 Good morning. My name is Nancy Lindbergh and I'm the president of the United States Institute of Peace. Thank you for joining us this morning for a very important conversation about Somalia, a country struggling to emerge from decades of violent conflict. U.S. Institute of Peace was founded in 1984 by Congress as an independent federal institute dedicated to the prevention and the resolution of violent conflict and I'm joined today by somebody who's very much engaged with that effort in Somalia, Mr. Abdei Ayente. Somalia's former minister of planning and international cooperation and currently the ambassador designate to the United Kingdom. Thank you for joining us here at U.S. Institute of Peace. Thanks for having me. This is an important moment for Somalia. On the one hand, we've seen steady territorial gains against the al-Shabaab extremists. They've been largely driven out of Mogadishu and other Somali cities by the African Union regional peacekeepers and the nascent Somali security forces. Very importantly, Somalia has achieved encouraging milestones on the political front. It had a very successful peaceful presidential election process in February. A new president who seems encouragingly poised to take Somalia to the next level. And very importantly earlier this year, there was the London Somalia conference where donors signed a new partnership agreement with Somalia committing to support the next phase of the country's transition. And at the same time, Somalia committed to key reforms to strengthen the institution and promote economic gains. So these are very encouraging achievements, but at the same time, a quarter of Somalia's population is displaced with 1.6 million people internally displaced by violence, by hunger, and over a million people living at refugees in the region. Somalia remains one of four countries that is teetering on the verge of famine. And although that immediate risk of famine has been averted, there is still a constant threat of starvation with more than half of Somalia's population remaining in need of food assistance. The territory controlled by El Shabaab has been greatly reduced, but the group continues to stage lethal attacks. We just saw this in Kenya with the killing of nine civilians on its coast. And El Shabaab has carried out vicious attacks against the Somali people in recent months. The planned drawdown of the Amazon peacekeepers, which is scheduled to begin next year, will mean that the burden of keeping the peace and keeping the pressure on Shabaab will shift to Somalia's new security forces. So this is a really important junction. It is a moment for Somalia of great importance, and I welcome the opportunity to discuss the way ahead right now for your country, Mr. Ayente. Let me take a moment to note to our viewers who are watching that this that will be taking your questions. You can submit your questions by tweeting them with the hashtag USIPSomalia on Twitter or using YouTube's chat feature. But before we do that, I'd like to turn to you, Mr. Ayente, and ask if you can give us a sense of where you see Somalia's recovery standing, what you see as the key challenges ahead. And in particular, you were very involved with drafting Somalia's new development plan and negotiating the new partnership for Somalia at the London Conference earlier this year. So give us a sense of that and how you see this pathway to recovery moving forward. Well, thank you Nancy for having me here at the USIP. It's a great honor to join you here. Now Somalia is at a very critical juncture at the moment. We have just come out of a very long and protracted electoral process that many people have doubted whether it could actually even happen and elected a selected parliament and then elected a president and who then selected a cabinet who are viewed largely as people who can move Somalia forward. But we still have a number of main issues to tackle. Number one, this new administration now is going to focus on negotiating the politics of security with the federal member states around the country. Remember, this is a country that is emerging from decades of conflict and violence and hasn't properly settled the issues surrounding around state building. And so the federal government is always negotiating new terms of agreement with federal member states. And so this administration is now focusing on that and that's why the president took the leadership of establishing the National Security Council a few months ago, which has already met two times and is accelerating the process of creating what is going to be a truly Somalian national army, which is what we need to defeat the enemy. That's a big issue that is happening and a major policy approach for administration. The second point is, as you pointed out in your opening remarks, nearly half of our population now is facing serious humanitarian crisis. This is something that has happened every few years. We can almost predict when the next one will happen. What we're trying to do in this administration is to prevent that from happening. Not only deal with the current one, but make sure that it doesn't happen again. The way to do that is to make tangible investment in the infrastructure surrounding resilience. We have a full chapter in our national development plan focusing on resilience. That's a resilience at the community level, not at a national level. The third issue is development. We have a clear plan for that at the moment and the administration has begun implementing the key aspects of that, which really focuses on investing in the fundamental infrastructure of the country, which is totally dilapidated or destroyed over the last two and a half decades of civil war and conflict. We need to get that things like energy, for example. We still have the most expensive electricity in the world. You cannot have industry going in Somalia with that kind of energy. We are now focusing on getting renewable energy and getting ahead of the pack by investing in the right technology. The fourth and important area is to defeat the enemy. Al-Shabaab has been degraded significantly by the Somali National Army, by our brothers and sisters from the African Union Mission in Somalia, which have been around for 10 years. Importantly, by our allies led by the United States, which continues to help us degrade the enemy significantly. But we need to defeat them, not only degrade them. That's a long and difficult effort. With our limited resources and capacity, it is going to take some time. Of course, we are now facing the withdrawal of Al-Masam starting next year. We are going to have to build up our national army to replace that. Then the related issue to this is the politics of everything. This is a country that needs to stabilize politically, that key actors in the country need to agree on or find a broad consensus around key issues, resource sharing being one of them. And the final issue I would conclude with is revenue generation. That is where it all comes down to. The government won't be able to do anything without increasing its current revenue by at least 30 to 40 percent over the next year or so. The administration has laid out its approaches and strategies toward that by engaging the private sector and increasing taxes from key sectors, the telecom, the money transfer companies, and other sectors that are at the moment untaxed. But we're putting in place the necessary legislations for that. You've just laid out really the classic set of challenges that face a country trying to emerge from conflict. And it's often a case of how to prioritize against a vast set of needs, how to get ahead of the corruption that often permeates those systems. But let me start with the wonkiest part of this. You talked about taxes. In the development field, it's often called domestic resource mobilization as the secret sauce for really enabling a country to get forward. Against the backdrop of the politics and the corruption, how do you see that really being able to move forward and create that foundation of revenue for the country? So domestic resource mobilization or aka taxes or revenue generation has three elements into it. One is politics. The politics of it is the federal government and the federal member states and local governments need to agree on a broad set of tax regime. And our Ministry of Finance at the federal level is leading that process, has already had several meetings with federal member states to come up with a tax regime that works for everyone. That's the politics side. Then there's a technical side to understand how tax regimes work in our region, in the Horn of Africa, in Africa and in other parts of the world and compare and contrast and ultimately use the system that works and that can be customized for some other. And the third element is the government's ability to enforce that. So the politics and the technical work are now going on. The government's ability to enforce it is where I think the greatest challenge is at the moment. And I think once you have the politics and the technical out of the way, I think the administration now is making tangible efforts in ensuring that it has the capacity to collect taxes. I mean ultimately people don't like paying taxes on their own. There has to be some kind of a power that nudges them in that direction. And also confidence that the taxes are used well and ultimately for citizen benefit. So talk to me about corruption, which is one of the most corrosive aspects of any country that's trying especially to emerge from conflict. How is Somalia going to be able to tackle that? It is a real and practical problem on the ground and it's not that people are necessarily so corrupt but the institutions that are supposed to advance transparency and accountability and integrity were simply either not there or they were two weeks to implement that. I'm really delighted to report that a few weeks ago our council of ministries have passed the Anti-Corruption Commission legislation and have established the Anti-Corruption Commission, which is stipulated in our constitution and that commission is then responsible for rolling out the government's policies toward integrity, transparency and accountability. And is this the first? It is the first time that this commission has been fully established, even though it has been in our books for some time. This new administration deserves credit for that. You were, as we talked, you were the leader of the First National Development Plan in 30 years. As you put that together, what did you find were the primary expectations of the Somali people of their government and how do you see the government being able to actually deliver on those expectations? Nancy, that was one of the most humbling experiences that I have ever overtaken. We traveled across the country to villages and towns and cities across the country hearing from ordinary citizens and federal member states and local governments. One of the most striking things we've learned from there was how similar, not dissimilar, similar people's aspirations were, whether they were in the north of the country or far west part of the country or the center of the country. They wanted basic things, boreholes, local schools being fixed, a clinic for heaven's sake, for mothers to give birth. I mean, very rudimentary things that we take granted in the Western world that people were lacking. What they were asking for is basic government services at the local level. If you read our National Development Plan, what we have tried extremely hard is to ensure that it does not include lofty goals, because lofty goals mean nothing. It includes very specific investment strategies on these fundamental services that people need at the local level. Do you think the government will be able to deliver at a pace that equals expectations? You've got, there's a lot of optimism with the election of President Formaggio. Will he be able to meet those expectations? Well, I think we need to do a better job in managing expectations without a doubt. I think people would like to see President Formaggio and the administration succeed, but I think, as you know, in government, 80% of work is paper pushing and 20% gets actually delivered. And so a lot of everything in the National Development Plan will not be delivered in four years' time, but even if we end up delivering a good half of it, we've done a lot. And I think the administration's pace of starting to implement some of this is commendable so far, but it would also need support from our international partners. Mind you, this is a several billion dollar document that's why people don't have, and that's why we now have the new partnership agreement, which is a mutual accountability document that binds us and our international partners together on a collaborative framework to support our efforts to deliver these things on the ground. So say a bit more about that new partnership. What do you most need from the international partners, and how can you bring the private sector into realizing that agenda? So the new partnership for Somalia essentially replaces what was the new deal for Somalia, which was our development agenda from 2013 to 2016. This is a document that holds the Somali government and its international partners accountable on a set of benchmarks and targets over the next four years. And it allows each other to talk to each other in an open candid dialogue and telling each other what is wrong. It also opens the space for the private sector as well as the civil society to participate in the delivery aspects of some of the projects on the ground. The private sector is so important to everything we're doing in Somalia. 96% of our economy is in the hands of the private sector. The government piece of this pie is so tiny, and so we need them. We view them as our partners in the next phase of development in Somalia. We need them to pay their fair share of taxes, but they also have legitimate concerns. Things like, are we able to deliver security services to them, protect their assets on the ground, that type of thing, and think we need to do a better job in meeting their expectations as well? And, of course, the corruption agenda and the energy needs. Let me turn to some Twitter questions because quite a few have come in. And let's start with, you talked about the importance of the nascent Somali security force given the drawdown of Amazon. Do you think that the right priorities are to build a national army and police force that are drawn from all the major clans? And should we also curb interference in Somalia's internal affairs by its neighbors? So it is, I cannot imagine any more important task than focusing on building a Somali national army as well as a national police force. At the moment, one of the criticisms against the existing army and the police were that they were not broadly representative of the country. The initiative of the president to establish a national security council, which then endorsed a new national security architecture, calls for an overhaul of our security service. What it calls for is a new national army that is consisting of everybody. So all of the five federal member states will each contribute 3,000 troops to this force. And the number of the army will be reduced and the police will be significantly increased because what we have realized is that what we now need more is a police force protecting communities and providing, you know, everyday rule of law services at the community level rather than an army because at the moment we need the army to fight the enemy al-Shabaab and so on. But we will need to ultimately build up our army where it needs to be. But our priority right now is protecting civilians at the community level. How important is it to engage the Somali diaspora in achieving this vision, helping Somalia at this critical moment? What's their role and how do you best engage them? Well, you can never overestimate or underestimate the importance of diaspora in the context of Somalia. You know, about 10 percent of our population, even more by some estimates, are outside of the country. A lot of them are in North America and Europe and have gained... Including my hometown in Minnesota, Minneapolis? That's correct. And have gained significant professional experience as well as, you know, some of them have enough entrepreneurial skills to be able to join the private sector in Somalia. The good news is that a significant number are now going back already and contributing at the public as well as the private level. In some cases there is a bit of attention between the diaspora and those who stayed back in the country. But we have to remember that the diaspora send nearly two billion dollars a year in the form of remittance to Somalia. That's larger than all international aid combined. Especially during the worst of the drought. And their response to this drought has been more effective than probably most international NGOs. And so there is now the president announced at the London conference that the government will establish a new national diaspora agency that is entirely dedicated to cultivating relationships, you know, bringing those talents and professional skills back to the country and, you know, amplifying their role in Somalia in a way that contributes to the peace and stability of the country. That's a very interesting vision. A lot of countries struggle with that. I wish you all the best with that. Thank you. Here's a question that says, and it echoes something you said about how to defeat Al-Shabaab. The only way to sustain the gains against Al-Shabaab is to increase the government's engagement with Somali community leaders, business and non-government and civil society actors. Do you agree? And if so, how will the government go about doing this? I mean, it's a no-brainer. We have to engage every aspect of our society. And elders are, in the Somali context, are the backbone of our traditional political architecture. In fact, four years ago it was the elders who selected our members of parliament. And even in this new parliament, the elders selected the delegates that ultimately elected the members of parliament. So they play an important role. And I believe there are various ways to engage them that are already underway. The federal government and the member states routinely engage the elders for peace building when a conflict arises between two communities to deploy them to the right places and get them to facilitate peace dialogue. We're also engaging other aspects of the community, principally youth and women. Remember, 75 percent of our population is under the age of 30. And that is a striking number if you think about it. It's both a good thing, for the most part, but and idle youth also have their own risk as well. And so the government, the administration, and the council of ministries are now putting a lot of effort and trying to figure out a way to engage youth. And there are various projects going on. Then women. Our parliament right now has 24 members of the parliament, 24 percent of the members of the parliament are female, up from 14 percent four years ago. That's a huge positive step in the right direction. And women have generally demonstrated that they are better at peace building in the context of Somalia than men who have mostly been engaged in the wars and the conflicts. Yeah. So how do you help support that? Well, we have institutions. I mean, we have a ministry focused on women's affairs, gender and human rights, and under a very capable ministry. Then we have an entire ministry dedicated to youth affairs. And so these federal institutions are pushing the engagement of these sectors of the society. So I have a number of questions, all of which deal with the question of justice in various ways. You know, anytime a country has been through the many years of conflict that Somalia has, you have a lot of tearing of the social fabric, mistrust. People have done terrible things to each other. Do you think that it's a top priority to prosecute people for crimes, regardless of their clan affiliation? And how do you not condone impunity but at a time where things are so fragile? Right. So there are two parts to this question. One is, you know, there is a whole literature around transitional justice and what do you do in a country that is emerging from conflict. Remember, the worst part of the conflict in Somalia is behind us. Most of the worst things have happened in the 90s actually. And so there are in the constitution and there is a ministry focused on reconciliation. And so there are efforts to try to delicately address this issue without it leading to yet another conflict. This is a very, very sensitive issue as you would imagine. And then there is the justice in the grand scale of like the rule of law. And that is something that is the government is engaged. There are various legislations that are being passed. There is a whole ministry focused on justice and that kind of thing. So that efforts is going on. But not to be taken lightly, the whole issue of transitional justice is critical, important, and sensitive. Final question is President Farmaggio participated in a street cleaning and Mogadishu last week. How do you rank that in terms of priorities? What's the significance of that? I mean, look, the important thing here is that the public office holders demonstrate that they are encouraging the right thing to do. I mean, cleaning the streets of Mogadishu or any other city is important. But the most important, I think, message he was sending is that he was out there, you know, encouraging people who are doing this very important work on day-to-day basis. But I know when he's in his office, he's working on other equally and far more important issues like debt relief. I mean, we owe $5.5 billion to 28 countries and entities. And we've got to get that debt canceled or forgiven for us to get access to constitutional loans from international financial institutions. That's an important work that he and others are involved. We could go on. I want to thank you for joining us here today. I think you've enabled us to touch on the real complexity that a country faces as it tries to move forward. This is an extraordinary moment. There is a gathering optimism that Somalia has a pathway forward despite the significant challenges. And I thank you for being here with us today to discuss that. I wish you the best of luck. And as Secretary Tillerson said earlier this month, know that the people of Somalia can continue to count on U.S. support as you continue to rebuild your country. We all want Somalia to succeed and to climb out of what has been a terrible 40 years. And I think with the kind of vision that you're outlining, the optimism will continue. Thank you very much. Thank you for having me here. I'm glad I could show you here. Thanks.