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ESAT News (May 3, 2017)
Somalia’s new president, Mohamed Abdullahi Farmajo, is in Ethiopia on Wednesday in a much-anticipated meeting aimed at smoothing over decades of mistrust. Farmajo has been criticised for waiting three months before going to Addis Ababa, according to a report by Radio France International.
The Radio quoted Gérard Prunier, a French historian specialising in the Horn of Africa as saying “the Ethiopia trip is by far the most important visit abroad that President Mohamed Abdullahi Farmajo will make and it is also the most difficult.”
Farmajo has visited five other countries, including Kenya, beforehand.
“He didn’t have the guts to go there first,” Prunier told RFI by phone on Tuesday.
“Since it’s going to be a controversial visit with difficult circumstances, difficult dialogue, he probably postponed it until he felt it was absolutely necessary.”
Mohamed Abdullahi Farmajo beat the odds to become Somalia’s ninth president on 8 February, campaigning on a platform to defeat the Al Shabaab armed group and improve security
The radio report said Farmajo almost did not make it to the presidency due to meddling from the Ethiopian government.
Rashid Abdi, Horn of Africa Director at the International Crisis Group in Nairobi told RFI “the Ethiopian government backed a different candidate, so there was speculation that the new Somali president may actually be hostile to Ethiopia, a regional country with a military presence in Somalia.”
Yet the urgency of Mogadishu’s security concerns leave Farmajo with little choice but to do business with Addis.
“Definitely there is a huge security imperative which is how to deal with Al Shabaab,” Abdi says. “Al Shabaab is an existential threat not only to Somalia but to the region. And I think that security cooperation between the two countries will be very central to how they move forward.”
Relations though weren’t helped when Ethiopia pulled its troops from Somalia last October.
The report said Somaliland and Yemen are expected to be top on the agenda of discussion between the two sides.
