New Somali president survives terrorist attack, faces daunting job

On only his second day on the job, Somalia’s newly elected president was given a stark and deadly warning today of what he is up against in perhaps the world’s toughest government position. 

Twin suicide bombers struck a hotel in central Mogadishu where President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud was giving a press conference alongside Kenya’s foreign minister, Sam Ongeri. Neither man was injured, but the attacks are representative of the challenges in leading a country plagued by famine, poverty, corruption, and terrorist violence. But despite these many hurdles, some say Somalia's new leader has the characteristics needed to maintain recently won gains and edge the country toward improvement. 

The political landscape

For Somalia’s new leader, an academic and former aid agency consultant who swept the incumbent aside with 70 percent of the vote, the inventory of pressing tasks truly is daunting.

First, his government, when he appoints it, will control less than a fifth of his country. Al Shabab, Somalia’s Al Qaeda-allied Islamist rebel force, while under pressure, still rule other parts of the country under repressive interpretations of Islamic law. The group has launched ever-increasing numbers of hit-and-run or suicide attacks, even in the heart of the capital, and claimed responsibility for today’s attack, which killed eight people, including three Somali soldiers and at least two from the African Union peacekeeping mission protecting the president.

Within hours of Mr. Mohamud winning Monday’s presidential election, the group said he was little more than a puppet of the West, and would be targeted.

But beyond the presence of terrorist groups, more than 2 million of the new president’s citizens need outside help finding enough food each day. Pirates along the Somali coast, Africa’s longest, are excitedly watching the monsoon winds wane as they prepare to set out to sea again.

Mohamud is a government outsider with no power base in the capital, Mogadishu, where artful and hardened politicians have made minor fortunes stealing from state coffers, according to a recent United Nations report.

“The question is not so much whether Mohamud is up to the job, it’s whether anyone at all would be up to it,” says Ahmed Soliman, Somalia researcher for the Chatham House think tank in London.

Strengths of an ‘outsider’

There are positive signs that Mohamud could keep recently accelerating progress in Somalia moving in the right direction, however.   

On paper at least, he has the support of the country’s new 275-member parliament: nearly three-fourths of them chose Mohamud over Sheikh Shariff Ahmed, the incumbent, who entered Monday’s election tarnished with accusations of corruption, including trying to buy parliamentarians’ votes.

Indeed, Mohamud’s presidential victory has been interpreted as a protest against Sheikh Shariff’s inability to stamp out graft among the country’s elite. Over the past eight years of the "transitional government" – which officially ended with Mohamud's victory – corruption has grown.

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