Divided into we and they, S/land will be history.
Dictatorship is supposed to be, and of course it is, a system of the earlier centuries that has lost its shine and sheen. Why and how dictatorship has lost its relevance in this time and age is that dictators had been always engaged in doing more harm than doing good for people.
Among the worst Dictators some African and Asian countries have seen include Mohamed Siyad Barre, the most talkative and the least educated dictator, who was seen fleeing from Mogadisho with a loot of unaccounted wealth, Mobute Sese Seko of Zaire, who amassed an opulent wealth estimated to be over US$5 billion by selling his nation’s riches, the self-proclaimed Emperor Jean Bedel Bokassa of Central Africa, who was accused of slaughtering his critics and eating their flesh, but In his final days after being deposed from office, was posthumously rehabilitated by President François Bozizé in 2010, Muammar Qaddafi of Libya, who died
from injuries sustained in a firefight when loyalist forces attempted to free him, although a video of his last moments shows rebel fighters beating him to death, Ferdinand Marcos from Philippines, who engineered the biggest money laundering in Philippine history, whose wife Imelda Marcos had more than three thousand pairs of Gucci shoes, one of the most expensive shoes of Italian origin and the list goes on and on.
Dictators are rulers who wish to see whatever they say goes, regardless of what the majority of their citizens think. How dictators make that dream come true relies on some strategies that dictators share in common.
The two Colonels are no exception and their own political strategies include:
a) To keep highly educated individuals away from positions of influence and authority within their administration.. They often invite yes-men to their system, rather than to welcome men of wisdom and courage to
S/land government. The chief goal of this strategy is to marginalise potential elites
to ensure their continued survival in power;
b)To use the threat of arbirary arrests as a regular tool to intimidate powerful critics into accepting their ruling system. Character assassination s also a common tool that the Colonels always resort to when they feel that their might and main are at risk;
c) To destroy the separation of powers, in order to consolidate their control and undermine checks and balances;
d) To consider themselves as exceptional individuals who deserve entitlement and therefore never imagine that they need ideas that can create things that never were. The two Colonels only regurgitate what those before them used to do and think it is new. Remarkably, the two Colonels look at their past history in anger and look at the future in fear. They never even forgive before they pray, if they perform the prescribed daily prayers.
Politics is just a mindset, the more you exercise it and improve the definition of how you exercise it, the stronger it becomes and the more it can expand and attract more people. This is how intellectual leaders understand both politics and power.
Looking closely at how the two Colonels used and stlll use to behave and exercise power and politics, we appallingly come to realise that political messages are on the rise and that it is important to understand not only what people like me are saying,
but the mindset that is motivating the two Colonels’ ruling styles and their reasoning – the way they use the power that is entrusted with them and define the legitimacy of how they execute it.
First of all, the faculty of how this country is to be led and ruled aright has just passed the level that the two Colonels could understand. The theory of public policies is basically more complicated than how the two Colonels had at first realised.
Here is one good evidence of what
inspires Colonels’ leadership behavior. By centralising power within the executive branch and weakening or co-opting other branches of government, such as the useless Guurti, the judiciary and the legislative, the two Colonels have ignorantly eroded the separation of powers. All S/land legal institutions have become workplaces that endorse and enforce whatever Muse Bihi and his administration suggest, resulting in letting all other government branches be their liabilities. The reason why the Colonels do want to keep all branches that constitute the government under their tight control is to hide their abuse of power for their own personal gains.
The erosion of separation of powers,
which is the division of government responsibilities into different branches to limit any one branch from exercising the functions of another, has accelerated Muse Bihi’s free-riding opportunities to
put S/land under one man rule, resulting
a form of government in which Muse Bihi and his two helpers, Mohamed Kahin and Saleebaan Geel possess absolute power without S/land’s effective constitutional limitations.
Without reflection, Muse Bihi went blindly on his way, creating more ill-planned and ill-articulated moves, and failing to achieve anything useful. The outcome of “I-rule-S/land-as-I-want-and-wish attitide’ is that
S/land is now sitting down to the banquet of blood that oozes out of dead bodies, of brothers, causins, nephews and neighbours killing one another
The armless teens who were slaughtered indiscriminately in Hargeisa, Burco and Eerigaabo cities by Muse Bihi’s special security secret services during the peaceful demonstration tbat was held by opposition parties on 11 August 2022, the war in Lasanod that affected S/land socially, economically and politically, the rebels that recently climbed Gacan-libaax mountain and the war that happened between them and RRU forces on 11 August 2023, all these events and their grieve casualities and consequences occured as a result of foolish and failing politics engineered by Colonel Muse Bihi, Colonel Mohamed Kahin, who only knows how to level baseless allegations and accusations at Abdirahman Cirro, and Saleebaan Gaal, who in today’s Guurti session openly defined the war that happened between Gacan-libaax dissidents and RRU forces as a war between a particular clan and all other S/land clans. It is a modus operanda that re-enforces the beginning of the phase
two of the war in 1994.
The question that needs asking is: Can S/land survive under the leadetship of the two Colonels?
It is true that attempts by the two Colonels to keep S/land population in a constant seesaw, confusion and uncertainty is not what common sense understands. To see S/land societies divided into four sections is not also what can encourage how this country could be saved from devastation and destruction.
Evidently, hereunder is how S/land societies are divided:-
a) Clans that tribalism motivates them and just ralliy blindly behind Muse Bihi.
b) Sycophants (Guulwadayaal) who just preach that peace is important for all, but don’t really know how to find out exactly what is a threat to S/land peace and stability. These sycophants, if they want peace, must prepare for war.
c) Clans that support opposition parties for they have the feeling that the time and the turn in which they should rise to S/land power has come. The fact that presidential election was intentionally postponed by the incumbrnt administration has angered those tribes that support opposition parties and that anxiety enticed them to respond to.Muse Bihi and his administration in revulsion.
d) The other division is at lost of what is actually the root cause of the political conflict that only arise during presidential election times. This division is blameless because it consists mainky of poor and powerless people.
The majority of S/land people, particularly people who hail from the middle tribe are worrying and frustrated. They are worrying about what the fate of S/land will look like should the confrontation between Gacan-libaax rebels and the current administration’s forces would escalate into an allout war.
Of course, S/land population has the right to worry about their destiny because the breakout of civil war is a disaster that has its weight, wariness and worries.
But worrying will never shape the outcome of wars. The divide that is visible in S/land population causes the society’s inability to mediate Muse Bihi and opposition parties. Rather, it encourages Muse Bihi to stick to
his position to use power and even it enables him to ignore all calls for renewed efforts to enhance peace.
If S/land elders, elites and intellectuals are divided on who caused and still continues to create conspiracies that only catalyse further conflicts, where the confidence and courage to make peace prevail will come from?
Muse Bihi doesn’t have the ability and intellect to put everything, anything that might add fuel to the standing conflict and clashes of ideas down to the table. He is not born to do that. He believes in obstinancy, thinking that obstinancy is the weapon of the wise. He is just clear at creating enmity and everything else that worsens the present situation. Muse Bihi and his colleagues don’t know that the basics of politics is compromise, especially when political disputes arise between the ruling party and opposition parties.
Having said that, division on what is good for all is the weapon of the idiots. Unity founded upon principle, upon shared values, upon truth and morality, law and order is the commitment of the wise. The moment of consciousness that doesn’t come up when events happening around us presage bad signs for the future is useless.
The first, the second and the last options for resolving political conflicts are disussion and dialogue. That is, there is no other way that is less harmful than resolving differences that arise between public units than negotiation mechanisms.
Negotiation is an important tool to have when conflicts do arise because it stretches our thinking and our brain’s ability to compare and contrast opposing views of the conflicting sides and assess and analyse how those views might be compromisable in a different context.
Finally, the problem with S/land is not about being led, but it is about leading. And this can only be remedied at this moment if those who are now in power let their intellect, their attention and their imagination invite them to focus on how their weakness, their want, their intention and attitude define and describe their difference and dispute with the opposition parties.
Non of us can predict when the two Colonels and Saleebaan Geel will realise that their likes and dislikes cannot be a skill in war at any rate.
Divided into we and they, S/land will be history.
By :Jamafalaag
S/land, Hargeisa.
jamafalaag@gmail.com
As per usual the opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not reflect the opinions of qarannews.com
