What kind of leaders does Somaliland need?
So what kind of leaders does Somaliland need? What qualities would we like to see in them? And can anybody be a leader?
Leadership is a very tough assignment. It needs maturity and mentality. It needs vision and future-mindedness. It needs integrity and audacity. It helps to have had on-the-job training.
But not any leader is leader; not any leader raises expectations about what people could be any of the time. Good leader is the one who gets his people from where they are to where they have not been. The public does not fully understand the world into which it is going. Leaders must invoke an alchemy of vision, ideas that contribute to the unified sense of mission and thereby to the harmony of the whole. The art of creative leadership is the art of institution building, the reworking of human and technological materials to fashion an organism that embodies new and enduring values. Those leaders who do not are ultimately judged failures, even though they may be popular at the moment.
Abdurahman Ahmed Ali was the man who led SNM to victory. He was the man who became the first Somaliland president after the defeat and downfall of Siyad Barre's regime. But he became a president at a time when everything was dull and disaster and institution building was something looking like the reign of Orwell's Animal Farm, where the working classes gather at the windows of the Farmhouse to see pigs and men sitting together at the table, indistinguishable from each other. His character as one above that mode of life had to do with his failure to fashion a form of effective government.
Mohamed Ibrahim Eqal, whose human nature had no will to take a holistic stand on issues of institution building that the cause demands or dictates it, took over the office. Egal arrived on the job manifestly pushed and prejudiced. He found financers of his campaign, he found a ragtag of SNM Lieutenants who united behind him, he found militias he manipulated and managed them by tribal intrigues, he then built a small base that supported his presidency. The fact that Egal was a demagogue, whose motives, goals, grace and grit were all for a purpose, had a lot to do with how he rose to the presidency of Somaliland. Those of us who believe that Egal had dealt the things that were very much up in the air at that time with a magic wand or merit are forgetting history.
The seeds of Eqal's follies and failures were sown much earlier, however. In 1960, his manners of leadership had enabled the people of Somaliland to go into union with Somalia, and later, when the union went bad, he did not even consider it important to be a leader in fighting for the re-evaluation of the union. In 1991, Egal was the first Somaliland politician who openly opposed Somaliland secession. In less than a year or so, sadly, if not surprisingly, Egal reversed his position, not with the readiness to reinvigorate Somaliland secession, but with the love to occupy the position of presidency by whatever shame and dull blade he could find.
Egal's political career – his early days in Somaliland independence, his years in the agony and anxieties of imprisonment, his return to Somaliland and rise to its presidency - proves the point that Egal was a man who did not have the capacity to grow. If he knew how to grow and get his mind open to the measureless human problems, the demands, needs, and requirements of his people would have been in the focus of his attention. The degree of his attention was his only measure of chair, living with his eyes on it, from his childhood to his adulthood, and the people were so stupid that they never suspected the trick.
History judges leaders on their handling of the national interests, not on their passions for power and privileges. The view that our past political leaders were mostly the main part of the problem that had plagued Somaliland progress, rather than a people to help it prosper, is too evident.
Egal and Abdurahman Tuur were two different things. Everyone was born to what little thing he was, but they had one thing in common. Both of them were a product of a time and generation that was long in eclipse but whose outlook and attitudes are now making a comeback at the highest levels of Somaliland government.
Today the more realistic question is: since leadership improvement is part of peoples' concerns in a way that it hasn't been for the old generation, is it not reasonable to assume, then, that the present generation aught to beat the imperfection of the previous one?
After Abdurahman tuur and Egal, Somaliland elected a president and a parliament to maintain the awareness of what is at stake in the poor country. It is how the elected president, the ministers he appointed and the parliament performed in that context – out of the spotlight – that determines whether or not the perspective of today's leadership has a better light over the one of the past.
Presidency, the highest post of any nation, will always have unlimited responsibility. It is a profession that is as hard as a rock as anybody might think. It is too intellectual and far rigid in its roles and requirements for the average person. By its essence therefore it requires an extraordinary person with extraordinary skills. It also takes quite a bit of learning.
One of the things new presidents, if they are intelligent, always try is to know the weakness of those before them and learn from mistakes and get better. Part of the lore and litany is to learn what one has to hold back when it comes to the issues of nation-building; what potholes were there; what mistakes one made; what more one needs to do in order to emulate the role of leadership. Evidently, he whoever uses his brain gets the guidance that roads are made by walking, that nations are built by seeking and searching the good, that achievements are made by exploring elaborate ideas, and that each exploration is only a means to the next
Dahir Riyaale Kahin became Somaliland president when Eqal met his day. He did not come to the office as a politician who had merits that aided his ascendancy to the presidency. His position as a vice president to Egal just allowed him to step in.
As merit is not a measure that people pay attention to when they are ever going to elect a president or a parliament, the phrases 'what Riyaale was and what aided him to win Somaliland's first presidential election in 2003' are not important. What is important is what Dahir Riyaale has become after he was elected to the highest post of the nation. Has President Riyaale intellectualized a lot in his administration? Has he come to know that good institution will help him go a long way? Good governance and great intimation will get a boost?
The one thing we'd think the Somaliland people didn't need any more was of leader who neither has the ability nor the intellect that could add anything chronically gracious to his administration. There really is no point to have a leader who has no enough courage to question a system, not just to understand the existing trends but to change the whole structure into honest forms of transparency and accountability. What have leaders with no inclination to honest government ever done for Somalis, except they made them lag behind?
It would take a look to enumerate the ways in which the combination of political cowardice and callousness still grips Somaliland people – still holds its appeal – across generations. How Riyaale, as a president, has ascribed to this effect?
Riyaale is just another president who began his career by failing to fault not only earlier students of leadership for their preoccupation with position and personal interests, but also by not even feeling the fact that such attention blinded them to the far more important task of instilling the people. Suffice it to say that by the time Riyaale was elected the consensus that has evolved from his leadership behavior had become so badly frayed that the chasm of reform in administrative methods and political timing was on the point of coming apart.
President Riyaale failed to form the kind of government the people wanted. He did keep doing what his predecessor was doing and did not take a different path. He made the opportunities even darker by forming a government that, right from the outset, has seemed directionless, uninspired and addicted to the empty calories of generalities. He did not even devote all the government's efforts to improving its organization, to enriching the quality and content of its work, to creating closer contact with the masses, and to working out increasingly correct and accurate working-class tactics and strategy. He just re-instated those people who worked with Eqal to his new administration and re-enforced the styles Eqal's administration, a system widely assumed to be politically fatal at the time, and one in which anyone who has a heart that can not accept everything strongly dissents and despises.
Riyaale's Cabinent: Most of Riyaale's Ministers do not have the imagination, skill and passions to sustain great tasks. All of them are unable to demonstrate the dignity to create a sense of responsibility – an exciting and emotional touch that the people can relate to, as well as a set of values that people feel satisfying – a common element that is being able to create an invigorating nationalistic message. They neither look for advise nor listen to anybody, as if all of them are blessed by the nature any more than it does to anybody else. Besides this they are all mean and bitter, and play dirty and do things they would not have done. Every Minister in Riyaale's administration has the mentality that public treasure is no one's treasure, and that, if he does not take it, someone else will take. The result?
The saga diffused from one Ministry to the other in a way that small chance is there for regularity or exact system, for nothing but fraud is always turning up, and the needful things, like remaining faithful, when nobody is looking, like being honest, when the office is empty, are often lacking and out of place. Those who get wrong in my reasoning must explain why not we see a Minister or a Manager in Riyaale's administration who got around to one project once he has been victorious in another.
The deepest wound is not that there are rampant corruption and malignant careers in Riyaale's administration. These are attributes we can understand. People have a piece of it in themselves. Lesser sociopaths move around them all the time. What is amazing is not corruption, but government's continuous support to those who exercise it and turn blind eyes to the suffering of its victims.
Somaliland Parliament: Nothing is more amazing than that the people should be others that they absolutely were not. Any elected parliament can only be credible if its members actually fulfill their duty and do a difference for the people they are supposed to represent. It is from the point of view of what the parliament did for the people that we assess its credibility.
Responsibility matters most, and in this regard it is good to know that the parliament was not elected to follow the tired routines and failed policies of the past but to make the formulations that could serve not the interests of any party or the agenda of any one tribe but the aspirations of all Somalilanders. Moreover, the parliament members were elected to lay down the rules under which regularity is enforced in the state, and eradicate authoritatively and uncompromisingly all forms of misconduct that would create tension in ethics and exact system, and ensure that the country is led aright and its rules are respected and regulated in letter and spirit.
The significance of any legislative body is revealed by what its members do when the moment is hard. If we thought the parliament members would represent the best chance to make a clear break with the meaningless rubric traditions, they failed to find any phenomena other than the one that those before them had used to engage with Somaliland. Even if nature had bestowed some of them a bit of gift, none had improved it by a learned education and experience.
Teetering under the weight of their own conflicting ideas and internal contradictions, the Somaliland MPs see in evil things innocent and give offence where offence is unnecessary. They never turn to the past for advice, never make use of what belongs to very different times and never consider where the Somaliland people are and where they will be tomorrow. Add to that the fact the PMs always spend their time in dawdling more than they talk in what must be done for the people and, moving in a realm of rubric tradition, retelling to themselves and to others the story of tribal intrigues and meaningless routines, while failing to rectify the past where they have to, leaving untouched the ways in which they could reshape Somaliland politics and begin the work of remaking Somaliland, to steer the nation out of the old ailing politics that still continues to criminalize the ethics and standards of civilization.
Somaliland opposition leaders: Who the hell are they? Heroes and hope-raisers, who could make Somaliland strong, some people might say. But Ahmed Silaanyo and Faisal Ali Waraabe are far from being that.
Ahmed Silaanyo does not carry a "map" of a family model in his head. His pert but pertinent history tells his own tale. He has a habit that never allows him to feel what binds people together and what pulls them apart, and that is what always makes him unable to find the common stake Somaliland people have in one another and let his mind reflect that spirit as well. His political approaches are the mechanical movements of divide and distortion, from the day he joined SNM, to the day he was elected as SNM chairman, to the day he lost it to Abdurahman Tuur, to his voice today. All this shows that Mr Siilaanyo did not even learn how he could correct himself in a way that might enable him to be a leader who can, if he rises to the national office, make Somaliland a country in which no one is left.
Faisal Ali Waraabe is not a man whose political ideology is remarkably sharp. In his drive for personal ambition he acts as a mere adventurer and his actions – in performance, politics and speaking – are devoid of content. He always moves in a realm of mudsling and muttering. He is just like a child seeing the sky reflected in a puddle after rain, letting his foot touch the puddle, which at his touch will turn into a raging flood that will sweep him away. This gives us some idea how Faisal should have taken a lot of training in politics before his becoming a politician.
If the opposite of what is said about these gentlemen is true, why a really dead-end distraction always develops from their political debates and discussions, and one asks oneself what more will they say and do when what one all hears is stupid ruses or rhetoric? "We never heard them say we need to be one. We heard them criticizing but not contributing solutions."
The picture we find is that opposition leaders are not men who are finding their political voices for the first time. They tried and tested their voices, and there is only one truth about their trials and tendency – no one can dispute – that they never know that loving a chair is one thing and leading a nation is another.
Each century, while giving birth to new ideas, gains new perceptions. Each and every leader of other nations looks differently at the world than those before them did. The reason why they look at the world in a different way is that they have witnessed the appearance of a range of factors that compel them to distinguish the difference between the problems of the past and the present ones and the way they use to encounter them.
Think of the way in which President Riyaale began his political career and the way he seems to spell it out. Riyaale, who has had an executive position for a considerable number of years, is still unable to understand today's many cares and concerns, leave alone that he is even aware of what his tenure as a president will look like. His tendency to surround himself with unskilled and uncredentialed personalities proves the point that he did not even learn seriously what leadership responsibility is all about.
If I am not mistaken, Somaliland people are always led by leaders who are not guided by the circumstances that are variable and changing day after day. It has become so common and so seemingly agreeable that every individual government repeats the mistakes committed by its predecessor. The wonderment is why it is hard for all Somaliland leaders to look at the world differently than those before them did, and whoever becomes a president or a parliamentarian can not read his thoughts any other way.
When myopia to rebel grips the Somali society time and time again, what would it acquire, and whom would it identify as its adversary? Is our land not a land of sages and saints? Is our nation infertile to produce keen leadership? Is arrogance what Somaliland leadership can all in all evoke? Where the care is that leadership is known to inspire? The sheer perfection of its design and dedication? The elegance of its strides? The searing integrity of its elaborate element? The qualities of its nobility, ideas of dignity, of unself-interestedness, of largeness of spirit, and of a rising above spite, faction and greed?
The sensation gives us timeless lessons to remember. Hereunder is one that is worthy of note.
There is a temptation to slack off when you feel great about what you have achieved – to forget yesterday's humiliation and insecurity to accept the illusions – that your struggle has ended. Good professional athletes or great thinking men know the danger of complacency about both in their professional and personal lives. Some reach high in their middle years and, when the adulation stops, settle into marginal careers and conditions. Some even hit bottom. Those who survive are the ones who prepare for their post-glory days. Somaliland public figures who ignore their past are like ones who stand in the rain, arguing about its wetness while becoming drenched. If they tell to themselves they must be what they can not be is somewhere near the same thing as their becoming a failure.
How could we believe that our leaders are more aware of what our people need when most of them are not even brooding the past, leave alone they are to ensure that the future is safe? Attempts to push today back to yesterday are too dangerous, especially at this day and age, and especially as they concern government affairs and reworking of human resources, where the price of a single error is irreversible catastrophe.
It is all bad and it is all pain and above all it is desperately sad. The leadership of today has no better light over the one of the past. The beautiful ones are not yet seen, the men with the basso profondo and elegant profiles.
The dogmas of the past are inappropriate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with challenges, and the people need to rise with the challenges. As our case is new, so Somaliland people need leaders who must think anew and act anew. The people can not afford the ills of our tribal politics and need new approaches and understanding that could guarantee success and sense of tomorrow. It needs leaders with transformational qualities, who have the capacity to understand that the imperative to act wisely and well is as urgent; politicians who can sense any problem before the public can feel it; men whose understanding is thousand times ahead of that of the public.
The need of our time is nothing more than a leadership – a leadership that is intellectual if we are wise, analytical if we are ambitious, humane if we care enough, considerate if we are kind, honest if we want to live in an honorable life, prudent and pragmatic if we want to beat the problems and the property we share.
The property that Somalis share in common is poverty. And poverty, anywhere, on any scale, is a potential strife. Ignorance is another. But neither is beyond repair and remedy. Human development and its mobilization can make miracles. No country can overcome poverty unless its people beat it. Proverbially people who have a why to live for can find almost any how. But this depends on how people read their thoughts and arrange their ideas. Simple reasons explain how.
Right thinking leaders look at their time with a measure of suspicion and circumspection. In conditions of widespread poverty and communal strife, they increasingly work on how best they can get these problems licked. They do not try to do everything for their countries at once. They pace their policies and patch the holes and put things together in a way that gives a good start. They think not of how to clean the country's roads; instead, they pick up a bit of garbage on the road and drop it in a litter bin. They think not of how to feed the country's millions of hungry children; instead, they help the kid on the corner to get a cup of milk.
Mohamed Mahatir of Malaysia did just this; he thought very small when he rose to the power of his country. From his thinking small came rural micro-credit and Malaysian projects, a powerful instrument of social change, opportunities for Malaysians in Malaysia.
Obviously, nations will not develop unless the leadership at all levels reaches some minimum standard of maturity. The matured leader always picks up a talented team. If there is no talent on the team the leadership chooses, the system does not work well.
It is only by a collective effort, by bringing together the best minds in the country, by following the reasonable norms of contacts and cooperation that people can preserve their home, can make it better and safer.
Nothing, however, is more frightening than the terror attacks that shook Hargeisa City on October 29, 2008. It is easy, as we remember the loss of innocent lives, to realize that deranged individuals are even now thinking up ways to bring Somaliland state to premature end. Recollections of terrorist attacks on Somaliland's engine room, UNDP office and Ethiopian Embassy remind us that radicals and fanatics are yearning to gain a place in history by trying to destabilize and disable the country from going forward.
In conclusion, arrogance, and the illusion to occupy positions and acquire wealth without intelligence, is not a substitute for having the skills and ideas and talent required to prevent the problems causing pains in the first place. That is something we would be well advised to bear in mind. If we won't, "Somaliland" will not flourish, any more than a potato, if it be planted and replanted for too long a series of generations in the same worn-out soil. What this means is that Somaliland will always find itself in where "what is leadership" is not the first question from impresario considering an ethic representation! And one wonders where the hope of having good leadership will come from when cranks and the criminals we know – SNM Lieutenants - who led Somaliland people into civil war, are still trying to recapture the power, in a nation that badly needs some adult supervision.
Best regards
Jama Falaag
Saudi Arabia
jama.ismail@kuehne-nagel.com
source: Saylicipress.net
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