Somali Citizen’s way of trying to find solution to the current stalemate “Hiigsiga Doorashada 2016”

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Alberta | QOL | December 27, 2015 – It does not look like we have learned any lesson as Somali people about what has caused our homeland to collapse 25 years ago, which eventually evolved into a failed state. In the 1990s, as the Somali State ceased to exist, millions of Somalis dispersed throughout the world, applying as refugees everywhere. Millions of them were also displaced within their own and neighboring countries. All Somalis are suffering from that dark side of our history. We shall never repeat how we treated each other or we will face similar fate in the near future.

The root cause of the problem was a clan domination mentality some people had those days. Even today as we try to put Somali State back together, some people, regardless of their educational background (some of them with PHD’s) are still thinking how dominate others. We all need to forget dominating others because those days of dominating others are gone for good and we need replace with instead how we can accomplish social justice.

Social justice can never be accomplished unless we allow each of us to be part of the state formation, have say and benefit from the state as a citizen. If we are to take step in the right direction, we need to have representative of every sector of the society in our government.

If we are to progress, we can no longer ignore our Somali sister, or try to subjugate minorities. We will need to allow everybody to participate in the state formation and the reconstruction of what was once called Somalia; as Kennedy said “House that is divided cannot stand.”

Let us be positive, we have made significant progress in our process to bring Somali State back together. We do have federal government with the help of African Union Troops and the help of the international community that is trying its best to move the country forward. State formation is close to a completion with the formation of Hiraan and Shebelle State and Banadir State to follow.

Recent consultation with the Somali people inside Somalia and the meeting that was held in Mogadishu has shown Somalis don’t agree how to move forward as current president and parliament’s mandate is coming to an end in Aug 2016. Some States prefer 4.5 formulas to be used in the selection of our next parliament and while others proposed using district system process to select next parliamentarians. Even though we still need to maintain power sharing with everyone including woman and minorities, the use of 4.5 shall never be repeated instead we shall use formula 5 for the power sharing

I know some people have raised issue with recent population census conducted by the federal government with the help of UNFPA but this can used as a way forward out of the current stalemate. Selection of parliamentarian is fair if they are selected based on population of each district using the data collected rather than “Degmo” since the parliament is called people’s house.

My background is engineering and when we want to analyze a data and solve problems, we sometimes use something called Parito analysis. Pareto analysis is a formal technique useful where many possible courses of action are competing for attention.

Using this analysis, I have taken the population data collected through the 2014 census and ranked from highest to lowest and found where 80 percent of Somali people live. (Please see the graph below)

The districts (Gobolada) with highest population will get the highest number of Lower parliamentarian or upper senate). Some people have proposed 3 senate for each district to make it 54 but this is not fair to the district with higher population.

I have calculated the number Parliamentarians (upper and Lower Chamber using the formula under the data sheet). Some numbers become decimal that are rounded to the nearest number.

I have looked at where each district falls within the existing states and assigned a number of lower house parliamentarian and upper senate based its population. I have also come up the number female representation using 30% of the total for each district. Once we have the number of parliament of each state, then we can figure out the number of parliamentarians to be representative of minorities.

This will allow us this time to move forward with using this formula to elect the parliamentarians and then they can elect the president.

Once the parliament (upper and lower) and the president are elected, the most important mandate for the government will be to get us ready for “One man and one vote” four years from now. The summary of the number of parliamentarian (upper and lower house) I came up are as follows: