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By M. M. Afrah©

Both the Jawhar and Mogadishu wings of the TFG have been ignoring calls of reknitting of fragmented and overtribilized Somalia. These self-styled leaders are doing everything in their ill-gotten power to keep the status quo, come what may.

One doesn't have to be a prophet to predict the consequences.

Instead of sitting down at a roundtable conference in order to iron out their petty differences, key figures from both wings are traveling from one Arab country to another-Yemen, Egypt and the Emirates announcing that they had found the tonic of their troubles in those countries. Surely many people at home and in the Diaspora won't swallow? Only few did, mainly their flunkeys and patsies.

A friend and colleague-a journalist of the old school-wrote; "The Somali leaders from both sides of the spectrum exploit their own people every time they open their mouths and say something, which they believe would enhance their tarnished images, when in reality they are unwilling to open peace dialogue with their adversaries."
I concur with him.

All the non-cooperation gesticulations in Jowhar and Mogadishu are purely to impose their power and dreadful doctrines on anyone, no matter how humiliating. The only difference between the two factions being what they want to achieve in case they hit the political jackpot-uncontested power and material gains as their ultimate aspiration and objective.

Historically, there has been friction between the governments of the day and the opposition parties after independence in 1960. Adan Abdulla Osman, the President at independence, and a man who was well versed in politics and knows what he is talking about, coolly told the then opposition leaders to do their homework properly before they open their mouths!

Now most of us know that Adan Abdulle Oosman, who is very much alive and kicking in his own farm, refused to have anything to do with repugnant political intrigues in today's Somalia. Still he was at pains to advice the faction leaders/warlords to ditch their weapons and resign en mass and let alone the people elect their own leaders in a fair and free election. The old man's advice fell on deaf ears.

This friction, though more intense in nature, never seems to vanish; we still see it today, this time with the use of lethal weapons of all calibers, resulting unending blood path. Many well-meaning people foresaw it in 1991/92 after the insurgents toppled the military dictator. The vacuum was then filled by blood thirsty warlords who reduced the same people who welcomed them, to victims without free will, more like dolls tossed around in the power hungry flurries of the warlords, followed by genocide, Hutu-style.

"Silence is a sign of a true consent," one of the Mogadishu main warlords said in an interview with Reuter's news agency in 1992. Months later he died during an offensive against his archenemy at Madina District of Mogadishu. "The silence of true consent" did not save his life.

This was always a homogenous country, and its cohesion, whatever cohesion it has, can only be based on mutual respect. Everyone looked the same, spoke the same language, worshiping the same God and believed the same things.

These things, I know, have been said before, but their obvious truth is why these people, unique in Africa, do not abide by their traditional Shir under a tree and negotiate how to return the country to the community of nations and pull the people together inside the country instead of jostling to settle old scores.

The dismembered corpse of Somalia have been set free by the departure of the former dictator, who died in exile in Lagos after more than two decades of iron-fist rule, and pronto the warlords evoked the splitting of the people into archaic clan, sub, sub-clan lunacy-a Hobbesian world: the war of all on all locked in blood feud, hatred and mistrust.
(The word "Hobbesian" is sometimes used in modern English to refer to a situation in which there is unrestrained, selfish and uncivilized competition, Miriam Webster Dictionary).

These ignorant and semi-educated villains knew very well what demons they were frivolously invoking. If they did not, they would have fall silent in shame.

If they are fraying now, it is because their petty politics has for the last fifteen years or so broken the traditional Somali tolerance for consensus revamped by the Somali Youth League (SYL) during the early days of struggle for independence and unity-one people and one nation, devoid of the virus of tribalism.

The thorny issues that have been dragging for months still remain unresolved. This include, among other things, whether to base the government in the capital, in conformity with the federal constitution and whether foreign troops, mainly from the neighbouring countries would be deployed in the country as peacekeepers with Ethiopia playing the flag-bearer.

Whatever they proposed was no more than their washed-out strategy of "us-against-them," keeping the people in the dark. It is no wonder major donor countries, except Italy and some shadowy stakeholders, are gradually retreating from the Somalia heartbreak. In the political jargon it is called donor fatigue.

Now the question that bugs many of us is: What next?