Person of the Year (2011): Sharif Hassan Sh. Aden

Person of the Year (2011): Sharif Hassan Sh. Aden WardheerNews Jan 02, 2012

Somalis have waved goodbye to 2011 licking away the scars it left on them while dreading the new perils 2012 might have under its wings. Since the collapse of the last central government of Somalia two decades ago, Somalis have yet to see a caring year. The twenty calendar years they have so far witnessed were all cruel, without exception, in terms of the sustained destruction they inflicted from Black Hawk Down, brutal warlords, famine, Drone bombardments and now the full invasion of the country by almost all East African armed forces.

Lives in the country remain stubbornly in a managed chaos where villains of all sorts compete to undercut and outsmart each other.  Piracy in the high seas, starvation, corruption, Islamic extremists, warlords and inept transitional governments all call Somalia their home and are all in agreement to maintain the status quo. In a pandemonium of this sort a pirate can have stake in the TFG, the warlord businesses, the Islamists and food aid haulage contracts. Nothing in Somalia is what it appears because the distinctive features that traditionally separated different interest groups have all but vanished and that is precisely the reason the scuffle with in the Transitional Federal Institutions (TFI) refused to rest in peace.

It is not surprising in light of the boisterous forces that took root in Somalia and particularly the south have failed to produce model statesmen that could fill the void and rescue the country from its perils. It is said “no government is   better than its people.”  The successive TFG governments installed to deliver the country from the cold into the bosom of the nation of states unfortunately hail from the same groups that hold the country and its seas in ransom.

Picking a person of the year in this shadowy situation is an arduous task, where one is given points not on what good they have done for the country, as none is even thinking along these lines to this day, but on how long one has endured to keep his personal turf.  Surviving in the jungle of Somali politics one has to have the ingenuity of the acclaimed actor Marlon Brando of the movie  “The God father”; so after exhaustive research the Speaker of parliament, Sharif Hassan, AKA Sharif Sakin-Xariif has qualified to earn the title of the Person of the year.Continued