On the 5th of
September, 2012, I packed up my bags and moved back to Mogadishu! I know,
sounds mad to choose to live in a city known as the “most dangerous city in the
world” when I have options. But you see, I am absolutely tired of visas,
immigration offices, work permits, deportation threats, sneaking out of
countries coz my visa expired, and learning new languages. I will rather dust
off my Somali than improve my Portuguese or Swahili, I figured.
Secondly, if Somalis in the
Diaspora, who are known as “fadhi ku dirir”, or “armchair activists”, and I was
one of them for years, don’t move back to Somalia, we will have crazies,
extremists, former government-hand-out-dependents, anyone who couldn’t find a
job in the West, run this beautiful country to the ground. We literally have to
vote with our feet and come back in droves to reclaim Somalia.
This is my second time ‘moving
back home’ but this time I wasn’t running away from London’s depressing gray
sky. I packed up my bags in London in 2004 and said “I am going back home”,
showed up in Mogadishu and 4 months later, I was back in London, with the same
“I am going back home” slogan! For some odd reasons, I have always felt a pull
to this city even though I don’t have a lot of positive memories from when I
lived here years ago. That decision was speeded up when I worked on the 2012
Presidential campaign for a former boss and good friend. I was supposed to help
him only for a week in the first week of August, but I ended up staying for the
whole campaign period. Looking back, I think it was a blessing in disguise to
have stayed, at the cost of getting into a difficult situation with my then
bosses at the NGO I was working for.
I have landed at the deep
end of Somali politics and at a crossroads for this country’s bloody history of
the past 22 years. I have met few of the presidential candidates, so many of the
MPs (who were electing the President), traditional elders, women, youth, and
lots of whealer dealers. The month and half of the campaign taught me more
about the state of Somali politics than an MSc in politics did! It was raw
politics, so much clan dealings and negotiations that in the end, didn’t get
the candidate I was campaigning for elected despite so many promises and
optimism! I was amazed by the sheer lies of the many MPs who spent a lot of
time with him and promised they would vote for him. In the end, only 8 gave him
their votes compared to nearly 40 of what we thought were solid voters for our
camp for the first round (there were 3 rounds)! This will take time to digest
and learn from, because there might be good reasons for this kind of brave lies
and promises which I can’t understand at the moment.
Despite the loss in our camp,
we have gained a lot from this election. My first support was for the candidate
I was working for to win but when he lost, I was so glad to see a fresh newcomer
defeating the overly confident, brutal and loaded former President lose! I
chose not to be at the election venue that day, thank goodness! But I was glued
to the TV and on social media watching the reactions of Somalis in the
Diaspora. It was an emotional day and there was so much buzz on social media
that Somalia became a trending topic on Twitter! During the day, I went for a
drive, to get away from the tension of everyone gathering around the TV to
watch the process. I knew the real election would be delayed so I went to the
beach with some friends and driving thorough Mogadishu was like a ghost town!
OK, so the image most people have of Mogadishu is that it is a ghost town with
nutcase suicide bombers, which is not all accurate. Part of the city is very
busy and you won’t even feel you are in an unstable city, with lots of traffic,
noisy traders, police every corner. The other part, lives up to the reputation.
Ghostly, ruined buildings, empty of its former residents and just a stark
reminder of how far this civil war has gone.
I got back in time for the
elections and it was one of the most stressful experiences as emotions ran high
both on TV and on social media. Our candidate sadly lost on the first round but
the battle to remove the incumbent President was more agonizing and longer
process. At the first round, he had the most votes, 64 out of 220 votes and 23
candidates! I thought that was it, it was over for Somalia’s chance to turn a
new page. I kept calling a friend inside the election venue who usually has a
good idea of how things work in Somali politics. He reassured me that since the
second runner up has only 4 votes less, it is over for the President! I turned
to social media to see if anyone agreed, but no, the mood was one of defeat.
You could hear the noisy
shock of the nearly 2,000 people crammed in the election venue, thorough the
live TV coverage. The minute the results were announced, almost everyone, apart
from the President, were on their feet. Presumably, those with the lowest votes
just got annoyed and left to evaluate the financial damage and others had to
reshuffle their allegiance and do last minute campaign to either boost the
President’s votes or make sure they give all their support to the runner up.
The first round was supposed to produce 4 candidates with the most votes among
the 23, second round was supposed to eliminate 2 of the 4 and last round to
produce a President. However, the first round produced such an unexpected and
imbalanced numbers that it upset the neat plan, with 64 for the incumbent President,
60 for a totally fresh face, Hassan Sheikh, 37 for the incumbent Prime Minister
and 20 votes for a businessman newcomer!
To make the situation even
more tense, and maybe because they realized they had no chance and now the real
fight was to block the incumbent President from staying in office, both 3rd
and 4th runner ups decided to throw in their towels! They both also gave
short speeches calling for MPs to support ‘change for Somalia’, which we all
understood to mean vote the new guy in.
Few hours later the result
was announced, after a lot of behind the scene last minute desperate moves by
both sides, incumbent President apparently giving cash out to MPs to buy their
votes, from the tinted-windowed black landcruiser parked in the courtyard of
the election venue. There are also reports for the Mogadishu mayor lobbying for
him by asking the candidates with the least votes to give the President their
support! The mayor is supposed to stay out of this, or at least not be so
blatant about it, it shows the over-confidence of all those in his camp about
his re-election!
The second round counting
was such a surprise I couldn’t believe it, I don’t think anyone could. The
count was like, for every 20 votes, 3 went to the President and the rest to
this totally fresh new face to politics! If there was a written profile of the
new guy online, google search would have probably crashed that evening!
Everyone was on social media and on the phone asking, who the hell is this guy?
How did he pay (no other way can he defeat Shariif, the deep pocketed) to get
these many votes? The answer is probably, a lot of Arab money and he was lucky
enough to be in a place where he was competing against a guy who symbolized
what Somalis are trying to bury and leave behind, a never ending transitional
government and a deeply corrupt one at that. Talk about being at the right
place at the right time, with a bit of work of course, to get 60 votes in the
first place, takes a lot.
This was a massive
achievement. Somalia has been under a limbo “transitional government” since
2006 and we needed to move on to a more permanent and stable government.
Apart from the hope raised
by these changes, the people I have met during the campaign, especially younger
Somalis with a vision of future Somalia I could relate to, has ignited a fire
in me to want to return and contribute somehow. This is a place I dreamt of
returning and living peacefully, under a functioning government. This was an
opportunity I couldn’t pass up. I just had to make the move and think later,
about how to survive in a city where you need a bodyguard to move around. Apart
from the fact that it is very expensive, it is also not how I ever imagined
living. And how do you make a decent living in Mogadishu if you want to stay
away from politics and don’t have money for business? Too many questions and I
would have easily backed out, the solution was in dive first and think later,
as usual.
