Same Clan, yes? VOTE!

The elections in Somaliland weren't democratic. Every citizen didn't vote and the votes weren't fair at all. Almost every person voted more than once; that was not fair to the other voters and also to other campaigns. Furthermore, other candidates were bribing people to vote for their campaign instead of voting for other campaigns. It was very corrupted. Moreover, people were voting for whoever they were voting for because of their ethnicity, not because who is going to benefit their country more. Candidates didn't provide any information about themselves other than their ethnicity. Corruption and favoritism are the exact reasons why Somaliland is not making a significant progress.  

That being said, I didn't vote for a couple of reasons. The first reason is my lack of knowledge due to the fact that candidates don’t educate voters about themselves and don’t provide their ideologies and what they are going to do. A voter must know who he/she is voting for because one can determine the future of his country based on the leader he chooses. The second reason is that voting offices were just a handful. There were hundreds of thousands of people at every office and this caused some people to wait hours until it was their turn to vote. This was not fair to the citizens who didn't go to work because they had to vote. The most shocking event that I witnessed was that people who were wealthier gave the person who was in charge of the lines some change for his pocket to allow them to vote first! Also, limiting the number of voting offices is a way for certain types of governments to limit the number of people who vote and which class of people vote (I’m just saying…).

An incident that happened in our school is that a candidate (I won’t say any names) who had a relative in our school, Abaarso Tech, decided to have his relative bring a lot of friends to Berbera so that they could vote for him. He persuaded them by telling them that he will be providing them with “good” food and shelter and he will let them enjoy the beautiful beach of Berbera.

The aftermath of this system was a gun fight that happened in Hargeisa the day the results were being announced. A political party named Xaqsoor accused the government of unjust results. They said that the electoral committees deprived them from their rightful number of seats in the parliament. This, however, was not a surprise given and many people who noticed this system of favoritism and corruption predicted the fight.