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Will Farmaajo Go To Prison?

Moreover, what we are confronting is not just political incompetence, but outright criminality. Last year the United Nations Security Council’s Sanctions Monitoring Group for Somalia exhaustively documented how senior TFG officials, including the deputy prime minister and other members of the cabinet, were directly involved in visa fraud including, in one incident, the facilitation of travel to Europe by two suspected al‐Shabaab cadres.

More recently, the report of the auditors reviewing the TFG’s books for the years 2009 and 2010 reveals that while during the relevant period bilateral assistance to the regime totaled $75,600,000, only $2,875,000 could be accounted for.

The auditors determined that the balance, which Page 4 represents more than 96 percent of international aid to the TFG, was simply “stolen” and specifically recommended forensic investigations of the Office of the President, the Office of the Prime Minister, the Ministry of Finance, and the Ministry of Telecommunications, as the most egregious offenders.

As to recently ousted Prime Minister Farmajo, the spin put out by the public relations firms he hired with international donor assistance notwithstanding, he was no reformer. When political commentators said he came with “no political baggage,” it was a polite way of saying that he had no experience of Somali politics on the ground—he had not been in the country for a quarter of a century at the time of his appointment—and no base from which to lead.

That is not to say that he did not learn quickly from his colleagues in the TFG. He held the post less than a year, but the auditors could not account for $648,000 from the salary account of the Office of the Prime Minister. He also awarded his old boss, a former county executive from upstate New York with no evident foreign policy credentials, to lobby the U.S. State Department on his behalf.

Given that Farmajo is a U.S. citizen and at least some of the “missing” or otherwise misspent funds undoubtedly derive from assistance funded by American taxpayers, perhaps the Department of Justice could be encouraged by the Subcommittees to take a closer look into the matter and determine whether any laws have been broken and, if so, what civil remedies might be sought or criminal prosecutions possibly brought. Anyway, is it any surprise that such an outfit has had little success in rallying even minimal public support behind it, much less accomplishing any of the basic tasks—the fulfillment of which was the very raison d’être for its creation in the first place—including laying the reaching out to various segments of society, drafting a permanent constitution, conducting a census, holding elections, and, in general, reestablishing the foundations for Somali statehood?

There is perhaps no more telling indicator of the TFG’s dismal prospects than the fact that no fewer than three different Western initiatives—a United States‐funded training program using private contractors, a European Union military mission, and a French operation—have recruited, trained, and armed more than 9,000 troops for the TFG and yet fewer than 1,000 of these recruits have remained loyal to the regime. To make matters worse, some of the personnel have gone over to the insurgents, taking with them invaluable tactical knowledge as well as their weapons.

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