Abdirizak Khalif Ahmed, the former Speaker of the Lower House of the Somaliland Parliament hoodwinked everybody including the Somaliland public, international partners, and Waddani Party adherents as a leader committed to a better Somaliland and an honest political broker.
Instead, he revealed his true character as a deceitful opportunist who abysmally betrayed the nation throwing the region that elected him down a hellhole that it will find hard to climb out of for decades to come.
In the newest interview, he gave to a TV station, Monday, the former Speaker of the House of Representatives of Somaliland, and a leading executive of the leading opposition party, Waddani, Abdirizak Khalif Ahmed, admitted that he never believed in the sanctity of Somaliland’s restored sovereignty, its statehood or values.
“I do not believe in Somaliland. I only used it until such a time my people united and came up with a common stance,” he said, responding to a direct question the interviewer put to him regarding his allegiance.
Mr. Khalif stated that, despite his deeply concealed betrayal of the trust put on him, he held ministerial portfolios at Public Woks and Transportation, respectively for over 5 years during President Ahmed Sillanyo’s reign of 2010 to 2017. Neither did he believe in the Somaliland that fought tooth and nail to put him up as the leader of Somaliland’s bicameral parliament in 2021.
“I only believed in buying time for my people (clan) to live in peace with neighbor clans (in the area),” he said.
The interviewer – either by design or unintentional oversight – did not ask him how his treachery to the nation he was supposed to serve or the oaths he had taken on the Quran reconciled with his declaration and prospects for the future as a politician.
Mr. Khalif went on to goad the people of Awdal region to stage an uprising stating that they were marginalized and that the central clan of the republic and leaders of the formed armed movement that emancipated it from the former brutal regime suppressed them. His words indicated that Awdal wanted out as Sool and that they were only afraid for their lives.
Borama, the regional capital of Awdal, however, is indelibly etched in Somaliland’s history as the cradle of modern Somaliland. Both the tricolor flag and the national anthem were the products of Awdalites.
Mr. Khalif chose not to mention any of those facts or the fact Sool representatives signed the proclamation of a restoration of the country’s independence that it lost to Somalia in 1960 and all subsequent agreements and treaties – verbal or on paper.
Khalif’s words highlighted between the lines that he projected himself as a leader of the Sool region of Somaliland he hailed from placing himself, also, at the head of a conspiracy to separate the region from Somaliland by guile or force that predated the targeted assassinations of prominent Las Anod residents which lead to the violent protests and sniper shootings of demonstrators late December 2022 and early 2023.
The death of civilians was hastily blamed on Somaliland security forces as planned triggering massive opposition to a Somaliland whose army and government built a ramshackle small town into a modern city within a decade or so.
Even his closest allies have now come to terms that might not have been nurturing a Sool insurgence for over the past decade or so alone, but that he and close co-conspirators may, also, have been pulling the strings behind the curtains in the disturbing violent demonstrations which shock the nation, especially in the cities of Erigavo, Burao, Hargeisa and Borama. The supposition strengthens the Attorney General’s charges which may lead to a sentencing in absentia and his eventual apprehension with the collaboration of other countries.
On Sunday, the former Speaker held a press conference in Las Anod to announce his resignation from the Speakership, membership of the parliament and membership Waddani Party. – and what appeared to be a declaration ruling out a reunion of Sool residents with the rest of Somaliland, emphasized that developments in the region have reached a critical point of no return.
Mr. Khalif Ahmed, during the press conference, touched on a number of sensitives issues that have the potential to leave lasting scars on his political life, inter-dependence and trust among the society and on a number of damaging secrets he revealed during the press conference he held among which was the active and sleeping roles as a mole severe Sool region from the rest of Somaliland while in office in both the government and political parties with him at the helm of the resultant tribal regional state.
He disclosed – to the dismaying shock of all around – to Somaliland and to all and sundry out there in the world that he held on to the leadership of the House of Representatives only to serve the plans of the traditional leaders and insurgents of the Sool region with whom he shared clan kinship although he was under oath to serve all the people of Somaliland, uphold the Constitution and the values of the nation as a whole.
“I decided not to continue serving the administration in January (2023). But after conferred with the leaders of the community here in Las Anod, we decided that I stay on as long as my position served my people (clan),” he said.
The Speaker failed to fathom the implications of his double standards and the fact that he worked as a mole occupying the third topmost position of the nation under solemn oath which makes him not only a criminal in the eyes of Islam and in the eyes of the whole world but, also, a shady character whose testimony and statements he fed the outside world can no longer be viewed as objective or be trusted.
“I sent my family (second) abroad on February 3 and the battle (for supremacy of Las Anod) started on the 6th,” he said. A man of his stature cannot abandon all his believes in 4 weeks which shows he was part of the conspiracy being hatched for Las Anod long before that.
Khalif bought his way into Turkish ‘citizenship’ by getting that country’s residence and passport probably preparing for this eventuality before anything happened in the Las Anod area.
The Speaker, in this revelation, admitted that he misled his former colleagues in the Waddani Party, in the parliament, in the government, well-wishing international partners, and the whole nation – a situation that engendered a great deal of heated debate with many defending him saying he had to be given the benefit of the doubt even though his actions spoke louder than words more often than not.
“Matters have now reached a point of no return between the people of this region and the people you hail from. I tell him to stop and if he doesn’t, we are at the peak of readiness primed to go,” he said.
The Speaker did not mention, though, that the respite given to the city by the withdrawal of the national army and other security agencies that he engineered in agreements he reached with President Bihi also gave the insurgents and the Garaads leading the drive for Somalia-statehood to arm themselves and to call for military support from as far as Gedo.
Neither did he acknowledge the funds he demanded and garnered from the government to, ostensibly, quell the insurgence or that he used those funds to bankroll the very disturbances he was supposedly helping calm down and to bribe Somaliland army units belonging to his sub-clan to defect to the insurgents’ side along with their military hardware.
In the above clip, a colonel of Somalia’s Puntland army, fighting in Las Anod, states that Khalif gave him US$ 50,000 to ‘buy ammunition and defend his people’ right after he returned from one of his back-and-forth trips to Hargeisa.
The majority of commenters, though, directly accused Waddani party for putting him up for the Speaker’s chair and by continuing to defend him even after it became clear that Khalif did not have the best interests of the nation he represented at heart.
“He is a traitor through and through,” one said. “He was a calculated plan to work his way through the system to whittle it down from the inside. It worked for him unsuspected during the past two decades or so”.
“Khalif was the worst of warmongers. Sending his two families out to a privileged life abroad, enrolling his children in the best of schools while sending thousands of other families and their kids to a life of misery and beggary either in makeshift camps or in the open in the wild makes him a criminal who should be punished for crimes against humanity atop of his role in the Las Anod war,” another wrote.
‘He sent his family to safety and then started the war immediately afterwards. He is a brazen liar, callous, and a cruel conniver. This shows Somaliland was a victim of propaganda and hate media all along with the army still holding the defensive positions they took after retreating from around the city on the insistence of Khalif serving the war cabal while pretending otherwise,” yet another stated.
“He sent kids not his own to war using them as human shields, as fodder on the fire he stokes,” yet another quipped.
“The fault is shared by the part that introduced such an ignoble, once-in-a-century traitor to the nation and kept attacking everybody who voiced displeasure in his actions. The part must apologize to the nation and retreat from the limelight for some time to lick its wounds,” another said.
In an attempt to leave the society he previously served divided and suspicious of one another henceforth, the former Speaker threw a few, carefully picked shells around. He specifically targeted clans who formed the support base of the national party he betrayed, Waddani, making it appear as if the party and its followers were in cahoots with him all along – perhaps not hitting all the nails on the head squarely as intended.
Among those he profusely thanked for unreserved support for himself and the SSC-Khatumo insurgence were several active MPs in the HoR.
“I would particularly express my gratitude and thanks to members of my House: Mohamed Abib Yussuf, Barkhad Jama Battun, Ahmed Jama Salah, Suleiman Nur Warsame Fod, and Mubarak Musa Ismail. I thank you for your unwavering support to the people (of Sool), for your bold expressions of your opinion, and for standing behind us. I thank you for resisting other cares and inclinations that have prevented others of your elk from the right path,” he said, marking the MPs as co-conspirators of the same feather as himself.
That he specifically named the MPs at a time the Ministry of Interior has obliquely referred to several MPs under investigation for conspiracy against the state earlier during the week was a bombshell he could have wholly avoided.
The former Speaker was elected to Parliament on 3478 votes where, among the MPs he mentioned in his expression of gratitude for supporting his duplicitous behavior, Barkhad Battun, was elected on more than 20 000 votes in the Maroodijeh region.
And, yet, Khalif was given the honor of the Speakership and not Battun or any of the others who have earned the trust of the electorate. Khalif, additionally, was given preference over his contender for the position from the same Sool region, the former Foreign Affairs Minister, Yassin Haji Mohamoud Hiir ‘Faratoon’, who had bagged more than 4400 votes of the regional votes. The latter is a confirmed, fiehard Somalilander who played an illustrious role in Somaliland’s peace and state-building activities since its inception 32 years ago.
Mr Khalif also lauded during his press conference the traditional leaders of some sections of the Somaliland society. On the same breath, he criticized others who traveled all the way to Ainabo on the way to Las Anod to await a response to an invitation to a peace dialogue they sent to their counterparts in the Sool region which ended in failure when the latter chose not to honor it – probably on the behest of people like Khalif who was working both ends at the time.
“I thank the traditional leaders of the Garhajis clan who refused to go with their peers to Oog and Ainabo insisting that if they cannot help the rebelling people they were not going to mock and leer at them,” he said, adding another divisive bombshell to his calculated words to pry the unity of the fledgling nation apart some more.
“It is a poor attempt to pull as many people as can be into the macabre web of deceit and treachery he had woven, one commented on a Facebook post of the former Speaker’s press statement.
“As he largely singled out one clan for his feigned gratitude, leaders must speak out and extricate themselves from the implied implications,” another countered.
Khalif spared no praise on two pro-Farmajo social media journalists, Terra, Germany, and Bakayle, all of whom were sworn detractors of Somaliland and promoters of everything Somalia especially if it promoted Farmajo’s point of view. Both took interviews in Las Anod and put together stories that media analysts put as figments of the imagination designed to paint a gloomy picture likened to that which the people of Somaliland and their cities suffered under the former military regime of Siyad Barre.
“I can never forget the two journalists who greatly supported through the media showing the world what happened in Las Anod,” he stated.
The former Speaker directly attacked the origins and clan of everybody else but his.
“People in the Sool region have every right to call their kin from as far as Luuq (Gedo, Somalia) rendering the self-anointing claims of Musa Bihi over this region naught,” he said.
The Speaker, of course, intentionally ignored the fact that the people of Sool were willingly and by choice part and parcel of all historic and contemporary arrangements that placed Somaliland where it was presently situated. The all-clan agreements of Burao in 1991, the national charter of Borama in 1993, and the fact that they all belonged to the pre-colonial British Somaliland Protectorate with its internationally demarcated boundaries.
It has been clear since December 2022 that the violent demonstrations that erupted in Las Anod on December 27 and 28 had nothing to do with social grievances or demand for justice but a conspiracy to supplant Somaliland colors for Somalia ones.
The majority of the people were slowly prepared to accept that the government of Somaliland was picking off the very people who figured high in its support in the region one by one – an unlikely supposition that by repetition became something of a reality to many of the more impressionable in the eastern city.
Around 40 people fell victim to targeted killings in the city since 2010. The latest reports from the troubled town which turned from a promising city to a den of militants, extremists, drug dealers, and rapists in less than 6 months put the figure of the intentionally killed since January 2023 at 72.
The Somaliland Constitutional Court issued a summon to appear in front of the Court within seven days to answer charges the National Attorney General filed against him last Tuesday, June 6.
Although the outside world has been methodically led astray with concocted reports and exaggerated incidents that whitewashed the role of militants and proponents of another forced union with Somalia, including the United Nations Security Council, facts are slowly emerging as leaders of the situation now feel bold enough, confident enough to come out to the open.
Neither the UNSC, nor the international community has fully analyzed its supportive actions to anarchy and lawlessness in a country that was for 32 years characterized as the ‘beacon of Africa’, the ‘best kept secret in Africa’, and an ‘oasis of peace and stability in a volatile region’. Neither is Africa ready for the formation of clan states.
Annexing Sool to Somalia or giving a state status is tantamount to blowing the whistle for a scramble to hundreds more of its kind in Africa and elsewhere starting with a Somalia next door that is keeping barely together hundreds of clans that would gladly adopt the Sool model.
