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Monday, January 16, 2012
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s recent announcement that the UN
Political Office for Somalia (UNPOS) will relocate from Nairobi to
Mogadishu has generated fears that the office – established in 1995 to
advance the cause of peace and reconciliation in Somalia – will not be
effective in bringing about stability in the country. Last month, more than 200 members of Somalia’s Transitional
Federal Parliament urged the UN Secretary-General to remove the current
head of UNPOS, Augustine Mahiga, who they accuse of lacking “capacity
and vision beyond the transitional period”.
Similarly, the Washington-based Somali National
Alliance wrote a letter to Mr Ban protesting the corruption, nepotism
and lack of competent staff at the UNPOS offices in New York and
Nairobi.
The Alliance’s executive director Osman D. Osman believes
that growing mistrust between the UN and Somalis is due to the
perception that UN staff and local implementing partners have shady
deals with each other, and that instead of improving the situation in
the country, UN operations in Somalia are hindering development and
disempowering local institutions.
Donors give millions of dollars to the UN for its projects in Somalia every year. Yet the country has little to show for it.
Somalia’s Prime Minister Abdiweli Mohamed Ali, in a recent interview with the UK’s Telegraph newspaper,
referred to the UN as an “entrenched interest group” that had
exaggerated the scale of the suffering in Somalia in order to drum up
donations, a charge that the UN has vehemently denied.
The truth is that there is little oversight over
how donor funds allocated for Somalia are spent because there is a
general lack of effective auditing and monitoring, thanks partly to the
fact that big donors such as the European Union are not mandated to
monitor UN projects. It is assumed that the UN will monitor itself,
which in itself is problematic.
In addition, most UN projects in Somalia are
managed from Nairobi, ostensibly because of the insecurity posed by
Al-Shabaab and other militia.
Thus these projects are left in the hands of local
NGOs, many of which are perceived to be corrupt. There is also a lack of
credible national institutions that could play an oversight role.
Afyare Abdi Elmi in his book, Understanding the Somalia Conflagration
notes that the international community’s efforts in Somalia have been
mostly unsuccessful because they ignore home-grown initiatives and
traditional institutions.
He says that though the UN says it consulted relevant
stakeholders when it produced the UN Transition Plan for Somalia, the
plan is largely the product of bureaucrats based in Nairobi.
The idea that the UN and international NGOs based in Nairobi run the show in Somalia is not as far-fetched as it might seem.
The UN bankrolls the Transitional Federal
Government, and is in charge of most of the relief efforts in the
country, even if all of its operations are managed from Nairobi.
An MP in the current government (who did not wish
to be named) told me that “Somalia is under UN rule, but no one is
willing to talk about it openly”.
This, in itself, would not be a problem if the UN
was perceived to be an honest broker and if it was not riddled with
irregularities.
Past UN Security Council and other reports point to
a web of corruption involving the UN, local NGOs, politicians and
businesspeople.
The involvement of non-traditional donors and
Islamic NGOs has altered the power dynamics, and shifted the development
paradigm in Somalia.Turkey, for instance, is playing a significant role in reconstructing
Mogadishu by re-building schools, hospitals and government offices.
The decision by Turkey to play a bigger role in Somalia’s
recovery is no doubt related to the country’s geopolitical interests in
Africa and the Middle East, but it is also a response to the failure of
the international community to bring about peace and development in
Somalia in the last two decades.
Many Somalis believe that Turkey has demonstrated
moral authority and leadership in resolving the Somali crisis, something
that the many peace conferences and UN projects have been unable to
achieve.