President Silanyo made two decisions that the Ethiopian authorities had wanted from him, ahead of his official visit to Addis Ababa this week.
The President of Somaliland, Ahmed Mohamed Mohamoud known as Silanyo, finally conceded to Ethiopian demands: he appointed a new representative to Addis Ababa in the person of the former BBC Somali service journalist, Adam Nouh Dhule, who already has family members living there. The previous nominee, Mohamed Hassan Saeed, therefore had to be sacked from the post. In fact, although he had been designated, he had never been able to take up the appointment because Addis Ababa considered him too young and too close to the IRI ().
President Silanyo yielded to Ethiopian pressure on another matter. He asked his head of national security, Hussein Hassan Guleid known as Kenyati, to tender his resignation. The latter did so on 13 November, without giving any public explanation of his action. He was much more open, however, in his letter of resignation: according to our sources, he directly reprimanded the Ethiopian representation bureau in Hargeisa and certain western countries, including the United States and the United Kingdom, of accusing him, wrongly in his view, of having links with the Al Shabaab Islamist rebels.Hussein Kenyati's letter also mentioned other reasons for resigning. For example, the fact that President Silanyo's chief of staff, Hersi Ali Hassan (), constantly interfered with this work, taking over certain of his tasks, and the fact that the Minister for Finance, Mohamed Hashi Elmi, had made a 15% cut in the funds earmarked for the head of national security, for no apparent reason.
Hussein Kenyati's dismisal will not go down will with the French Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure (DGSE - overseas intelligence services). The latter had received Kenyati a few weeks back to devise a plan to negotiate the release of the French secret service agent currently held by Islamist rebels in Mogadishu ().
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