We agree to walk in to political maze, or to the confusions we had experienced the days that Udub party had dissolved in to nothing, or Fragments of Ucid Party sought to get another name for their political aspirations. Because, it appears that we are happy with the political context regardless its continuing contradiction to our constitutional content. The right to political participation is nothing more than an empty word scratched in the legal pages, when the reality shows that it is in Silanyo’s kitchen or in Faysal Ali Warabe’s briefcase.
A county, where it is a common for a political party to reflect the desire of a given clan, or the coalition of certain clans which seeks the benefits of the political power at the expense of other citizens, is my country. It happens here, where selfish individuals and blood-corporations strife to dominate the destiny of the Majority under the misleading status of their clans. In this regard, the contextual democracy in which the voters are not intellectually free from the baseless prejudices of clan mythology, from the ancient revelations of war-ensuing poets who never used to live in a complex, congested, urban dominated world like me, is not a democracy.
Those who argue that clan institutions are the nuts and bolts of Somaliland Politics are really hijacking the political discourse for their short-living aims. Yes, when all State institutions collapsed, clans where the only remained social institution that represents the people in the post-war period. They were the starting point of our state-building or in pre-constitutional stage, but not the ends of our statehood in the future.
But when there is a prevailing political incompetency, the demand for free-size political suits could be a dominant in the market. Then, Somaliland’s Political race course, is conceded to accommodate clan-activists who only know how to speak to their clans. Clans are the strategic engagements for those who neither have the guts nor talents to come up with personalities and persuasive political rhetoric that would attract broader support from the public at large.
Recently, experiences suggest that our traditional, consensus-based approach of our conflict management appears to be unproductive, while the Constitutional Court is used as an alternative forum for the solutions of non-legal, political conflicts. We have seen the parliamentary quarrels mounting up to the extent that Speaker and his deputy scuffled before the cameras. What a pointless experience!
People are too tired of towing the sea-drifted democracy that guarantees nothing more than fruitless and outdated elections. A democracy whose agenda proves to be excluded from the social matters that affects the lives of every citizen is not democracy but a disguised hypocrisy.
Mohamed Ahmed Abdi Ba’alul (Somaliland Informer)
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