Connect with us

The Villa Somalia

BREAKING: Abbas Siraji Somalia’s youngest cabinet minister shot dead in Mogadishu

Published

on

Bodyguards for Somalia’s auditor general shot dead a government minister in an apparent accident near the presidential palace in Mogadishu on Wednesday evening, police said.

Auditor general Nur Farah’s bodyguards opened fire on a car carrying Abbas Abdullahi Sheikh Siraji, the public works and reconstruction minister, near a checkpoint close to the palace, said police captain Mohamed Hussein.

Senior Somali security member Mohamed Hassan told the German news agency that the minister’s bodyguards had falsely identified Farah, who was travelling in a bulletproof vehicle, as a threat and there had been an exchange of gunfire.

Several of Siraji’s bodyguards were wounded in the incident, according to Hassan. Another minister who was in the car with Siraji survived.

The auditor general escaped unharmed.

Security concerns are high in Somalia’s capital, Mogadishu, as the al-Shabab armed group continues to target the palace, military facilities and hotels with suicide car bombings and other attacks.

President Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed was elected in February and his new cabinet was sworn in on March 21.

Siraji, a former refugee who spent large parts of his life at a camp in Kenya, had been the youngest member of Somalia’s new cabinet.

Somalia’s information minister, Abdirahman Omar Osman, sent condolences over the death, calling Siraji a “brilliant and rising young star who showed commitment in serving his country”.

The new president has vowed to improve security in the Horn of Africa country, which has seen a quarter-century of chaos.

Meanwhile, al-Shabab has said it will step up its attacks after the president announced a new military offensive against the group, which has been fighting to overthrow the country’s internationally recognised government.

In March, a car bomb blast targeting a security checkpoint near the presidential palace killed at least five people and wounded several others.

The US announced last month that it is deploying “a few dozen” troops to Somalia to assist the national army and conduct unspecified security operations – the largest such deployment to the Horn of Africa country in about two decades.

Continue Reading
Advertisement
1 Comment

1 Comment

  1. Pingback: Somali soldier who killed minister Siraji gets death sentence – Bartamaha

You must be logged in to post a comment Login

Leave a Reply

Briefing Room

Somalia calls for accelerated debt relief to fight terrorism

Published

on

$4bn arrears make it almost impossible for Mogadishu to access new funds

FINANCIAL TIMES — Somalia’s prime minister has called on multilateral lenders to accelerate the debt-forgiveness process so that the country can access funds to fight terrorism and its underlying causes.

Somalia owes around $4bn, most of it interest and penalties on nearly three-decades-old loans made to the former military government of Mohamed Siad Barre, whose overthrow in 1991 plunged the country in the Horn of Africa into years of lawlessness and civil war.

Those arrears make it almost impossible for Mogadishu to access new funds from the International Monetary Fund or the International Development Association, the soft loan arm of the World Bank that has money earmarked specifically for fragile states like Somalia.

Officials working with the new Somali government, which took office in February last year, describe the administration as the best in decades and complain that lending restrictions are hampering its efforts to fight al Shabaab, a militant Islamist group, and to build a functioning state.

Last year, the Somali government headed off famine in parts of the country with international help. Al Shabaab has been pushed back, but is still able to carry out deadly terrorist attacks, such as bomb blasts in Mogadishu in October in which more than 350 people were killed.

In an interview with the Financial Times, Hassan Ali Khayre, the prime minister, said of efforts to establish a functioning administration: “Now we have turned a page and taken bold steps, we are hoping the world will take a little more risk on Somalia.”

Mr Khayre, a former aid worker and oil executive, said the government had a budget of only $274m, which was not enough to create the social programmes needed to prevent radicalisation of unemployed youth or to address deprivation. He could not confirm an estimate, made by one World Bank official, that al Shabaab had a bigger budget than the government.

“Certainly, ours is a very tiny budget for a country of 10m people,” he said. “Fighting terrorism needs good governance. It means providing services for our people. To do this costs money and that’s why we need the support of the international community.”

Only the Somalis are going to defeat al Shabaab. And if they are going to do it they are going to have to be able to pay for it.
Michael Keating, Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General for Somalia

Kevin Watkins, chief executive of UK-based charity Save the Children, said it was urgent that the IMF accelerate a process to forgive Somalia’s debt under the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries initiative that has seen debt write-offs in more than 30 countries, mainly in Africa.

Mr Watkins, who has exchanged letters on the subject with Christine Lagarde, IMF managing director, described what he said was IMF foot-dragging as “inept, misplaced and embarrassingly complacent”.

Mohamed Elhage, who leads the IMF’s Somalia mission, said the country was “marking important milestones on reform and policy implementation”, although it needed to make stronger efforts to improve fiscal discipline and raise tax revenue.

The head of the Atlantic Council’s Africa Center in Washington, Peter Pham, said multilateral institutions were right to be cautious before flooding Somalia with money. “It’s déjà vu when the dilettantes in the international community get excited about the Somali government,” he said. “Let’s not flood the country beyond its capabilities to absorb.”

Mr Pham accepted that the new government had made progress but said he was not convinced that corruption had been brought under control. “Huge amounts of aid in cash simply disappears,” he said, adding that he suspected up to half of the 27,000 soldiers being paid to fight al Shabaab with western help were “ghost soldiers”, drawing a salary without doing any fighting.

Of the government’s limited budget, he said: “I’ve yet to figure out what they do with that $250m other than to travel to conferences and to pay parliamentarians whose absentee rate is atrocious.”

Michael Keating, the Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General for Somalia, said he thought the new government was worthy of support. “I’m a bit of a cheerleader for Somalia. This government is on a steep political learning curve but has serious agenda,” he said.

“Only the Somalis are going to defeat al Shabaab. And if they are going to do it they are going to have to be able to pay for it,” he added. “That’s the reason why getting to arrears clearance and HIPC debt relief is so important.”

Continue Reading

Somali News

Somalia Prime Minister fires three ministers

Published

on

The country’s Prime Minister has fired three ministers in a major cabinet reshuffle in East African nation. Ministers for Foreign Affairs, Interior, Reconciliation and Federal Affairs as well as commerce lost their portfolios as the government hopes to improve delivery.

Continue Reading

Briefing Room

Somalia PM Says His Government Demanded US Aid Cut

Published

on

Somalia’s prime minister, Hassan ali-Khaire, said his government had demanded the U.S. briefly suspend aid to much of Somalia’s armed forces in an effort to improve transparency and accountability following corruption concerns.

Speaking Saturday to reporters in Mogadishu, Khaire blamed former Somali governments for U.S. concerns about corruption.

“In the first month in office, my government stood for the need for Somalia to be governed on transparency principles,” he said. “To ensure such principles, Somalia and the U.S. government have agreed to this aid suspension.”

He said that the pause in assistance was part of his government’s effort to fight corruption by tackling misconduct and opening the door to accountability.

“We have done a study that made it possible to find out the challenges against rebuilding our national army, including diversion of soldiers’ salaries, lying about the list of the active and alive military personnel, and as a result, we have jointly decided to suspend the U.S. aid to parts of Somalia’s military for a few weeks until we improve and fix the errors,” Khaire said.

Mattis ‘sure’ of progress

On Friday, U.S. Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis said that he was optimistic about improving Somali accountability concerning the distribution of American aid to Somali armed forces.

“I’m sure we can get this thing under control, even if it’s not for the whole, but for parts of it,” Mattis told reporters at the Pentagon.

Despite the aid suspension, Khaire said his government was confident that it had gained the trust of both Somali people and its international partners.

“In the light of the recent IMF [International Monetary Fund] and World Bank reports on Somalia and the work we have so far done, we are confident that we have gained the trust of the Somali people and our international friends,” he said.

For nearly two decades, Somalia has been among the world’s most corrupt countries, topping the list made by the corruption monitoring group Transparency International.

Nepotism, favoritism, bribery and aid embezzlement have been commonplace across all sectors, making many citizens believe that corruption is a normal way of life.

Continue Reading

TRENDING

  • Minnesota1 day ago

    Minneapolis team keeps immigrants informed during Super Bowl

  • KENYA2 days ago

    Tensions High in Kenya Amid Media Ban, Opposition Arrest

  • Briefing Room2 days ago

    What spurred six countries to join the AU’s mission in Somalia

  • KENYA2 days ago

    US and EU criticise Raila oath, call for respect of law

  • Crime2 days ago

    Pictured with his wife on Snapchat: inmate stabbed to death inside Wormwood scrubs jail

  • UK2 days ago

    Man who attacked London Muslims imprisoned for over 40 years

  • Minnesota2 days ago

    Willmar woman speaks out against Islamophobia