IS IT DEMOCRACY OR HYPOCRISY? By Mohamed Ahmed Abdi Ba'alul.

IS IT DEMOCRACY OR HYPOCRISY?

               By Mohamed Ahmed Abdi Ba’alul (waddi 12@gmail.com)

In democratic politics, political parties are meant to be the living bridges between the people and power—the open gates through which every citizen may walk toward participation, dignity, and representation. Political participation should never be treated as a private gift wrapped in the hands of Ahmed Mohamed Mohamoud Silanyo, Faisal Ali Warabe, or any other powerful party owner who sits like a gatekeeper before the doors of democracy. It is not charity; it is not favor; it is not inheritance. It is a sacred constitutional right that belongs equally to the ordinary citizen and the political giant alike.
Yet our political reality tells a darker story. We continue to wander through the same dusty labyrinth of confusion that swallowed the UDUB Party when it dissolved into silence, and that forced fragments of the UCID Party to search desperately for new masks to wear in pursuit of old ambitions. Despite these repeated failures, society seems strangely comfortable living inside this unfinished house of contradictions, where constitutional promises decorate the walls but never open the doors. The right to political participation has become a beautiful word buried in dry legal pages, while real political access sleeps in private kitchens and locked briefcases.
This is a country where political parties often grow like trees watered not by national vision, but by the narrow rivers of clan loyalty. Coalitions rise like temporary tents in a desert storm—not to shelter the people, but to protect the ambitions of a privileged few. It is a place where the camera is deliberately turned upside down, and everyone pretends the image is still straight. If this sounds absurd, it is because politics here often walks backward while calling itself progress. Selfish men, hungry for influence, and bloodless corporations, thirsty for control, sit at the table of power while the silent majority waits outside the door. Somaliland has become a stage where people are given the vote but denied the voice, where democracy wears fine clothes but walks barefoot in truth.
I live in a country where citizenship is too often chained to primitive clanship, where a man is measured less by the weight of his character and more by the shadow of his lineage. People are born carrying names that become invisible prisons, and they are expected to live as echoes of inherited loyalties rather than as free and responsible citizens. Ignorance hangs above society like a dark cloud before a storm, heavy and patient. The whole nation drifts in an ocean of tribal illusion, and its people struggle like swimmers against restless waves and merciless currents, never certain whether they are moving toward the shore or being pulled into deeper waters.
Those who argue that clan institutions are the sacred bones of Somaliland politics are often not protecting tradition—they are merely decorating their own interests with the language of necessity. Yes, clans once stood like the last surviving trees after the forest of state institutions had burned to ashes. In the painful post-war years, they were the only remaining structures capable of giving people shade, order, and representation. But they were meant to be a bridge, not a destination;  a lifeboat, not the shore itself.
Today, clans have become the softest pillows for political opportunists who fear the hard road of genuine political dialogue. Instead of building national visions broad enough to shelter all citizens, many politicians retreat into the small rooms of clan activism, speaking only to familiar ears and inherited loyalties. Blood relations have become political passports for those who lack persuasive ideas, moral courage, and the intellectual strength to stand before the full nation. They borrow legitimacy from ancestry because they cannot build it through leadership.
Recent events reveal an even sadder truth: our traditional, consensus-based methods of conflict resolution are losing both their wisdom and their usefulness. Meanwhile, the Constitutional Court is increasingly treated like a political hospital where non-legal wounds are brought for impossible healing. Parliamentary conflicts have risen to such shameful heights that the Speaker and his deputy fought before the cold eye of the camera. What should have been a temple of law became a marketplace of humiliation. Such scenes do not reflect democratic maturity; they expose institutional weakness dressed in official clothing.
People are tired—tired of dragging a democracy that floats like a broken boat, promising arrival but delivering only circles. Elections come and go like seasons, repetitive and predictable, yet they leave behind the same dry soil of disappointment. A democracy that ignores the hunger, pain, and daily struggles of ordinary citizens is not democracy at all; it is theatre without justice, performance without principle, and hypocrisy wearing the mask of national progress.
When justice is silent, when equality is selective, and when representation becomes a privilege rather than a right, democracy ceases to be a living system and becomes only a well-polished lie.
Mohamed Ahmed Abdi Ba’alul
Waddi12@gmail.com