Harvard-Educated Technocrat Chosen as Somalia Premier

By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN

Published: June 23, 2011

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NAIROBI, Kenya — The president of Somalia’s transitional government on Thursday appointed a Harvard-educated prime minister who said he would try to revive Somalia’s war-wrecked economy and establish better security in a country that has been virtually lawless for 20 years.

Feisal Omar/Reuters

Abdiweli Mohamed Ali

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• Times Topic: Somalia

The president, Sheik Sharif Sheik Ahmed, seemed to be continuing with his preference for Western-educated technocrats by naming Abdiweli Mohamed Ali as prime minister. Mr. Ali’s résumé reads like the itinerary on a tour of prominent American universities: it says he holds a master’s degree in public administration from Harvard, a master’s degree in economics from Vanderbilt and a Ph.D. in economics from George Mason University. In recent years, he has been teaching economics at Niagara University in upstate New York.
He is Somali-American, and his profile is similar to that of Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed, the previous prime minister, who also is an American citizen. He was abruptly pushed out of Somalia’s transitional government this month as part of a United Nations-backed deal to resolve an internal political dispute. Mr. Ali was a deputy prime minister and had been the acting prime minister since Mr. Mohamed resigned.
At a news conference on Thursday in Mogadishu, Somalia’s capital, Sheik Sharif praised Mr. Ali, whose academic focus has been international trade, public finance and public choice.
“He is a good man,” the president said. “I hope he will improve the situation of Somalia.”
Few would argue that Somalia needs it. The Transitional Federal Government has been paralyzed by infighting and accusations of corruption over the past several months, and it controls only a small patch of the capital. Much of the rest of the country, which is nearly the size of Texas, is ruled by clan militias and Islamist insurgents. Somalia’s seas are plagued by pirates, whose ransoms keep going up, to about $10 million per hijacked ship.
African Union peacekeepers have recently uprooted insurgents from several neighborhoods in Mogadishu, but without a functioning government most analysts predict the insurgents will be back.
“Somalia is in a difficult situation; there is an economic crisis and insecurity,” Reuters quoted Mr. Ali as saying. “I hope I will succeed in overcoming all these problems. I urge the entire government and Somalis to help me achieve this.”
The transitional government’s Parliament, an often fickle and unpredictable group, must approve Mr. Ali’s appointment. Sheik Sharif said he was urging the lawmakers to act fast, because the mandate for the transitional government expires in August 2012. Somalia has cycled through more than a dozen transitional governments since the central government collapsed in 1991.