February 20, 2018 | Morning Headlines
Major Security Shake-up After Emergency Cabinet Meeting
19 February – Source: Hiiraan Online – 202 Words
The Somalia government has launched a major security shake-up on Monday after an emergency meeting held by cabinet ministers in Villa Somalia. Immediate changes were made to the top brass of Somalia’s security apparatus with new commanders in the intelligence, police and custodial corps. The government has appointed Osman Sheikh Hussein as the nation’s new spy chief, replacing Former NISA head, Abdullahi Mohamed Ali ‘Sanbaloolshe’. Hussein previously served as the Deputy Minister of Health.
General Bashir Abdi Mohamed has been promoted from the deputy police chief to be Chief of Police. Finally, Gen Bashir Mohamed Jama “Gobe” returns to his post as the chief of the Custodial Corps. “Bashir Gobe” previously served as the Director of Somali National Intelligence Agency (NSA) in 2013.
Somalia’s security apparatus has seen re-shuffles before. Two days before the infamous Oct 14 bombing, the nation’s defense minister and army chief both abruptly resigned amid credible reports of infighting within the security establishment. Analysts have forecasted that the security situation in Somalia will remain difficult. They predict that unless serious reforms are made in the security structure, Somalia will continue to remain vulnerable to Al-Shabaab attacks.
Key Headlines
- Major Security Shake-up After Emergency Cabinet Meeting (Hiiraan Online)
- Somalia Lacks Capacity To Roll Out Nationwide Tax System-Finance Minister (Goobjoog News)
- South West State To Elect New President November- State Assembly (Goobjoog News)
- Cabinet Endorses Director of Somalia’s Communications Authority (CNBC Africa)
- Qatar Charity Rehabilitates Somalia Flood Cyclone Victims (Gulf Times)
- River Shabelle Runs Dry At Jowhar (Radio Ergo)
- A School For Yemenis In Somalia Keeps Dreams Alive (Al Fanar Media)
NATIONAL MEDIA
Somalia Lacks Capacity To Roll Out Nationwide Tax System-Finance Minister
19 February – Source: Goobjoog News – 195 Words
Lack of capacity and skills remains a major challenge to mobilizing domestic revenue collection, Finance Minister Abdirahman Beileh has said. Beileh said the government was not in a position to put in place the infrastructure and resources to ensure a robust tax regime is instituted. “We lack the capacity to put good systems across the nation. We do not have the ability to give everybody a tax identification number,” Beileh said in a media interview Sunday.
The Finance Minister noted however the government was working to overcome the challenges to enable it roll out a nationwide tax collection system. “If you identify the challenge then you have the possibility of putting a stop to it and we are working on that” The minister’s remarks come amid an ongoing boycott by traders in the country’s largest market-Bakaro over new sales tax.
Under the new system, traders are compelled to pay a 5% sales tax to be paid upfront. Traders who spoke to Goobjoog News said they will not resume business until the government addresses their grievances. Some shops opened in the morning in Bakaro but majority remain closed. The strike will enters its third day tomorrow.
South West State To Elect New President November- State Assembly
19 February – Source: Goobjoog News – 196 Words
Presidential elections for South West state will take place in November 17 this year, the State Assembly declared Monday as it closed its fourth session today. The Assembly also passed a crucial constitutional amendment locking out clan elders and delegates from participating in the election of state president. The Assembly will now be the sole authority to elect the president.
In a vote Monday, 110 lawmakers endorsed the second presidential election amendment which sought to make parliament the sole body to elect the president. Only three expressed a contrary opinion. The current president Shariff Hassan Adan was elected jointly by delegates and elders in 2014 before the Assembly was constituted. Subsequently, the Assembly passed its first amendment locking out delegates and giving powers to the legislators and clan elders.
But in today’s vote, the Assembly unanimously endorsed the first amendment to mirror elections in other states within the country which give their assemblies the mandate to elect the president. South West state was formed in November 7, 2014 after several political tussles and agreements. Adan was elected president ten days later. It is not clear if Adan will be defending his seat in the new poll.
INTERNATIONAL MEDIA
Cabinet Endorses Director of Somalia’s Communications Authority
19 February – Source: CNBC Africa – 412 Words
The Cabinet has unanimously endorsed Abdi Sheik Ahmed for the post of Director-General of the National Communications Authority (NCA) of Somalia, which is established under Somalia’s Communications Law 2017. Speaking after the endorsement, the minister for Post, Telecom and Technology, H.E. Abdi Ashur Hassan, thanked the Cabinet for the endorsement of the director who will lead Somalia’s first communications regulator.
“This is another milestone by the Ministry to have the director endorsed in due course because it will bring us closer to the establishment of the regulator,” said the minister. “When the law was passed in 2017 we promised our commitment to its implementation, and the establishment of NCA is the first step towards that goal,” concluded the minister.
Qatar Charity Rehabilitates Somalia Flood, Cyclone Victims
19 February – Source: Gulf Times – 345 Words
The Qatar Charity (QC) office in Somalia has rehabilitated “thousands of flood and cyclone victims” through its early recovery programmes. Through this, the organisation said it contributed to the restoration of basic services, the environment and social life, provided livelihood and shelter, and reintegrated displaced populations.
The office supported victims of floods that hit the Middle Shabelle region, as well as those affected by cyclones that swept across the Puntland region, in order to rehabilitate them through its early recovery projects, QC said in a statement. These projects are considered the bridge between emergency relief and sustainable development efforts, it noted.
Qatar Charity rehabilitated three schools by equipping them with study tools and materials, while it also reconstructed four health centres and provided the required medical equipment. This benefited 92,776 people affected by floods hit the Middle Shabelle region in 2013 and 2014. Aiming to empower agriculture-dependent families to permanently benefit from river water, QC provided 10 irrigation generators to small-scale farmers in the Middle Shabelle region, rehabilitated 10km of irrigation canals and supported 250 such families by giving them seeds and manual tillage tools.
River Shabelle Runs Dry At Jowhar
19 February – Source: Radio Ergo – 483 Words
The river Shabelle has completely dried up in some parts of Jowhar, leaving a wide dry river bed where children can play football. There have been devastating effects for people in the area who rely on the river for their drinking water, as well as on farmers using the river for irrigation and pastoralist communities whose livestock drink there. There are also hundreds of local fishermen facing unemployment.
It is the third time the river has dried up since March 2016. Yakub Ise Omar, head of Somalia Water and Land Information Management (SWALIM) in Middle Shabelle, said the river has been badly neglected over a long period of time. Eroding soil and silt have filled up the channel preventing water from flowing. Sometimes the water floods over the river banks but people are unable to benefit from the flood water. The regular maintenance that used to be carried out ceased after the fall of the central government in 1991.
Yakub told Radio Ergo that overall water management has been poor and the water catchment areas are not effective. This has heightened the problems caused by failed rains over the past three years. He said generally rainfall collected in water catchments had reduced from 600 mm to not more than 200 mm in the last three years. This is partly due to climate change in Eastern Africa.
OPINION, ANALYSIS AND CULTURE
“I feel very happy when I see my children going to school,” said Noor, who arrived in Mogadishu three years ago, after her husband was shot dead by rebels in her hometown of Sana’a. “I know they have a bright future and this makes me happy when I’m sad. It removes my stress. I feel my dreams are still alive.”
A School For Yemenis In Somalia Keeps Dreams Alive
19 February – Source: Al Fanar Media – 817 Words
Sudd Khalif, 16, was among 35 students competing to answer a teacher’s question in a packed classroom at the Yemeni Community School here. Khalif fled the civil war in Yemen, his home country, two years ago, postponing his dream of becoming a doctor. Now he needs to study hard, he said, because he still hopes to study medicine some day. “I want to achieve my dream in Somalia,” said Khalif. “I had given up in life” in Yemen, he said. “But I thank God that everything is going well now. I’m now lucky to access education like other people.”
Khalif is among 5,800 Yemeni refugees who are trying to make a new life in Somalia—an irony, given that thousands of Somalis in the past have fled to Yemen to escape violence in their country. But with the help of the United Nations and international humanitarian groups, Khalif and thousands of other Yemeni youth are receiving a basic education, many of them for the first time.
Civil war has engulfed Yemen since March 2015, and nearly 6,000 civilians have been killed in the conflict, according to the United Nations. Unicef and other U.N. agencies warned in December that the conflict had created “the worst humanitarian crisis in the world” and that a “deepening catastrophe” loomed, with food supplies uncertain and some 16 million people living without access to safe water, proper sanitation, and basic health services. The chaos in Yemen is also taking a toll on Somalia. Yemeni children who escaped civil war in their home are now getting access to basic primary education for the first time in Somalia at the Yemeni Community School.
Nearly 35,000 Somali refugees have returned from Yemen since the war began, according to the U.N. refugee agency. The government of Somali President Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed has struggled to accommodate the returnees as well as the new refugees arriving from Yemen, while also fighting al-Shabaab extremists linked to Al Qaeda and a devastating drought. The building that now houses the Yemeni Community School here became a reception center for refugees and returnees.
Constructed in 1978, the building was in serious disrepair after having served as a base for various militias that controlled Somalia during its civil war. With support from the U.N. refugee agency, the nonprofit group Action Africa Help International rehabilitated the facility with the goal of helping exclusively Yemeni students. Last year it enrolled more than 500 boys and girls from Yemen between the ages of 5 and 17. More than one-third of the world’s refugee children are missing out on education, according to Unicef. In Somalia, tackling that problem is hard. The East African nation has one of the lowest school-enrollment rates in the world. Only 42 percent of primary-school-age children attend school and only 40 percent of those children are female, according to U.N. figures.