Borrowed Thinking; Flawed Analysis: A Reply To Tani!‎‎‎‎

By Ahmed Hashi Dhimbill

In a recent piece published widely, Dr. Tani suggested to Somali Landers that the two chairmen of the opposition parties ought to go home and exit our political environment simply because they hold no elected positions in the country and thusly, their status is questionable and, to quote a cynical harangue from the piece, “anyone else who tries to speak from a position of authority, without having an elected mandate from the people is a spoiler, a pretender, an impostor and someone who is just a leader in his own dreams”.

Obviously, from the standpoint of elementary political science, Dr. Tani’s analysis is fraught with injudicious and faulty use of concepts and structures in our constitution and in our political traditions in order to silence some of our politicians from our political discourse.

First, Dr Tani’s uses the American system as a basis of analyzing our political structures when any camel herder in Somaliland knows that what we took from the American system was the concept of separation of powers: period. Indeed, once this devise [American political structures] is employed for analysis much of what would have been a good debate strays completely from our political realities and indeed speaks volumes of the lack of political understanding of what our political experiment is really about.

To wit: There is no question that our representational system is a hybrid of several strains of parliamentary, congressional, and traditional institutions given our “transition” and “experimentation” with these institutional concepts. The Parliament – and that is why we have to start with these definitional issues – our institution should actually be called the House of Representatives and not the West-Minister “parliament” because our “congress men” and “congress –women” sit in that house which has a senate in the context of our checks and balance system which should not be interpreted in “parliamentary” notions because in most parliaments there is a Prime-Minister who sits in parliament and governs through both his office and as the leader of government in the parliament (also referred to as the house in many liberal democracies).

It is these definitional concepts, and behind them historical and political science issues that confuse Dr. Tani in his mixing of oranges and apples. Dr. Tani may cry foul and suggest that I am making the same mistake of borrowing from the American system in my analysis here and confounding him of the same charge. The difference between my senses of the issue is this: political parties in Somaliland have elected leaders and on the eve of the coming elections they may wish to choose another leader, to contest elections. Since political parties are sine qua non the agency for our electoral politics – in our multi-party system – they are indeed symbols of our democratic institutions and vehicles of our democratic business. Leaders of these parties then are in fact symbols of our democratic dispensation and they are the official opposition and indeed one of them, Ahmed Sillanyo being the leader of the official opposition. Indeed the British Ambassador in Ethiopia and that country’s Foreign Minister, including the head of the AU recently welcomed him as such understanding him as a leader in waiting who can and speaks for all Somali Landers when it is in the national interest and speaks also for the loyal opposition because of his status within the political party he heads – even when one excludes the man’s political history and his contribution to our democratic dispensation.

We all ought to try and debate these issues because then we can lend light to the status of our politicians in our country, for, if we were to take Dr. Tani’s contention about who may or may not speak we are indeed in the ominous realm of the slippery slop of denying legitimate protagonists in our political environment the most basic rights afforded by the constitution: the right to assembly and the right to speech.

I would like though to speak to a more bizarre claim contained in Dr. Tanis piece: and that claim is the idea when one is not elected they do not represent the national weal nor can they speak from a position of “authority”. But which authority are we actually speaking about? Indeed, what types of authority[s] are there in a given political system that legitimately earns them the right to speak?

I know of several “authorities” that allows folk to say this or that about a particular issue. There is such a thing as a “moral authority” “secular authority” “ethical authority” and several other authorities that allows for speech in this or that particular fashion. To disallow these and cannibalize authority only in the political real – which allows every citizen to speak with authority mind you – is, to borrow a rather worn metaphor: the understatement of the year!

The Doctor may have not realized that his words and maybe his intent may have seriously caused injury to the very crux of what Somali Landers are sincerely and earnestly fighting to make concrete – a democratic dispensation. Democracy is not about institutions alone, its is about habits, daily interactions within people, having the democratic sense to know what injures the body politic –if one is concerned with the march of democratic politics that is – as a well as understanding that the political system we are developing is not a process to be used strategically to eliminate or exclude legitimate protagonists from the political realm, but rather, and indeed, a process to engender the growth of democratic culture – without which we are nothing short of barbarians.

Every Somali Lander can make sense of the sub-text in the piece, it is about Sillanyo. He is not mentioned nor is he chastised but everyone can see his name writ large on the piece. Knowing the politics of our country, and the disdain that some have for our opposition leaders it is worrying that Dr. Tani’s intervention situated right smack in that discourse may give moral comfort to those who see politics in our country as a zero sum game. I believe it is wrong for the good doctor to think that causing confusion or debate about the opposition leaders will bolster the fortunes of his choice of political parties. I for one have a different political vision than Kulmiye, however I accept the leadership position of the party, its chairman and I see it as a legitimate protagonist in our political environment. We must all do this in order for our system to work; otherwise it would only be paying lip service to that noble concept of democracy and how it should work – leading us all into the pit-fire of hypocrisy! Dr. Tani’s intervention, given his own contribution to Somaliland now seems to turn the democratic world that he himself campaigned for on it head by chipping away the very fiber of our sense of what a democratic dispensation ought to be – in the world of the sciences of politics this notion has a comprehensive word: reactionary!

dallo57us@yahoo.com

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