Samia Mahmet

📣SOME PERSONAL NEWS📣 After over a year of extensive consultations across #Somalia and beyond, I’m deeply honored and profoundly humbled to be elected Chairman and Party Leader of XAQSOOR PARTY by its founding Central Committee. At a time of profound national challenges, our mission is clear: to confront systemic injustice and transform the corrosive political culture of the elite, which is disintegrating the Third Republic established 25 years ago. Together with the Executive Council, I pledge my unwavering commitment to achieving this noble objective. Aluta Continua!

Bismillah, The national dialogue initiative put forth by #Somalia President @HassanSMohamud that aims to (a) resolving the political uncertainty of the past year, particularly regarding constitutional and electoral disputes, and (b) uniting efforts in the just struggle against Al-Shabaab terrorists, is a welcome and commendable step. Moreover, the fact that the President has issued this call with only a year left in his term is a positive sign. However, if caution is not exercised and lessons are not learned from previous failed political dialogues of 2021 and 2016, this initiative has the potential to plunge the country deeper into chaos, undermining the nation’s quarter-century-long reconstruction process. In the last two election cycles, “political stakeholders” have agreed on an electoral process that had blatantly deprived Somali citizens of their legitimate right to freely and fairly elect their parliamentary representatives. Given this checkered past, I call for this initiative not to become another “deal” that sacrifices the rights of the Somali citizen. Leaders at both levels of government must agree on an electoral system based on justice, equality, and transparency. If they fail to do so, it is certain that they will not achieve their second goal of countering Al-Shabaab terrorism. Throughout the world, armed insurgencies thrive in environments plagued by injustice, favoritism, discrimination, and the looting of shared resources, afflictions that have become widespread in our country. Finally, if this initiative fails to produce results that benefit the Somali people and instead becomes yet another platform for “political stakeholders” to divide the political loot among themselves as usual, the direct beneficiaries of the resulting fallout will undoubtedly be Al-Shabaab and the regional countries that have been seeking to exploit our nation’s vulnerabilities.