State employees built villas with bank credit and rented them to diplomats

Evidence

This habit had started during the Italian trusteeship administration. For instance, Bank Credito Somalo was created to mainly support farmers, but it also, on a smaller scale, gave credit to senior government officials to build their residences. One of the people who took a legitimate advantage of this was Abdirashid Ali Sharmarkee, who was a functionary of the administration. Hussen, while vice president of the bank and not a government employee, could not access this credit, although he had some deposits in the bank from his dual income. During his tenure in the two ministries he did not build a home. Most Somali officials who built houses using bank credit rented them, rather than living in them as was required by the terms of the loan. Given the shortage of suitable housing in Mogadishu, these premises fetched a handsome price from the expatriate community, a practice that would only increase after independence. In due course, many politicians and civil servants took advantage of their position to raid the public purse, construct coastal mansions, and lease them to expatriates for a handsome return. — Abdi Ismail Samatar, Africa’s First Democrats, 723

Categorization

• XREF: Links to the broader narrative of how pre-independence patronage culture seeded post-independence corruption, relevant to the reader’s historical research on the 1960-69 period.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Abdi Ismail Samatar, Africa’s First Democrats, 723