Ten of Somalia’s 15 government ministers announced their resignations on Saturday in a move the prime minister described as designed to threaten the country’s peace deal with factions of an Islamic insurgency.
The 10 ministers criticised Prime Minister Nur Hassan Hussein for firing the capital’s mayor without consulting them. They also accused him of dictatorship, misusing state funds and failing to set up a budget.
”We have decided to leave our posts after we have seen the mismanagement of the prime minister,” the ministers said in a statement. ”He sacked the mayor of Mogadishu without consulting the Council of Ministers.”
The resignations put Somalia’s shaky transitional government at risk of collapse and threatened to undermine the peace agreement it reached last year with some Islamic insurgents. Among those who signed the statement were the foreign and defence ministers.
The 10 ministers said they would continue to serve until the prime minister could replace them.
Hussein appeared to dismiss the resignations, saying he had been considering firing some of the ministers anyway.
”The resignations are designed … to derail the ongoing reconciliation process, and prevent the recent Djibouti agreement between the government and opposition from getting into effect,” he said.
”Resignations do not matter. Their positions will be filled,” he said. However, he said his office had not yet received any formal resignations.
On Wednesday, Hussein, a humanitarian worker before he became prime minister, sacked Mogadishu mayor Mohamed Dheere, a powerful former warlord who is unpopular with many Somalis because of his heavy-handed tactics.
Hussein had accused Dheere of misusing public funds and failing to bring security to the capital. But Dheere is a key ally of President Abdullahi Yusuf, who reinstated him on Friday.
The 15 ministers in the United Nations-backed transitional government were carefully chosen to appease Somalia’s powerful clans and try to ensure support for the fragile administration.
On Thursday, 33 lawmakers petitioned the Somali Parliament speaker to press the prime minister to resign.
”I would never shy away from my responsibility by resigning, but I am ready to step down, if it will bring peace to Somalia and its people,” Hussein said.
This week’s political upheaval could undermine the government’s peace deal. The agreement was already in jeopardy, after the moderate cleric who signed it on behalf of the Islamic opposition movement was replaced by hard-liner Sheik Hassan Dahir Aweys, whose Islamic regime was ousted in 2006.
Meanwhile, millions of Somalis are dependent on food aid. Thousands have already died in the fighting between Islamic insurgents and Somalia’s transitional government, supported by Ethiopian troops.
Somalia has not had a functioning government since 1991, when warlords overthrew a socialist dictator and then turned their clan militias on each other. — Sapa-AP