By RASNA WARAH
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s recent announcement that the UN Political Office for Somalia (UNPOS) will relocate from Nairobi to Mogadishu has generated fears that the office – established in 1995 to advance the cause of peace and reconciliation in Somalia – will not be effective in bringing about stability in the country.
Last month, more than 200 members of Somalia’s Transitional Federal Parliament urged the UN Secretary-General to remove the current head of UNPOS, Augustine Mahiga, who they accuse of lacking “capacity and vision beyond the transitional period”.
Similarly, the Washington-based Somali National Alliance wrote a letter to Mr Ban protesting the corruption, nepotism and lack of competent staff at the UNPOS offices in New York and Nairobi.
The Alliance’s executive director Osman D. Osman believes that growing mistrust between the UN and Somalis is due to the perception that UN staff and local implementing partners have shady deals with each other, and that instead of improving the situation in the country, UN operations in Somalia are hindering development and disempowering local institutions.
Donors give millions of dollars to the UN for its projects in Somalia every year. Yet the country has little to show for it.
Somalia’s Prime Minister Abdiweli Mohamed Ali, in a recent interview with the UK’s Telegraph newspaper, referred to the UN as an “entrenched interest group” that had exaggerated the scale of the suffering in Somalia in order to drum up donations, a charge that the UN has vehemently denied.
The truth is that there is little oversight over how donor funds allocated for Somalia are spent because there is a general lack of effective auditing and monitoring, thanks partly to the fact that big donors such as the European Union are not mandated to monitor UN projects. It is assumed that the UN will monitor itself, which in itself is problematic.
In addition, most UN projects in Somalia are managed from Nairobi, ostensibly because of the insecurity posed by Al-Shabaab and other militia.
Thus these projects are left in the hands of local NGOs, many of which are perceived to be corrupt. There is also a lack of credible national institutions that could play an oversight role.
Afyare Abdi Elmi in his book, Understanding the Somalia Conflagration notes that the international community’s efforts in Somalia have been mostly unsuccessful because they ignore home-grown initiatives and traditional institutions.
He says that though the UN says it consulted relevant stakeholders when it produced the UN Transition Plan for Somalia, the plan is largely the product of bureaucrats based in Nairobi.
The idea that the UN and international NGOs based in Nairobi run the show in Somalia is not as far-fetched as it might seem.
The UN bankrolls the Transitional Federal Government, and is in charge of most of the relief efforts in the country, even if all of its operations are managed from Nairobi.
An MP in the current government (who did not wish to be named) told me that “Somalia is under UN rule, but no one is willing to talk about it openly”.
This, in itself, would not be a problem if the UN was perceived to be an honest broker and if it was not riddled with irregularities.
Past UN Security Council and other reports point to a web of corruption involving the UN, local NGOs, politicians and businesspeople.
The involvement of non-traditional donors and Islamic NGOs has altered the power dynamics, and shifted the development paradigm in Somalia.
Turkey, for instance, is playing a significant role in reconstructing Mogadishu by re-building schools, hospitals and government offices.
The decision by Turkey to play a bigger role in Somalia’s recovery is no doubt related to the country’s geopolitical interests in Africa and the Middle East, but it is also a response to the failure of the international community to bring about peace and development in Somalia in the last two decades.
Many Somalis believe that Turkey has demonstrated moral authority and leadership in resolving the Somali crisis, something that the many peace conferences and UN projects have been unable to achieve.
rasna.warah@gmail.com
Source: The Nation (www.nation.co.ke)
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