo be viewed in history? Will he be the worst and weakest? Or will he fall into the category of faltering failures?

Before we delve into that question, perhaps it would be interesting to know what in fact constitutes presidential failure and how we arrive at historical assessments of it.

We cannot know a leader completely, his character, his integrity, his principles, his sense of judgment till he has shown his colors, ruling the people, making the laws. Experience, there is the test.

There are many lessons we learned from Siilaanyo’s leadership that history will not allow us to forget even if we try to forget them. As history is a merciless judge, it is not fanciful or even unfair if to begin with Siilaanyo’s personality.

Siilaanyo is not a relic of another age as some hypocritics assert and acerbically argue in most of the time. He is a rabble-rouser, whose political and social mindset has always been to confuse the people when he could not convince them.

In principle, Siilaanyo is not a man of his own word. Nor he is a man of integrity. Virtue is not his traditional value. Betrayal is his basic profession, and profanity his behaviour.

When it comes to the faculty of ruling, Siilaanyo is ranked lowest for his moral authority, lowest for his vision and ability to set a national agenda. He is the worst, weakest and most wicked president since Somaliland seccesion.

During his presidency, it never came into his sense that the world is ruled by brains, by justice, by morals and by fairness. To his critics, rule was an incident, to him, a vacation. He made his vagueness as a shield, his weakness as an excuse of age, his wickednes as a sign of wisdom.

It is always true that honest and skillful leaders seize the opportunites to change things for the better. In periods where there is no honest and capable leadership, society progress stands still, even if things do not move in the reverse direction.

As history is our guide, Siilasnyo has never made a vctory to celebrate in his political life. If there is any, it was surely when he was elected as a president through election fraud in 2010. Instead he brought remarkable failures to Somaliland history.

Failures do not come from what humans know; they come from what humans do or undo.Their assessments depend on what people do well and what they don’t. For this, failures that come from what leaders do or don’t, end either in failure or in victory.

First, we must consider the difference between the failure of omission and failure of commission.

The first is when a president fails to deal with a crisis thrust upon him by events beyond his control.

When Siilaanyo was elected as a president, he took the power of a country that was in decent shape, a country that had all its required legal institutions intact, the legislative body, the judiciary, the executive body, the police, the army forces, the public service.

In fact it was actually an era when it was possible to believe that politics could speak to society’s moral yearnings and be harnessed to its highest aspirations. More than anything, perhaps, this era reminds us of a time when the nation’s capacities looked limitless, when its future seemed unbounded, when Somalilanders believed that they could solve hard problems and accomplish bold deeds.

In short and sharp reflection, in the year 2010 Siilaanyo took the lead for a state that was growing like a rising sun.

Siilaanyo is the first Somaliland president who did not prove himself as a skillful leader by any practical sense. He proved that he was incapable of dealing with the national issues in any effective way. In part this was because he was a man who lacked leadership character and hence couldn’t get beyond his own narrow political vision as the country he was charged with leading slipped ever deeper into crisis day after day.

Siilaanyo is the first Somaliland president who, right from his presidential inaugration date till the end of his rotten term, gagged himself, didn’t listen to anybody; didn’t take any advice, and did hole himself up in the presidential mansion, pretending to be someone that he is not, like someone not up and around – sort of synical plot.

This pretension in part enabled Siilaanyo to introduce policies and plans that undermined the motives of the national constitution. Siilaanyo transformed Somaliland presidential palace into a stronghold of his immediate family, putting loyalty to his own tribe ahead of loyalty to the state. He avoided the responsibility for handling the national ruling affairs and empowered memebers of his immediate family to run the government according to their own outlook and interest.

Sillaanyo did not stop there. He went further and took steps that changed Somaliland state from institutional government to a traditional government. He didn’t care about how this action impacts the real meaning of what an elected institutional government is all about.

Siilaanyo’s ignorance and refusal to be open and honest with the public interests further showed a disregard for the people who put him in power, and in turn eroded public trust in the state.

This didn’t create leadership vacuum but caused mismanagement crises that seriously threatened to engulf the nation. What has made the state a hell on earth has been precisely that members of Siilaanyo’s tribe have got the chance to make it their heaven.

Looking back at Somaliland history, Siilaanyo is the man who divided SNM into foes and factions. He is the man who instigated and intensified the first civil war that happened between East and West communities in Burco. He is the man who engineered what is known as the rainbow coalition.

Moving from his original motives based on ethnic hatred, he revived to enforce the strength of rainbow coalition, which is a political tribal move meant to keep specific tribe out of Somaliland. A feeling of hatred and enmity, hard to reverse or restrain, seems to grow if faith and trust will not be offered.

Siilaanyo is the first Somaliland president who openly conflated what is legal with what is always immoral, and overtly legalised corruption practices leading from one avenue to another, considering that corruption is not a vice but a virtue to enrich certain people, till it gradually became a normal way of life in every sector of our society. From political circles to business board rooms to educational institutions to the health and judicial sectors.

Siilaanyo is the first Somsliland president who made national treasury as his private bank account. He is the first Somsliland president who brought many people of his tribe into the government and more impoertant into the army. He is the first Somaliland president who openly violated the national consitution, allowing so many personalities of his clan and cronies to loot the public wealth.

It was as if the virtue of preventing vices and promoting virtue and human values were totally out of his belief and morality. Improve ourselves, reform ourselves, become more conscious, less flawed, less proud and impulsive – all that moral values are not what Siilaanyo grew to accustom either in his political life or in his private life.

Siilaanyo not only manipulated corruption policies to get Somaliland into poverty but he then used the corruption as an excuse to transform Somaliland society in ways that proved highly deleterious.

One result from many of these policies was that the economy flipped out of control. Inflation surged into double-digit territory. In addition, Siilaanyo’s corruption policies sapped resources and threw the nation’s budget into deficit. The president made no effort to inject fiscal austerity into governmental operations, eschewing his primary weapon of budgetary discipline, the fraudulent print of Somali Shilling.

His foreign policy would almost have to be considered a failure, and fraught with disaster.

But, whatever the underlying contributors to his failure, there is no denying that he is a failed president. He never handled a single issue in a prudent presidential manner. And this is a failure of commission.

When consider in all these cases, we can conclude that Siilaanyo intention was to ruin Somaliland. No more, no less. What else could we explain?

A failure of commission is when a president actually generates the crisis through his own wrong-headed actions. That’s failure of commission.

By:Jama Falaag

jamafalaag@gmail.com

Hargeisa, Somaliland