Garowe, Puntland, Somalia
By Ismail H. Warsame
Mohamed Affey has spent recent weeks recounting his years as a Kenyan diplomat and mediator of the Mbagathi Somali National Reconciliation Conference, 2002-2004, in a series of interviews with Juxa Video. The episodes cast Kenya as a steady, even-handed host guiding Somali actors to consensus. What Affey omits is how his own government’s conduct, and his own hand in it, nearly collapsed the conference before it produced anything at all.
This writer was present in Mbagathi during the period Affey now narrates from a distance. The record deserves correction.
The State House Maneuver
The signing ceremony Affey treats as a milestone did not take place in the Mbagathi conference hall, where negotiations had run for more than two years. It was moved to Kenya’s State House, and that relocation was not incidental.
There, Abdiqasim Salad Hassan and Mohamed Abdi Yusuf signed the Kenyan-drafted document in their official capacities as president and prime minister of the Transitional National Government. Abdullahi Yusuf was told to sign as an individual, not as president of Puntland State. It was a diplomatic maneuver engineered inside Kenya’s Foreign Ministry, designed to diminish Puntland’s standing at the moment Somalia’s transitional order was being finalized on paper.
This was not oversight. It bore the marks of then-Kenyan Foreign Minister Kalonzo Musyoka and Affey himself, the two officials most responsible for managing Kenya’s role as host. A mediator who omits the one episode that nearly ended the process he claims to have safeguarded is not offering an incomplete memory. He is offering a curated one.
The Walkout That Almost Was
Abdullahi Yusuf recognized the insult and moved to leave the conference outright, a step that would have removed Puntland’s leadership and thrown more than two years of negotiation into crisis.
Reversing that took considerable effort, much of it this writer’s own. Working through two trusted Kenyan contacts, Gen. Mohamud and Kenyan intelligence chief Shukri, this writer argued that Abdullahi Yusuf’s grievance was legitimate and that Kenya’s credibility as host was at stake. The two officers persuaded Abdullahi Yusuf to stay.
More significant than that immediate save was what followed. Mohamud and Shukri, once aware of Musyoka’s and Affey’s bias, committed to backing Abdullahi Yusuf for the remainder of the conference. Their influence reached Kenyan Presidents Daniel arap Moi and, later, Mwai Kibaki, and it became one factor in Musyoka’s eventual removal from Kenya’s Cabinet.
Why It Matters
Signing Abdullahi Yusuf in as a private citizen, stripped of his Puntland title, was an attempt to redraw the balance among Somalia’s transitional actors at the exact moment that balance was being formalized. Had it succeeded, and had Abdullahi Yusuf actually walked, the Mbagathi process and the Transitional Federal Government built on it might not have survived intact.
Affey’s version, delivered more than two decades on with no one present to contest it, recasts Kenya as an even-handed midwife to Somali unity. The fuller record shows a Foreign Ministry that tried, at a decisive moment, to diminish one of the conference’s principal actors, checked only by Kenyan officials who saw the maneuver and corrected course.
Silence on that episode, sustained across a multi-part interview series devoted to the conference, is not forgetfulness. It is a choice. This writer’s account is offered here as a firsthand participant’s record, with an invitation to other participants, Somali and Kenyan, to add what they witnessed.
Ismail H. Warsame is founder of Warsame Policy & Media Network (WAPMEN) and Warsame Digital Media (WDM). He served as founding chief of staff and director general at the Puntland State Presidency, 1998-2004, and was a participant in the Mbagathi Somali National Reconciliation Conference.