Who holds their ground and calms the waters?
As for the abolition of elders, the late President Egal told me, “Our biggest mistake in Mogadishu, when I was Prime Minister from March to October 1969, was to have ignored the elders. That bad habit has continued in Mogadishu. Elders in southern Somalia have no rank in the councils of state, where there is a state. We have the Guurti now in Somaliland’s upper house (a bicameral legislature) formed originally by the Somali National Movement (SNM) freedom fighters as their indispensable political wing.” For successfully recruiting Somali soldiers for the SNM, the elders were given a special advisory nomenclature with the freedom fighters. It was assumed by the embryonic Somali politicians, before they experienced independence in 1960, that their respective, forthcoming, ‘modern’ administrations could effectively handle problems of rural communities better than sarong-clad Sultans and elders who lacked westernized education. This was a mistaken belief. Rural elders, and not westernized
