January 11, 2005
Somalia's interim Prime Minister Ali Mohammed Ghedi will fly home in the next few days to assess the damage caused by the tidal wave which has left more than 100 people dead in the Horn of African country.
Ghedi, who joined the newly installed Somali government Nov. 3, is temporary based in Kenya’s capital Nairobi. His boss, President Ahmed Yusuf, also operates from Nairobi due to the insecurity in, lawless, Somalia.
Somalia slipped into chaos following the ouster of the dictator Mohamed Siad Barre in 1991. Since then, the country has been split into fiefdoms by warlords, with no central authority.
Sunday’s tidal wave is likely to speed up the transfer of the government to the Somali capital Mogadishu. Initially, the administration had planned to relocate to Mogadishu next year after sorting out security problems and pacifying the capital.
The quake, which hit Somalia’s coastlines Dec. 26, tore the seabed off the Indonesian island of Sumatra, striking Sri Lanka, southern India, the Maldives, Malaysia, Myanmar and Thailand, killing hundreds of thousands of locals and tourists.
Described as the biggest tidal wave in 40 years, the quake, which recorded 9.0 on the Richter scale, radiated out to East Africa, hitting Kenya, and killing one person in the coastal town of Malindi. The incident prompted the local authorities to order all beaches along the Kenyan coastline vacated.
Kenya’s environmental minister Kalonzo Musyoka said this week that the country’s navy had been put on high alert.
Neighbouring Tanzania, too, has been affected. It lost 10 people to the tsunami.
In Somalia, around 120 people were killed, 35 missing and 50,000 displaced by the wave, which originated 4,500 km away in Asia, Prime Minister Ghedi told journalists in Nairobi this week.
‘’The prime minister will lead a fact-finding mission accompanied by Somali officials and international agencies to the site,’’ Yusuf Baribari, head of the presidential press service, told IPS in an interview in Nairobi Dec. 29.
‘’The loss of human lives from the tidal wave is now more than 100. We are still getting more information about the devastation. But the damage to property is immense. All fishing nets, boats, refrigerators at the shore have been swept away by the waves. Most of the coastal villa