Somali lawmakers on Wednesday elected a former warlord as their new speaker, two weeks after firing his predecessor for brokering unauthorised peace talks with a now-vanquished Islamist movement.
A day after President Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed sought to rally support behind his embattled government, the MPs overwhelmingly endorsed Justice Minister Aden Mohamed Nur in the second round of voting, in which the winner needed a simple majority.
Of the 211 MPs present in Baidoa, a backwater town about 250km north-west of the capital, Mogadishu, 153 voted for Nur to beat rival Ibrahim Aden Hassan, who got 53 votes.
The remaining votes were disqualified, according to an Agence France-Presse correspondent.
Nur, a close ally of Yusuf, is a former Qur’anic instructor-turned warlord from the Digil-Mirifle clan, which is dominant in south-central Somalia.
”I thank all the MPs who voted for and even those who voted against me. I will serve the Parliament and I will not discriminate any group or people,” Nur told Parliament after his election.
”I congratulate Nur for his election and I will work with him,” Hassan said.
The election came a day after Yusuf called for a national reconciliation conference in the battered African nation in a bid to rally support behind his government, which has been wracked by infighting.
Nur succeeds maverick ex-speaker Sharif Hassan Sheikh Aden, whose January 17 sacking triggered widespread condemnation from the world, which warned that his removal risked destabilising the delicate clan balance of the feeble interim government.
Some MPs accused Aden of going out on a limb when he made an unauthorised move to open talks with then powerful Islamists, while others blamed him for working against the interim government in addition to absconding from duty.
Nur will now preside over the 275-member clan-based Parliament formed in neighbouring Kenya in 2004 after two years of negotiations.
The assembly draws its representation from Somalia’s four major clans of Darod, Digil-Mirifle, Dir and Hawiye, which each has 61 members while a collage of minority clans account for the remaining 31 seats.
Aden and several MPs are currently in Djibouti and say they will return to Somalia after the withdrawal of Ethiopian troops that helped the government topple the Islamists from the capital and other strongholds last month. — AFP
