‘Come to Mogadishu’ Somali PM tells UN

Mogadishu is now safe enough and the United Nations should move its offices and staff who work on Somalia into the country within 90-days, said Prime Minister Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed.

Mohamed made the demand at a press conference in the war-torn capital where his UN-backed Transitional Federal Government, supported by African Union soldiers, is battling Islamist insurgents with links to al-Qaeda.

“We call on UN aid agencies to move their offices and staff members involved in operations to assist Somalia to Mogadishu, and I ask for this relocation to happen within 90 days from today,” he said.

“We know that a lot of money is spent at offices in Nairobi and people claim they cannot go and operate in Somalia but I say that Somalia is not worse than Iraq and Afghanistan, where UN agencies are active on the ground,” said the PM who gave up a teaching job in Buffalo, New York, when he accepted President Sheikh Sharif Ahmed’s invitation to take office in October.

The UN workers are unlikely to move. Life in Nairobi is comfortable, safe and well-paid, with benefits including tax-free cars, generous housing allowances, school fees for children and so on.

Many of the UN staff working on Somalia never visit the country, or if they do it is only to the safer semi-autonomous regions of Somaliland and Puntland leading some to question how you can rebuild a country you have never seen.

But as one UN worker on Somalia explained to GlobalPost, “If the UN insisted that all of us working on Somalia had to work in Somalia most of us would quit immediately.”