Mogadishu,(insidesomalia.org)- Ethiopia was mistaken to think its army had the ability to endow Somalia with wise leaders. In an interview with the Financial Times, the Ethiopian foreign minister Seyoum Mesfin criticized Somalia’s top leaders—president Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed and prime minister Nur Hassan Hussein—for preferring infighting to nation building. Mesfin’s frustration has to do with Ethiopia’s inability to break the political impasse within the Somalia Transitional Federal Government. Both the president and the prime minister are promoting political agendas that benefit Ethiopia in the long term. Ethiopia cannot choose between the two benefits. The Somali prime minister’s peace overtures to the Alliance for the Reliberation of Somalia (ARS) weakened Eritrea’s influence on the Somali opposition. The Somali president tacitly supports the reconciliation but candidly favours absorbing influential members of the now Djibouti based ARS into the government along clan lines. “The government and parliamentary seats were divided along the 4.5 formula,” he told reporters in Mogadishu  few weeks ago in an apparent attempt to deny the opposition the opportunity   to expediently play a nationalist card.

Ethiopian Foreign Minister’s anger shows that Ethiopia is gradually admitting  its forces were unwittingly dragged into Somalia’s messy civil war and that not enough thought was put into post-invasion period to formulate a quick pull-out on the one hand and prod the Somali government it backs to perform on the basis of reconciliation and institution-building benchmarks on the other.

Many parts of southern Somalia are now under insurgents’ rule. As Ethiopia continues to  count the death of its soldiers since the 2006 invasion to oust Somalia’s Islamic Union of Courts’ forces, one thing is clear, fractiousness in the Somali government  and parliament will continue to weaken  Somalia’s ‘federal institutions’ .