Barre’s half-brother ran the Foreign Affairs Ministry as a patronage machine.

Evidence

Hussen met with Barre and told him that he would accept the offer on two conditions: that he would be given a sufficient number of educated people who had the skills and the resources necessary to do the job well and that Hussen could name the individuals he needed and that the general would inform his people at the Foreign Affairs Ministry to expedite the request. Omer Arteh was the minister of Foreign Affairs during this period, but the director general, Abdirahman Jama Barre, Siyaad Barre’s half brother, wielded the power of the ministry. Hussen got the two key people he wanted and left for New York, where he found the Somali office at the UN an utter mess in every way imaginable. People on the payroll did not have the skills to do the work. These people were employed primarily to serve the pleasure of the director general. Hussen’s first task was to clean up the financial mess and then reorganize the affairs of the mission. Once this urgent matter was done, he focused on streamlining the work process to ensure that the mission served the national interests rather than those of the regime. — Abdi Ismail Samatar, Africa’s First Democrats, 1061

Categorization

• XREF: Shows the nepotism and patronage that characterized the Siyaad Barre regime — connects to the book’s broader contrast between early democratic Somali leaders and Barre’s dictatorship.