Hargeisa Municipality, today and yesterday, Razed down hundred-year old trees at a day the Minister for Environment, H.E. Shukri Haji Ismail, Vowed to plant 250 thousand more trees this year to combat the engulfing desertification spreading all over the country.
In a new campaign to cleanse the city of Hargeisa from unlawful vendors and roadside businesses, the big bulldozers of the local government needlessly pulled down trees under which the vendors built ramshackle shelters.
Three-Four years back, the Municipality cut down trees that lined the wide avenue that approached the hospital from the city center side going through to the Presidency and the ministries area.
This latest unthoughtfulness on the side of the capital’s local government comes at a time when the Somaliland Ministry of environment is busy on afforestation efforts through the country to conserve the environment and protect whatever remained of the fauna and vegetation in this semi-arid country.
Whilst Hargeisa residents welcome the general motive of the move, people are, on the other hand, distressed by witnessing the uprooting of age-old trees lining places such as in front of the banks and beside the MiG monument and the on the roadside of the Ministry of Health.
Critics use the analogy of the woods and the forest not seeing one because of the other to describe what is happening. In its attempt to return the city to its former glory and clean streets, the municipality officials’ latest campaign is seen as a haphazardly planned move that has more counterproductive effects than that it attempts to remedy.
