A rebuttal: “Awad Misses the Point: Deni’s Parliamentary Address Should Be Judged by Leadership, Not a Technical Audit”

By Amb. Ahmed Isse Awad

Given the interest Ahmed A. Yusuf has shown in my short tweet, as reflected in his article on WardheerNews and the effort he has put into proving me wrong, I tried, with an open mind, to make sense of his criticism of my critique of Deni’s speech to the Puntland Parliament. I reread his piece and revisited my post to see whether there was anything I should correct. Despite his bold claim that “Awad misses the point,” I found nothing that persuades me to reconsider my argument.

The gist of Yusuf’s article is that I “may have applied the wrong standard to the wrong occasion,” and that “a presidential address opening the parliament is not a technical report” but carries “a broader responsibility: to explain the state’s direction, assess its principal achievements and challenges, articulate security and political priorities, and set out a vision for the future.” Says who? He does not tell us.

He cites no scholarly authority and no recognized guide to what such an “occasion” demands. His assertions are arbitrary, a product of his own imagination: a classic case of fadhi-ku-dirir.

Let me set the record straight. I did not ask for “a technical report,” nor for “expenditure breakdowns, implementation schedules and sector-specific performance indicators.” I simply pointed out that a leader, in this case Deni, has an obligation to tell the truth and to state facts supported by evidence, rather than make false and propagandistic claims.

I have studied leadership, and research in the field confirms that successful leaders typically rest on three pillars: technical competence, conceptual competence and emotional competence. A leader worthy of the title should know what he is talking about and, when necessary, be able to support his claims with facts, including data and statistics, whether he is addressing a parliament or discussing an issue with a friend.

Data and statistics matter even more when a leader is reporting to the nation on its political, economic, social and security condition. Moreover, using data does not stop a leader from articulating a vision or acknowledging challenges.

Yusuf also faults me on false premises. Under the subheading “A presidential address is not a security inventory,” he writes that “detailed information about the size, deployment, organization and the capabilities of security forces can be sensitive government information.” Even if we accept that point, which is debatable, I never asked for such details.

That reading stems from his own bias and misreading of my criticism. What I questioned was the veracity of Deni’s claim that new security forces had been trained and young university graduates recruited, and I asked for proof.

There is nothing sensitive about the number of personnel trained or recruited.

Again, in his rush to find fault with me and absolve Deni of false claims and exaggerations, he writes that “perhaps the most striking weakness in Awad’s criticism is the way it approaches Puntland’s infrastructure achievements.” He adds that “proper attribution matters, but it does not follow that a government deserves no credit for infrastructure delivered during its tenure because it did not originate every project.” He then goes on at length about Puntland’s infrastructure achievements, which have nothing to do with my criticism. Here he falls into a common trap: conflating the leader with the state.

I do agree with him on one point: proper attribution matters. That was precisely my point.

I did not dispute Puntland’s infrastructure achievements, as he insinuates. I disputed Deni’s misleading claim that they were his own doing, made without crediting those who deserve it, whether the World Bank, the people of Puntland, previous governments or the Garowe Development Committee.

Similarly, Yusuf faults me for citing business people and dismisses their accounts on the grounds that “anecdotes are not economic assessment.” Here again he exposes a glaring contradiction. On the one hand, he tells us Deni should not be criticized for failing to support his claims of political, economic and security achievements with data.

On the other, he discounts the lived experience of business people who have operated in Puntland since its founding and who are now witnessing the worst economic conditions it has ever seen, simply because they have not produced an “economic assessment.” I would trust, any day, the accounts of people on the ground who have run their businesses for more than twenty years over the armchair stories of someone eager to please the “leader” from afar, or of a leader who seeks to gaslight his people.

To his credit, Yusuf acknowledges, and makes abundantly clear, that leaders can and should be criticized and held accountable. Yet his unfair critique of my assessment of Deni’s speech and poor leadership betrays those declared convictions. Perhaps Yusuf, too, is afflicted by the irresistible “defend the leader” reflex, part of a debilitating political culture and intellectual malaise that took root in the Somali psyche through the devastating civil war and prolonged instability, deforming our national character and corrupting our public discourse.

Ahmed Isse Awad

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Amb. Awad is Somalia’s former Minister of Foreign Affairs and former Ambassador to the United States.