Local News
Prime Minister congratulates Puntland on twenty eight years since its founding
Hamza Abdi Barre commended the commitment of the leadership and people of Puntland to statehood and to peace, and paid tribute to the leaders who have headed the administration and to the resilience shown through the different stages of its formation.
MOGADISHU (SONNA): Prime Minister Hamza Abdi Barre has congratulated the leadership and people of Puntland on the twenty eighth anniversary of the establishment of the administration.
In a message issued by his office, the Prime Minister commended their commitment to statehood and to peace. He paid tribute to the leaders who have headed the administration over that period, citing the part they played in the building of the country and the resilience they showed through the different stages of its formation.
He closed by wishing the leadership and the people of the Puntland regions lasting peace, progress and prosperity.
Puntland was established in 1998, at a point when Somalia had no functioning central government and the collapse of the state was in its eighth year. A constitutional conference held in Garowe that year produced a regional administration with its own executive, assembly and judiciary, and it was the first of the entities that would later be incorporated into Somalia’s federal structure. Its founding leader, Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed, went on to become President of the Transitional Federal Government in 2004.
That sequence is the substance of the tribute in the Prime Minister’s message. The administration was built before the federal state existed, and the argument its founders made was that governance could be reconstructed from the regions upward when it could not be reconstructed from the centre outward. The federal framework that followed rested in part on that proposition, and the states established afterwards drew on the precedent.
The intervening years placed the administration under pressure of several kinds, among them drought, displacement, the campaign against armed groups in the mountains of the northeast, and the piracy that operated off the coast for much of the following decade. The reference in the Prime Minister’s message to resilience through the different stages of its formation points to that record.
