The honourable Chairman of one of the two Somaliland national opposition parties, Waddani, told the independent media that he was aggrieved that the government was gunning the same type of sabotage accusations at them as it did his party.
Chairman Abdirahman Mohamed Abdullahi ‘Irro’, meeting members of the media at his office, Thursday, expressed – albeit being his playfully best – that Waddani has suffered the brunt of – as he put it – the unsubstantiated accusations of successive Kulmiye governments as co-conspirators of Somalia’s Villa Somalia.
“I am really sorry this government – in fact, successive Kulmiye government – have made wild, Somaia-conspiracy accusations against you as they have done against us routinely without ever backing up their grave theories with any evidence,” he said, talking to the journalists from the head of the table at his office.
The Chairman said he and his party wished to offer the ‘wrongfully accused’ independent media of the government’s ‘unfounded’ allegations fully well cognizant of the valiant role a vibrant, independent media played in turning world attention favourably on the yet-to-be-recognized Republic now and in the past.
“Waddani,” he drove home, ‘remains a steadfast friend and supporter of an independent media that can criticize hi and his party as constructively and as candidly as they saw fit – something that the government has no stomach for”.
The Ministers of Information and Interior, brandishing a paper in the air, revealed at a meeting of the independent media the week before, that they had a list of over 30 journalists found to be in the pay of Mogadishu.
The ministers, however, inexplicably backed away from making the so-called list public or on filing litigations against ‘saboteurs’.
The independent media and its national organizations, more inexplicably, did not hit back by filing a lawsuit against the government to force it to either prove its point or recant its hurtful, damning allegations.
