Somaliland.Org

Badha Badha Faisal Ali Warabe and the SNM
By Sagal Say Wallahi
 
Always making extremely dull, turgid and frankly tacky speeches never short of inane comments, Badha Badha Faisal Ali Warabe, leader of one-constituency party well-known for flip-flopping on several issues, assumes that people warm to his cheesy slogans. Again, Warabe, vain and untrustworthy, attacks, consistent with his unbridled bravado, the Somali National Movement (1981-1993). According to UCID’s imperious man, the SNM was an undisciplined and undemocratic movement engaged in pre-modern political mobilization. Warabe’s remark does not surprise me because he never does anything with panache – the man is even unable to acquire a parrot brain to help him repeat conventional political wisdom – Finlandey xaal qaado. His public diatribes against the SNM are, predictably, the feeble dumbed-down rehashes of the NSS boys.
Faisal of Waaq Waaq UCID, clearly not chastened by his 6 years in politics and not more confident than when he first spat at the political space and taunted anyone with credible political capital, has recently provoked the reaction of Boobe Yusuf Duale who is universally recognized as an authority on the SNM political experience. Flabbergasted by this anything goes against the SNM, Boobe re-established the political achievements of the movement by highlighting its leadership alternations and procedural democracy at a time when all post-independence rebellion movements were openly flaunting Marxist-Leninist ideologies. Needless to say that UCID, a political formation run by Warabe’s clique of sycophantic friends, could never measure up to SNM’s standard of political openness.
UCID-UDUB critics of the SNM like to characterize the invocation of Somalilanders’ past political positions as part of Issaq’s irrational rebellion against Syad’s repressions. But this familiar criticism ignores the extent to which SNM’s political contributions inform how Somalilanders see the world and themselves. No wonder many Somalilanders see Warabe’s latest rant against the SNM merely as a deliberate attempt to allow the NSS regime a greater share of power. This approach is, by all accounts, construed as a hostile act by many former SNM freedom fighters and their supporters. In short, a slight on all of us! Everyone knows that it certainly does not add anything to his party’s legitimacy and acceptance.  
Notorious for their recantations, Ucid’s arrivistes reduce constructive criticism to its simplest expression: on-the-one-hand-on-the-other-hand.  Evidently parochial - and visionless - this party is in search of a credible political soul capable of providing its members and grassroots activists a specific identity away from UDUB’s NSS style. Despite their socio-democrat rhetoric and their middle ground politics, leaders of this party are dazzled by the idea of stardom and remain dominant within their clan constituency – Hargeisa South-East and Slaxley district. 
 
With a geographically and socially limited base, ina Warabe– the leader without a clear cause - recycles the claptrap our NSS boys and their supporters have peddled many times before against the SNM. His populist and ostrich-like tactics will forever prevent him from establishing himself as a pivotal figure in Somaliland politics.
 
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