By WDM Staff Reporter
The meetings between the council of presidential candidates (CPC) and FGS Prime Minister Mohamed Hussein Rooble was primed to face a technical conundrum. It’s deliberations is similarly bound to end up at a cul-des-ac because the meetings agenda or objectives were clearer in its concealment than in its revelation. So are the participants. As there is more to the faces than they revealed.
The dissection of thses variables could help shade insight into the layered aspects that make the PM Rooble-CPC meeting confounding. For instance, PM Rooble is well understood for who he doesn’t represent than who he represents. He doesn’t represent Farmajo. If he represents anyone, CPC is who Rooble represents. That’s the 4.5 business!.
Through the Decale jungle, Farmajo and CPC were preying on each other using Rooble as bait, or maybe, a Trojan Horse. On this, Rooble would deliver more for Farmajo than for CPC. Also in the mix is a whole deep state infrastructure, whose fate is intertwined with Farmajo. It’s plain Darwinism. CPC threats only alarms the deep state to throw more cordon around Farmajo to cushion him, and by extension, themselves, against CPC power grab.
FGS was awake to this fact. They brought the PM-CPC negotiation as a ploy to buy time and wiggle themselves out of the crisis that was created by the Feb. 19 nightly raid on two former presidents and other opposition candidates to suppress opposition’s anti-government protests.
Relying on the IC to fight its wars, the CPC pressed on them to join the chorus, declaring Farmajo’s continued stay in office beyond Feb. 8 illegitimate, the CPC was short on strategy against a more reticent, strategic and callously conniving FGS. A lethargic and reactionary CPC is too calculating, optimistic, garrulous and reliant on others to do their work for them.
That work was to produce for the CPC, despite not owning the means of production, something along the lines of the June 2008 Djibouti agreement. Unfortunately for the CPC, the ground had shifted on that long time ago. Rooble is no Nur Adde, CPC is no ICU (in composition yes, but not in leverage terms) and, fortunately for Farmajo, it was “being there done that” with his Kampala Accord experience. The more the CPC and allies underestimated Farmajo, the more he shocked them with unmitigated surprises.
Thrown into disarray by the Feb. 19 raid and subsequent FGS quashing of its planned protests, the CPC desperately embraced informally convened reconciliation meetings with the PM Rooble and other fellow constituents. Little did the CPC know that the informal nature of the meeting, which they conveniently mistook as formal, was because PM Rooble was under pressure to prove his worth by saving his position from the encroachment of the constituent that he represents in his position. Little did they also know that they were celebrating prematurely over the outcome of the Feb. 25 agreement at Decale prematurely because, as the bonafide representative of the constituent in the FGS, his apology on the Feb. 19 raid and suppressed protests was personal as opposed to official. With his successful last-minute cancellation of the CPC protests, PM Rooble made his boss satisfied with his efforts. That all the pre-hire tests they had run on Rooble were not in vain.
A series of badly managed messaging on an already anti-climaxed protests made CPC prospects of success not so promising. As the puppeteers of PM Rooble pre-occupied them with intra-constituency feel-good meetings, FGS tacticians have accelerated to the exit of their exit strategy. And Saturday’s eve, the big day of the weirdly so-called FGS-CPC joint protests (for “joint” is how the people understood), CPC was caught yapping. They again made it worse for themselves with their poor messaging about their reasons for canceling the protests. FGS, with its often superior communications, quickly thanked the CPC for responsibly canceling thé planned protests for totally unrelated, but convenient reasons to the ones CPC gave.
Decale was an exercise in deceit from the get-go. The parties were not committed to a treaty without their intentions to gain political advantage over each other and to renege. Such is the level of decadence and the extent that common decency has been eroded.
The CPC and allied FMS are determined to create a level playing field or at least narrow its power deficit with FGS. With the FGS frustrating CPC’s protests, the only means they had to get even with FGS was applying pressure tactics. But their timing was awful, as they were too slow in acting, and their preparation/organization even worse. With that, in all likelihood, the FGS will hold off against CPC protests long enough to make them impotent against the convening of the next national consultative forum to finalize the stalled elections process.
Halane venue is inevitable. But it is going to be neither as important for the CPC and allies as they wanted it to be nor as scary for Farmajo. The patriotic forces’s messaging was responsible for minimizing Halane’s importance as a meeting venue for future national consultative meetings. That message was, “Halane is a Somali territory. A territory that falls under President Farmajo’s jurisdiction.” Secondly, that there is really nothing left to talk about after the technical committee’s Baidoa agreement. All that was left was the formality of the signatories signing the agreement. And that Farmajo can do even in the darkness of the belly of a Beast.
The CPC have been played!
Warsame Policy & Media Network (WAPMEN) 