Egal bribed MPs with 1.5 million shillings to secure his election before the coup

Evidence

As the appointed day for parliament to elect the president of the republic neared, Egal and Yassin divided between themselves the 1.5 million shillings they had collected from the Somali Central Bank and went to their homes, where they invited individual MPs to come and collect their loot. Egal took 1 million and Yassin took 500,000 shillings. The MPs came in droves … Hussen called Osman and told him what he had heard. Osman asked him if he wanted to see a military coup. The former leaders agreed that neither had any desire for a coup despite their disdain for the regime. Hussen decided to stay at his home for the morning and waited for the morning broadcast of Radio Mogadishu. Rather than beginning the program with the standard world news, Radio Mogadishu played unusual music for most of the morning. At 8:00 a.m. Abdillahi Bile, a former staff member of the Ministry of Public Works during Hussen’s tenure who was robbed of his parliamentary seat in Dusamareeb during the recent election, visited him and told him the military had staged a coup. In Bile’s car they drove through the streets of the city and saw huge crowds celebrating the coup, and then they went to Afgoi. After returning home in the afternoon, soldiers came to Hussen’s home and informed him that they had orders to take him. The same vehicle also collected Osman and Haji Musa and drove them to the presidential retreat in Afgoi, built by Osman during his presidential tenure. There they found senior ministers of the deposed regime such as Yassin. Prime Minister Egal was under house arrest and would join them later. — Abdi Ismail Samatar, Africa’s First Democrats, 1046

Categorization

• XREF: Egal’s Central Bank bribery to buy the presidency connects to the broader pattern of how the 1969 election campaign was corrupted, leading to the military takeover.
• SEED: The inside account of watching MPs collect loot from a beach house, then the quiet coup—radio music instead of news, soldiers arriving—is a strong narrative scene for an essay on the death of civilian democracy.