By Mohammed Hirmoge
“…let’s crowd-fund to buy the remaining 8 months of his term.” Not my words, those are the words of a frustrated mother, fed up with the endless transgressions of Hassan Sheikh Mohamud’s administration. Evictions upon evictions and unchecked sale of government land is the centre of this resentment. The poor are uprooted, the rich are rewarded.
In the viral clip making the rounds among Somali speakers, the woman doesn’t stop there: “…we want good governance, he isn’t providing any.”
That raw frustration captures the national mood. Somalis are exhausted, disillusioned, and losing patience with a government that promised services but delivers dispair.
Shrewd businessmen and political cronies are rewarded with prime plots. It is this cruel inversion of governance, where the powerless are punished and the powerful enriched, that fuels the anger voiced in that viral clip. The people are not merely frustrated. We feel betrayed.
Earlier this year, the country was shaken by an image that cut deep into our collective conscience. A young schoolgirl, still in her uniform, returning home for lunch only to find her house reduced to rubble.
That single image said more than volumes of reports ever could. It captured the cruelty of evictions and the indifference of those in power.
We saw something even more harrowing. A grieving father, forced to dig through the earth for the remains of his long-buried child, after the State desecrated a cemetery and excavated graves.
It was not just a violation of the living, but also a desecration of the dead. There can be no greater symbol of a government that has lost its moral compass. So when that mother, in her rage and despair, suggests we crowd-fund to buy out these last eight months, she isn’t joking. She is voicing the raw truth of a people exhausted by abuse, betrayal, and bad governance.
The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Somali Stream.