African Union Representative’s Compromising Ties With Fahad Yassin

African Union representative’s compromising ties with Fahad Yassin After the UN ambassador was driven out, it is now the turn of Francisco Madeira, the AU envoy in Mogadishu, to be criticized for his ties with the no2 of Somalian intelligence, as reported by Africaintelligence.com and Indian Ocean Newsletter.

During a meeting behind closed doors held on 16 January, the president of the African Union (AU) Commission and former Chadian prime minister, Moussa Faki Mahamat, received alarming feedback on the performance of his special envoy in Somalia, Francisco Madeira. According to the confidential report submitted to him (which the Indian Ocean Newsletter has seen), Madeira has a biased view of the performance of the Somalian government. It accuses the AU representative of not gathering information on the ground in person but of obtaining it instead directly from two Somalian officials: the national security advisor Abdisaid Mohamed Ali and the deputy director of the National Intelligence Security Agency (NISA), Fahad Yasin Haji Dahir (Indian Ocean Newsletter Issue-1482), who is seen as being close to Qatar.

Under the influence of these two figures, Madeira is said to have pleaded the cause of the Somalian government to the AU and informed the pan-African organisation that the Somalian authorities are respecting their commitments to implementing the ‘one person, one vote’ system in time for the general election of 2020.

The problem is that Madeira studiously avoided mentioning Mogadishu’s role in the arrest on 13 December of Mukhtar Robow, aka Abu Mansur,the former Al-Shabaab spokesman who at the time was running for the presidency of South West State (Indian Ocean Newsletter Issue 1489).

Madeira has also touted the Villa Somalia’s efforts to clamp down on corruption, despite the fact that the latest rankings published by the NGO Transparency International classify Somalia as still being one of the most corrupt countries in the world.

As a result, Moussa Faki may decide not to renew Madeira’s term in office, which is shortly due to expire. Not least because – as is the case with the head of the AU’s conflict prevention division, the Burundian Fred Ngoga Gateretse – there are questions as to his motivations for adopting such a stance.