Mohamoud Hashi Abdi, the last Minister at the Presidency under H.E. Ahmed Mohamed Mohamoud ‘Siilaanyo’, the former president of the Republic of Somaliland, totally refuted a story his predecessor wrote in a published memoir of his in which he alleges President Siilaanyo suffered dementia and decided to step down after only 45 days in office in 2010.
The book, From the Bush to the Presidency, as written by Hersi Ali Haj Hassan, the current ‘Leader’ of Waddani party, and the Minister of the Presidency before Mohamoud Hashi narrates the story of the Ex-president’s reported dementia on pages 145 and 146.
Mr. Hersi writes that the First Lady called him and Mohamoud Hashi ion the behest of the president, to a meeting during which the President proposed that he resign as he was ‘so worried about the advancing memory loss he felt’. Hersi goes on to say that the president showed the worry and stress his health condition set on him.
“The First Lady, however, told us that the President decided to continue leading the country following a discussion that they had with him as a family,” the First Lady informed us when Mohamoud Hashi joined us at the meeting, Hersi noted in his book.
Mohamoud Hashi, when Eryal TV senior editor, Badri Kossar, asked him about that incident said: “I was neither a party to at such a meeting as reported by Hersi Ali in his book nor was he called to any meeting in which the president announced a decision to resign due to ill health”.
Mohamoud went on to say that there was no way a condition like the one reporter in the memoir could be concealed from the public or international actors for seven years and more.
“The president was a public figure who was always on the limelight, not a prisoner only accessible to a few people,” he said.
Mohamoud stated that he had been close to the Ex-President for more than a decade as an aide who worked with and stood by him since he decided to run for the Presidency against President Rayale during the latter’s end of his first term.
On page 226 of the PDF copy of a book that critics have started dubbing it as The Hersigate, Mr. Hersi states that the First Lady, Amina-Weris, has taken a leading, influential role in government especially during the last two years of president Siilaanyo’s term due to the president’s deteriorating health. This reference implies that he, Hersi, was the surrogate ‘president’ at the state house for 5 years preceding his walkout since, as he said, senility and dementia had taken over the elected President’s capacity to lead right from day 45 into his term, and that the First lady took over from him for the last two years.
In effect, the book intimates that nothing Hersi did not initiate was ever done during those five years. In fact, he claims – in so many words – that he was responsible for all development schemes thus usurping the collective output of a whole, fully functioning, multi-organed government for himself.”As Hersi has mentioned elsewhere in his book that the First Lady was a highly educated woman who, as any first lady supported and stood by her husband, but who never interfered in her husband’s leadership, so she was during her last two years, too”, Mr. Hashi said, responding to the reporter’s question on the matter.
Mr. Mohamoud did not miss to point out that if the First Lady was as correct as Hersi reports during the first five years of the President’s term and during which he was the Minister of the Presidency, then he should have let it go at that and not reported of her as an interfering lady who meddled in government affairs for the last two years which he knew nothing about as he was not there at the Presidency at all.
The many scandalous incidents Hersi’s book is fraught with, observers say, are enough to bury the political aspirations of Mr. Hersi who, obviously, miscalculated the effect a meaningless memoir as his can have a mature, discerning public most of whom see him as an upstart who had been pushed on them by the very President his words intended to bury deep under.
Critics state that for a person who can not boast of an educational background, a political or business one, and whose only claim to public limelight was during his terms as Chief of Cabinet and Presidency Minister, respectively; a person who had openly boasted of siphoning off millions of public funds to enrich himself on the expense of the constituents – a person who is living on land that he appropriated for himself using his office, there is nothing worth-reading he can present to the world.
“There are plenty of indefensible pseudo-facts in the so-called book which can definitely land the writer in jail,” one of them pointed out.
PDF Copy: From the Bush to the Presidency
