The Somali Parliament on Thursday overwhelmingly approved Mohammed Ali Gedi as Prime Minister of the war-shattered Horn of Africa nation, 12 days after it fired him and his government for being in office illegally.
A total of 229 lawmakers of the 275-member clan-based Assembly approved in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, a motion recognising Gedi as prime minister. Six voted against, 24 abstained and 16 were absent.
Immediately afterwards, the speaker of the House swore in Gedi, as Somali President Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed looked on.
On December 11, the Parliament passed a motion sacking Gedi and his government, saying he was illegally in office because Yusuf had failed to seek parliamentary approval. Two days later, the president reappointed Gedi.
”It’s good for all of us to accept the PM and give him time to form the government,” Yusuf told the lawmakers.
”I thank all MPs for approving me as prime minister,” Gedi said.
”Now, I will form the government after wide consultations with each of you,” he added.
His earlier Cabinet, which was formed on December 3, was rejected because it was not based on the principle of power-sharing stipulated in Somalia’s transitional national charter, a sort of interim Constitution.
”Now the message is clear. If the president and the prime minister act in accordance with the law, they will enjoy full support of Parliament. If something is done in a wrong way, that is when trouble will start,” parliamentary Speaker Shariff Hassan Sheikh Aden said.
Issues need to be tackled
The International Crisis Group (ICG) warned in a statement released in Nairobi on Thursday that the new government, which is still based in Nairobi due to insecurity in Mogadishu, will fail if it does not address issues that have divided Somalis for the past decade, and take steps to reconcile factions there.
”The transitional federal government has to tackle these issues, while earning the legitimacy to do so,” the statement quoted senior ICG analyst Matt Bryden as saying.
”If it does not, then the peace process will stall and Somalia’s stubborn leaders will likely return to all-out violence,” Bryden said.
ICG describes itself on its website as ”an independent, non-profit, multinational organisation committed to preventing and resolving deadly conflict”.
Somalia has lacked an effective central government since the 1991 ouster of dictator Mohammed Siad Barre split the vast desert country of about 10-million people into a patchwork of fiefdoms
controlled by warlords.
Two internationally recognised governments were formed before the election of Yusuf as president in October, but neither managed to establish control over the country.
The current peace process was launched in Kenya two years ago under the aegis of the regional Inter-Governmental Authority on Development, comprising Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda, Sudan and nominally Somalia.
Hope for success is much higher this time around, mainly because previously excluded warlords were brought into the negotiations and countries in the region applied unprecedented concerted pressure for finding a solution to Somalia’s lawlessness. — Sapa-AFP