Somali Prime Minister Mohammed Ali Gedi has postponed a planned fact-finding trip to Somalia this week due to transport hitches, the lawless country’s exiled transitional government said on Wednesday.
”The prime minister’s trip has been delayed for logistical reasons,” government spokesperson Yusuf Baribari said. ”The delegation will leave as soon as they are sorted out.”
Baribari declined to go into details but a senior official in the transitional government, who spoke on condition of anonymity, blamed the poor state of airfields in Somalia that the prime minister had planned to use.
”There are concerns that airstrips in Somalia are too short for the plane to take off,” the official said, adding that alternative plans, including finding a different aircraft, are being investigated.
”We are trying to look for another plane that can carry a [smaller] number of people, which can take land and take off in the airstrips without problems,” the official said. ”There are generally fears about air safety.”
Gedi had been due to embark on Wednesday on his first trip to Somalia since becoming premier last year for a week-long ”meet-the-people” tour to lobby support for the government ahead of its planned relocation from exile in Kenya.
He was to have led a delegation of senior Somali officials and lawmakers to south, central and north-eastern Somalia, according to a statement from the transitional government released on Tuesday.
The visit was announced a day after the transitional government, now based in Nairobi due to security fears in lawless Mogadishu, was unable to begin its planned Monday relocation to Somalia due to aircraft mechanical problems.
Baribari, the government spokesperson, insisted the relocation plan is still under way and had begun on Monday as Gedi had announced it would earlier this month.
Despite his comments, it appears that neither Gedi nor other senior members of his administration plan to relocate themselves permanently in Mogadishu or elsewhere in Somalia in the near future.
Somalia has been in chaos without any functioning central authority since the ouster of Mohamed Siad Barre in 1991 turned the Horn of Africa nation into a patchwork of fiefdoms ruled by violent warlords.
To get a foothold in the capital, Gedi’s government has requested and received authorisation from the African Union for the deployment of regional peacekeepers.
But their proposed presence has attracted vehement opposition from many Somalis, particularly hard-line Islamic clerics in Mogadishu, who are opposed to the presence of any foreign troops in the country.
Just hours after Gedi announced the February 21 start date for the relocation on February 9, a BBC journalist, in Mogadishu to cover the anticipated arrival of the government, was shot and killed in what analysts suspect was a warning against outside intervention.
Last week, an AU delegation in Mogadishu to assess security for the peacekeepers narrowly missed being hit by a roadside bomb explosion that killed two Somalis and wounded five others. — Sapa-AFP