“He should have sided with the nation at a time of adversity. It is obvious that, instead, he is has sided against it,” Mohamed Kahin Ahmed, Minister for Interior of the Republic of Somaliland, trained verbal salvos against Abdirahman Mohamed Abdullahi, Chairman of the Waddani opposition party, Saturday.
The Minister pointed out that what happened at Garadag and the killing of two officers by gunmen a week earlier was a misfortunate incident which was to the nation a calamity that could have done without.
“That killing was a national disaster which compromised the nation’s security as a whole. It was an incident that was confined to the killer and not a collective action as the Chairman intimated,” he said.
“There are no opposition points to gain from a national misfortune. As a national leader he should have sought to heal the harm done rather than try to ride on its back to score points with the bereaved families,” Minister Kahin stated.
Continuing to strip the Waddani Chairman’s accusation of any credibility as a national figure, Mr. Kahin went on to say “the only motive that must have spurred him to utter those unfortunate words was a desire on his part to link me ethnically with the killers – a supposition that cannot hold water as the people who perpetrated the heinous act acted alone and without the behest or support of the community they hailed from”.
The Minister disclosed that three suspects directly associated with the killing of the officers were caught and that the police were questioning 10 more for possible collusion links. In the hands of the security forces, too, are four out of five vehicles used in the operation.
Dr. Abdirahman Mohamed Abdullahi ‘Irro’ accused the government, and particularly of Minister Kahin, of being actively involved in igniting civil strife where they should have been giving more time to preparing the nation for parliamentary elections on end of the year.
“How can we believe that the government, and specifically the minister who should have been overseeing preparations, is sincere about the elections when, particularly, that minister is putting the torch to more ethnic hostilities and creating more instability,” Mr. Irro said on record on Tuesday last.
Chairman Irro went on to accuse the Minister of heeding not frantic calls for protection from the killed before they were fatally waylaid – an accusation which the Minister responded by declaring that he will file a case against the chairman to prove the enormous charge he laid against him in public.
The caustic exchange of harsh words and accusations between the two leaders on media is more significant than it appears as both sides frenetically look for to score against one another to prove that the other side is, in fact, the one to blame for another most probable delay to the scheduled elections.
Waddani, despite the fact that the international community reported the 2017 presidential elections as ‘template elections’, keeps demanding that the sitting National Electoral Commissioners be disbanded as it ‘does not trust them with another election’ – a stand the ruling party, Kulmiye, and the other opposition party, UCID, do not share with it. Instead, the two parties, stated in so many words that Waddani was using the NEC disbandment issue as an excuse and that it had no intention, in fact, of participating in the elections for reasons only known to its leadership. The two parties declared that they, on their part, were prepared to go to the polls to elect the next batch of House of representatives MPs on the scheduled time of 12 December 2019 with or without Waddani.
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