This morning on my way to work, I grabbed a local daily from a newspaper box. On the cover page -printed black- was a picture of a white apple, the logo of Apple Inc, with the portrait of a bespectacled man tacked inside the bottom of the picture. The words “STEVE JOBS, 1955-2011, THE GENIUS” also appeared on the lower quarter of the apple shot.
While I walked a block farther toward the train that will get me to work, my mind submerged deeply in a sea of scattered thoughts and has thus become a nuclei of activity, roving between places, comparing and contrasting people. Here was a man, Steve Jobs, who became an American household name for creativity, innovation and for quality of high-tech products his company, Apple Inc, has engineered, but above all, a man who had a country that was ready to reward him for his work. Steve was today mourned not only in the news media but also in family circles.
Then-and on the contrary- another event occurred to my mind. The latter happened a day earlier, in Mogadishu, Somalia’s capital, when, Bashar Abdulahi Nur, a young Al-Shabab fighter drove a truck filled with explosives into a government ministry building, blowing off half a square mile area, killing over a hundred people and wounding nearly 200 others. Most of the casualties were students waiting for the result of a scholarship selection exam that would have taken them to Turkey Universities. Other victims included area business owners and government soldiers, thus denying Somalia of its most productive workforce, the type that would have grown up to become the Steve Jobs of Somalia. While both events described above are extremely sad news for both nations, nonetheless, the cause, scope and magnitude differs. While Steve Jobs died peacefully, albeit the much pain to his family and nation for his loss, of pancreatic cancer, the deaths in Mogadishu were sudden and chaotic, and represent an unfortunate continuum of two decades of horrific bloodshed which catastrophically impacts on the people, educational infrastructure and socio-political progress of Somalia.
Most of Somalia’s elites have already fled the country. The appalling loss of lives in Mogadishu’s bloody explosion on Tuesday frightens those educated Somalis who glamour for an opportunity to return to rebuild their homeland. Already, Diaspora Somali entrepreneurs, scholars, athletes and artists are building other countries which provided them home away from home. Examples are abound but a few such as Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed, an American citizen who returned in 2010 to become a prime minister, Abdisalam Ibrahim, the first East African to play in the premier league, Mo Farah, described as the Greatest British long distance athlete of all-time, scholar and writer Abdi M. Kusow, also a professor at Iowa State University, listed in Who’s Who in America in 2010 and whose article on Normative Order was ranked as one of the 20 most read papers between 2004 and 2009 to Nurrudin Farah’s literary prowess, come to mind.
The question that demands an answer is if we Somalis keep on killing each other aimlessly for two decades and counting, where the hell are we heading? Why are we denying our geniuses, our own Steve Jobs, a place to call home? Why are we denying our young educated folks an opportunity to build the examples of Apple and Google? Why are so many obsessed with ‘my clan is better than yours?’ And why do we worship personalities in our political system instead of focusing on policy issues that improve lives, on principles which promote the dignity, integrity and territorial sovereignty of the Somali nation? Somalia will live on. In spite of Al-Shabab’s ugly bombing mission and AMISOM’s indiscriminate shelling of civilians, Somalia refuses to die. Somalia will live on through this painful, shameful carnage but the legacy this lives will forever stay.
Author's contact: ahmednajaah@hotmail.com
Author's contact: ahmednajaah@hotmail.com
