Timur Posted August 19, 2012 Our country is just a day away from ushering in a new leader. And with this moment will come new opportunities for businessmen, doctors, students, and mothers. I want to use this moment to speak to Somalia’s leaders and the masses whose destinies they will inherit the power to control. Let’s imagine for a moment that myself, the reader, and whomever is elected president are all banished from the country for a period of twenty years. When that time expires we will be allowed back into Somalia to see the fruits of the republic. Upon returning, whatever scenario we experience on the ground will be a simulation of the policies of the nation’s first post-transitional government. We will encounter one of two outcomes, resulting from the divergence of the reforms ushered in by our next president. Somalia 2032: scenario one We’ve touched down on a smooth asphalt runway, with a view of the capital’s burgeoning skyline; Mogadishu looks like an alien city, and in the best possible way. Inside the modern airport terminal we are greeted by college-aged employees who chat among each other in-between tasks, complaining about exam schedules. At the terminal’s exit we are driven off in a late-model taxi into the city. For a half-hour we ride through the city’s wide-but-pristine boulevards and finally approach a stop after many green lights. A healthy young man escorts a band of little girls in bright-orange school uniforms across the street before returning to his station as the neighborhood scout. Away from the city’s outer suburbs we enter the heart of the business district and drive right into a parade. Businessmen in Mogadishu are riding in a convoy of convertible coupes with a trophy in hand; the city is defending its fourth straight title as Africa’s most competitive commodities market. The three of us sit in the cab, confused and wondering where the ‘real’ Mogadishu went. Our driver takes a sharp turn and says to us, “Next stop is Hamar Jabjab.” We all breathe in a sigh of comfort, hoping to see the sights of ruins we had gotten used to. The cab drives for an hour by what almost looks to be a picturesque magazine cover photo. We sit through row after row of glistening modern highrises with rooftop gardens. On every fifth row of buildings for at least a mile is a large glassed-out library, visibly packed with diligent students inside. The driver stops outside a massive concrete slab that stretches for almost a mile out into the sea. We ask the driver, “What about Hamar Jabjab?” He looks back and says, “We just passed it.” Somalia 2032: scenario two Eight hours off-schedule we land in K50 air strip due to the closure of Aden Adde International Airport following years of factional infighting over aviation revenues. After an additional four hours of sitting on the cracked and dusty air strip we hitch a ride in the bed of a busted-up thirty year old Toyota Hilux Surf. We drive by the skeleton of Mogadishu University’s once-hopeful campus on the edge of town. We are stopped at a checkpoint by an emaciated young fighter before reaching our destination at the Ministry of Agriculture. The young man extends his frail arm out as if to beg rather than to demand extortion money. We continue to drive along a pockmarked stretch of road and approach a hollowed-out ministry building. The ministry’s rooms and halls are now occupied by dozens of families peering through the shelled-out frame of what once stood the stomping ground of the men and women who would fight hunger and drought. Before we can finish our journey through the retrograde capital our driver turns around to rain on our tour. “You don’t want to go further,” he says while tucking khat back into his cheeks with his pale, dry tongue. “The port is a no-go zone, all of the ministries are destroyed or slummed-in, and the cutest children you’ll see are probably some pimp’s property. Your tour stops here until you can cough up another $50.” At this point we nod and ask to be driven back to K50 to hitch a ride out of the country on a khat transport plane. Dilemma The most painful part of writing this piece is that the above scenario has already happened. I left Somalia as a teenager in 1986. That year our president received two options from the public; to either step down or deliver reforms. He did neither. His policies over the next few years allowed for the permeation of the environment that enveloped Somalia for the following three decades. I returned to Mogadishu 19 years after the day I left. The country I returned to was identical to the events and imagery I described in the second scenario. Part of my experience were checkpoints manned by starved teenagers, government ministries occupied by the urban displaced, and young children forced into work on every level of the city’s very visible criminal underbelly. I have already seen what twenty years of bad policies have created in Somalia. But despite what I saw seven years ago I am optimistic on this day. I want to be able to close my eyes today and return to a functioning Somalia in twenty years time. Neither I nor our readers control that destiny. Somalia’s fate is between its people today and their hopeful leaders. On this note, I am pleading with Somalia’s next roster of leaders. There is a very open window for Somalia to succeed. A very big opportunity to vastly improve millions of lives and bring about astonishing change in a deserving nation. War-ravaged Grozny was rebuilt entirely in half a decade, and China is able to create entire cities at the blink of an eye. Turning Mogadishu into a modern city and providing the Somali people with a respectable and dignified place to call their home and capital is not a monumental task by any means, but the intention has to be there. With intention, anything can be delivered, and delivered well. Twenty years is plenty of time to either build a nation from scratch, or to thoroughly destroy what is left of it. Please take this inheritance seriously and deliver a miracle. DissidentNation.com http://dissidentnation.com/a-message-to-somalis-on-the-eve-of-presidential-elections/ Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
LayZie G. Posted August 19, 2012 Open the ballot box, let the countdown begin... Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
