Aug 16, 2007

Dimwits and downright crooks

Couple weeks back FT reported the Somalia's Transitional Federal Government (TFG) has granted oil exploration rights to Chinese state firm CNOOC in Puntland. Few days later the TFG prime minister Gedi said he didn't know anything about such a deal, and no oil deals can be made until the proposed oil law is approved in parliament. that's right, he doesn't know anything about it.

The problem is that the president and prime minister - and the rest of the cabinet - are a bunch of crooks, each wants to sell the unproved oil/gas reserves of Somalia before the other. Abdullah Yusuf prefers the Chinese so he give them exploration rights in Mudug region where he's from, and the deals was signed in Nairobi and worse he didn't tell the prime minister about the deal. The Prime minister on his part is pushing through an oil law which basically says to create a state-owned oil firm but the twist is that wants a Kuwaiti and an Indonesian company to own 49%. He's in a hurry to get the law through the parliament because he already hammered out the details of deal.

I frankly expected this sort of thing from these two idiots, but I thought at this stage when everything is at stake and TFG officials are being assassinated and over 600,000 Somalis don't have enough to eat, they would wait a little bit or at least make sure they disguised what they're doing.

How is it possible for Somalia to get out of it's misery if it's led by these half-wit crooks? Frankly, I doubt it can.

1 comment:

bishop said...

frankly, you expect too much from your leaders when oil/money is involved...

(wouldn't we all like "state-owned" oil... like i said, though, it is a sin to even think like that HERE)