By Jamal Madar, London, UK

The old adage that says, “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me” does not seem to apply to the Somaliland people who are repeatedly and consistently fooled day-in day-out by a grossly incompetent and prolific liar president who spends most of his time thinking about ways and means of weaving a web of lies for his hapless subjects rather than running the country for which he was elected.  

The bald faced lies concocted by Rayale for the Somaliland people during his term in office are simply too many to count:  

Bogus Companies  

We were led to believe that Rayale and his usual suspects had recently struck a lucrative deal with a German company called SOUGUETA ENGINEERING AG that would construct coal-fired power plants in Berbera, which would eventually lift thousands of people out of the poverty trap through gainful employment. Secondly, we are asked to believe the dilapidated cement factory, which was stripped of all its valuable components by looters at the height of the SNM struggle against the Faqash (Barre’s loyalists) would also be given a new lease of life by the same company. The German company will invest a staggering sum of $300 million, with Somaliland government contributing only $7 million, so the story goes. Obviously, for the uninitiated, this looks very promising from the outset, and rightly so, but the problem with Rayale is that he is a pathological liar who has the habitual pattern of hiding his resounding failures with fancy gimmickry and irresistible fairy-tales full of promises based on mirages of prosperity.

In fact, it emerged later, as evidenced by the bloody protests in Berbera, that the whole idea of rehabilitating the cement factory was essentially to dismantle what’s left of the wreckage of the factory and export it as a scrap metal to India for maximum profit.

Whenever the president returns home from abroad, it is the norm rather than the exception to repeat, rehashed and recycled mishmash of lies, to his unsuspecting and gullible captive audience in Somaliland.  

If the past is any guide, Rayale had struck secret deals before with a range of bogus oil exploration companies in South Africa, Norway and Germany. On each occasion, he told the nation that this would have a great deal of benefit for the impoverished Somaliland masses. On the contrary, all we have heard was the arrival of a bunch of SriLankan conmen in ill-tailored suits in Hargeysa, masquerading as oil prospectors. The possessions of these men were not more than ‘the glossy prospectuses contained in their brief cases’, yet they promised our treacherous president that the streets of Hargeysa would soon be paved with gold. But when the local press cornered these conmen and put them directly under the spotlight, they froze and paralyzed like a deer caught in the headlights. How much the swindlers have defrauded from the president is not clear but what is evidently obvious is that they zeroed in on Rayale to separate him from his money (public money to be precise). A case in point is the classic con of Magne Andeas Meier- a Norwegian-born swindler “riding on a flying carpet of lies” who defrauded $250,000 from president Rayale and currently serving a long term jail sentence in Norway for fraud.

It is interesting to note that the much touted and over hyped SOUGUETA AG turned out to be another bogus company. It is a one-man company run by a Bosnian-born German citizen and had no proven trackable record of the engineering business, which they claim. The company is neither registered in Germany nor anywhere else around the world, thanks to the investigative piece of journalism undertaken by Ahmed Haji Nur- the Chairman of the independent Radio HORYAAL.

Thus evidently, this latest SOUGUETA agreement with the Somaliland government is nothing more than another calculated strategy to feed the public a steady diet of lies.  

It is only the deluded and those on the government’s pay roll such as Dr. Mohamoud Tani- the pseudo Somaliland representative to Canada- who would dance to Rayale’s tune in the streets of Ottawa.

Friendship With Djibouti  

Soon after his inauguration as president, Rayale left for Djibouti against the protestations and advice of many members of both houses of parliament as well as senior officials in his government. But in his determined effort to advance his hidden agenda, he had struck a secret pact with president Guelleh, which until to this day is shrouded in mystery.  

Upon return home, Rayale told the local press that Guelleh had promised to construct a tarmac road connecting between Djibouti and Gabiley and, as a gesture of goodwill, donated two second-hand electric generators and dead-stock military uniforms to Somaliland. More importantly, however, the president told us that Guelleh had made a pledge to help Somaliland secure diplomatic recognition from the international community. Few weeks later, IRIN called Guelleh’s bluff. He was asked about his view on Somaliland as an independent and sovereign state. Guelleh made no bones about his unequivocal rejection of the so-called Somaliland state, “We support a United Somalia. We cannot allow ourselves to advocate session. He added that so long as the South [ Somalia] remained unstable, Somaliland would not enjoy stability”. To rub salt further into the wound, Awil reportedly said in a recent interview with Sub-Saharan Informer that relations between Djibouti and Hargeysa had been strained to the breaking point and called for ‘the international community to help Somaliland normalize relations with Djibouti’.

The fact that Rayale had restored relations with Djibouti, possesses a Djiboutian passport, built a luxury house in there and is a distant relative of president Guelleh, all came to naught.  

Visit to Yemen

When Rayale left for Yemen, he told the Somaliland people that an official invitation was extended to him by the president of Yemen, Ali Abdullah Saleh- a man who is virulently opposed to an independent and sovereign Somaliland state. Saleh’s intention was, at the time, to mediate between Rayale and the tin pot dictator of Majertenia over the disputed region of Sool in Somaliland.

Rayale said that the Yemeni government would encourage investments in Somaliland, provide postgraduate scholarships to Somaliland students, and donate state-of-the art printing machinery to the country. However, the one thing the president was so proud about his visit to Yemen was that the Yemeni government would send an accredited representative to Hargeysa.

Thus far, the Yemeni government has not nominated or appointed anyone for this post. It was another blatant lie that the president told us.

Flawed African Tour  

As if all the past falsehoods and fabrications were not enough, Rayale pulled off another dirty trick from his A to Z Book of Lies by embarking on a flawed diplomatic shuttle around Africa in a vain attempt to put Somaliland’s case before the African Union. Large sums of taxpayers’ money were spent on seemingly doomed mission and large tract of territories in Africa was covered but in the end the president and his usual suspects came back to Somaliland with empty hands. However, this was not the case with president Rayale who, in his bizarre delusions, believed that the African tour was a triumph of diplomacy even though it was, in actual fact, an utter and complete failure.

It was only few weeks later that the reality dawned upon the president when he was denied out rightly to attend the AU summit held in Banjul, The Gambia. His closest aides, Abdillahi Mohamed Duale, then Information minister, and Awil Ali Duale, the current Finance Minister who often carries around with large brief cases stashed with dollars to the brim, were equally refused to set foot in the venue of the summit meeting and disgracefully ended up in distributing pamphlets about the republic of Somaliland to passers-by. To all intents and purposes, it was a shameful and embarrassing episode yet it was passed off as a diplomatic success. This begs the question, if this was a diplomatic triumph, what would a diplomatic failure look like?

The Stupidity of our voting public never ceases to astound me. Four years ago, the Somaliland people had made a monumental mistake when they elected their tormentor, Dahir Rayale Kahin, over their liberator, Ahmed Mohamoud Sillanyo.

The notion that Rayale, a former spy chief and remnant of Siyad Barre’s regime, who, in the nick of time, fled to Las Anod shortly before the SNM forces laid siege to the port city of Berbera, would do a better job than a man who gave for the most part of his life to the liberation struggle waged against the ousted military junta, sent a chill in the spine of many nationalistic and patriotic men.

Today it is all too apparent for everyone to see the irreparable damage caused by this treacherous and ever-bungling president to this embryonic state on all fronts.

The bald faced shamelessness of Rayale to trample upon the rights of the Somaliland citizens such as Amina-Waris and Al-Harbi, his surly indifference and complete and total lack of respect for the constitution and the laws of the country, his unabated embezzlement and plundering of the national coffers, his contemptuous treatment of the parliament, his extraordinary attempts to squelch dissent wherever it has sprung up are only but a few telling examples of his unremitting autocratic practices.

Carl Sagan was quoted as saying: one of the saddest lessons of history is: “If you've been bamboozled long enough, you tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. The bamboozle has captured you. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back”.

Lately, there has been a general tendency among the Somaliland public and significant number of lawmakers to deny the notion that we are being consistently bamboozled by Rayale. Is it possible that the people may never get back their power from this charlatan president?