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Since the party candidate campaigning season was declared open by the Somaliland electoral commission, candidates have been campaigning very hard to win the support of their various clan constituencies in the different regions of the country. While this parliamentary election campaign has not been different much from the previous presidential and municipal elections campaigns, the newly introduced government television added flavor to the candidate campaigns. Unlike the private TV in Hargeisa, the government TV is free of charge and the majority of households managed to connect to the service. Prior to the establishment of the TV channel, the government owned media was comprised of radio Hargeisa and a newspaper with English and Arabic editions. The old government journalists took over the new television as expected and kept entertaining the public with their inexperience in television broadcast. Candidates were interviewed prime time on the only worthwhile government TV programme, Masraxa Musharaxa, which great number of people in the city watched to know more about party candidates. The government employed media workers behaved embarrassingly funny on camera. In one instance a candidate from UDUB political party spitted on the ground, while being interviewed on camera. Many people thought that the candidate was flushing out the remains of Buuri Dambas from his mouth. While the candidate had every right to use the Buuri as he liked, the TV people should have had the decency to edit the programme and cut the part!!! Another amusingly regular occurrence has been how one of the TV interviewers shook the hands of interviewees so up and down ( ilaa suxulka ) with the words of Asalaama Calaykum both at the beginning of the interview and the end. Many people will remember this interviewer with his unique way of shaking hands, long past the election campaigns. Nor many of the questions asked by these interviewers were sensible to many people. With questions like Ma dhowr hebel ayaad noqondoontaa mise hebel hadii lagu doorto? Maxaad qaban doontaa hadii labada natiijaba soo baxaan? (i.e. you win and lose at the sometime! ), the TV interviewers revealed their lack of experience in posing the relevant questions. The candidates interviewed on the Masraxa Musharaxa were very mixed in terms of their educational background and experience. And if the claims of the many candidates on the programme is anything to go by, many had advanced degrees, Kulmiye and UCUD party candidates scoring high in this regard, compared to the ruling UDUB party candidates. All the candidates were assigned to various election symbols, which will appear on the ballots in the voting day. Candidate symbols are important in assisting illiterate societies to cast their votes for the candidates of their choice, while it also helps the candidates in campaigning among their supporters. TV interviewers repeatedly asked party candidates to interpret for programme viewers their respective election symbols, as if every symbol assigned to a candidate had intrinsic meaning to it. How the candidates interpreted their election symbols has been an interesting watch on the TV. Candidates strained every nerve to put a positive spin on the assigned /selected symbols such as a wooden spoon (fandhaal ), a kettle, a camel, and an elephant. In one case, a candidate was asked to share with the viewers what his symbol was and what it meant for him. He started by telling the viewers that his election symbol was a kettle, and then proceeded to glorify the kettle by enumerating its many uses by the people now and in the past. The way the candidates interpreted these symbols did not help in the eyes of the people, as some of the candidates put forward incredibly absurd explanations of what the symbols meant for them. A very unfortunate development from this election campaign has been the renting of rooms by candidates to serve as Merfishes for their supporters. Candidates furnished Kat to their supporters in those Marfishes and this lured many young party activists to start chewing the leaf. One of the candidates told a friend of mine that he opened over forty of such Merfishes for his supporters. This will have an adverse side affect on the society, which will remain with us for a long period of time. Many of the candidates rented cars and buses, which roam the streets with microphones blaring out songs from the ex-military regime revolutionary times, and other songs tailor-made for the candidates. This created a serious noise pollution in the streets. It seems as though candidates and their supporters believe that over-shouting the other candidates and their supporters wins them additional votes. One of the strangest and the funniest campaign statements, so far, was made by the minister of interior, while on a campaign trail in Gabilay district. The minister said that the opposition does not ‘have a president, a vice president, and ministers like the minister of interior (himself!), and even if the opposition wins the majority of seats in the parliament, we pay their salaries'. Did the ‘minister' know what he was talking about? The same statement was recycled by the first lady while in Borama. However, the lady forgot to include in her statement that the opposition parties lacked first ladies as well!! Otherwise, the election campaign is approaching a climax and candidates and their supporters are waiting the day of final reckoning at the polls. Yussuf Abdillahi Mohamed,
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