An already disgraced Guurti disgraces itself even more

EDITORIAL

On March 31st the Foreign Affairs Subcommittee of Somaliland’s Upper House (Guurti) introduced a bill banning the UN Secretary General’s Representative to Somalia and Somaliland, Ahmedou Abdallah, from entering Somaliland because he had described the security situation in Somaliland as better than the south but still fragile. On April 10th, the same Upper House or Guurti invoked article 83 (5) of Somaliland’s constitution which says that the president’s term can be extended if elections cannot take place at the appointed time due to instability. Since the situation was the same throughout the country on March 31st and April 10th, and since the Upper House’s position regarding the level of stability of Somaliland on March 31st contradicted its position on April 10th, then it is only reasonable to conclude that the Guurti were not telling the truth on one of these occasions. It does not take a rocket scientist either to figure out on which of the two occasions the Gurti were lying and why: they lied when they said the security situation in Somaliland is unstable, and they did it in order to use it as an excuse to extend the president’s term.

The Guurti’s lie is so obvious and so indefensible that even the government for whom they lied, has provided evidence exposing that lie. One only has to look at the Foreign Ministry’s March 29th statement which criticized the UN Secretary General’s report on Somaliland for distorting the security situation in Somaliland. In that statement, Somaliland’s Foreign Ministry strongly argued that Somaliland has been stable since the 1990s and that even in Sool and Sanag “the situation is now stable now that Somaliland controls all of its territory”, the exact opposite of the argument used by the Gurti for extending the president’s term.

When all is said and done, the Gurti’s decision to extend the president’s term is null and void because not only was it based on a false premise, but the Guurti’s term in office had expired long ago, therefore, they are no longer a legal body whose decisions are binding. The Guurti no longer hold the moral authority that they used to in the past (it is a measure of how low they have sunk in the public eye that there was no public uproar when their office was bombed, an act which would have been unthinkable in the old days when the Gurti respected itself and was in turn respected by the community). Likewise, the Gurti’s decision to push the presidential election to April 2009 is null and void, not only because the Guurti is an illegal body, but also because it is not the Guurti’s job to set the election date.

The truth of the matter is that on May 15th, Rayale will no longer be the President of Somaliland and he has no one to blame but himself. He had five years to prepare the country for elections and he failed to do so. To give him any extension would be rewarding ineptness and irresponsibility. The era of extensions is over.

We are closing this editorial with a question: since the Guurti had argued that the UN Secretary General’s representative should be banned from ever setting foot on Somaliland for saying that Somaliland’s security situation is fragile, what should be the Guurti’s punishment for claiming that the elections could not take place in time because of the bad security situation?

Source: Somaliland Times

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