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By Katharine Houreld, Associated Press Writer


Mogadishu, Somalia (AP) - Mogadishu's new mayor has paid his
employees, gotten some of the garbage picked up and turned the
lights on. In this city of rubble and bombed-out buildings, where
gunfire erupts every few minutes, that counts as progress.


      Mayor Mohamed Nur is making an effort to provide basic services
for one of the sorriest cities on Earth, a place where officials
are much better known for lining their own pockets. Somalis
battered by two decades of war have lost faith in the weak central
government, which is beset by militias, corruption and infighting.
The prime minister resigned Tuesday after a power struggle with the
president.


      Against this tide of chaos and despair, Nur has a budget of
$50,000 a month, two computers and three Olivetti typewriters. A
former expatriate who ran an Internet cafe and made a failed run
for city council in England, Nur said he has set an unprecedented
standard of transparency just by announcing when he receives money,
and later announcing how he has spent it.


      Nur, 55, said he used his first $50,000 to give token paychecks
to some of his 800 employees, most of whom had not been paid for
years. He also hired women to clear piles of garbage in his
neighborhood, one of the few held by government forces, and
persuaded the business community to lend trucks and pay for fuel
and labor. The second month's money was used to light some streets.


      Islamist insurgents "want to make us believe we are in the
dark," Nur said Sunday in the battle-scarred courtyard of the
government headquarters. "So we lit up a center of the city."


      The work remaining for the mayor, a presidential appointee, is
obvious from every corner of Mogadishu, the only part of Somalia
directly controlled by the government. Garbage piles up in ruined
roads and snags on barbed wire. Near the airport, a blackened spot
marks the latest suicide bomb attack.


      The U.N.-backed government says it can't protect its citizens
and provide services because it only received $11.2 million in aid
and revenue last year. But officials acknowledge that most of the
money they should have collected - port revenues, for example - has
gone missing.


      The only visible government presence on the streets are groups
of men, in uniform or plain clothes, who lounge in the back of
pickups or in the shade nearby, belts of ammunition loosely slung
across their shoulders.


      Departing Prime Minister Omar Abdirashid Ali Sharmarke said he
is resigning to ease political turmoil amid an impasse with
President Sheik Sharif Sheik Ahmed. Sharmarke said his sparring
with the president has been detracting from the struggle against
Islamic insurgents.


      The resignation will have little effect on the lives of Somalis
or the government, which with the help of African Union troops is
barely preventing al-Shabab, an Islamist militia linked to
al-Qaida, from seizing the entire capital. Sharmarke and Ahmed had
fought over a draft constitution and over their own power and
seniority. The bickering alienated many Somalis, who are convinced
the government is not focusing on their problems.


      "What can the government give us? Nothing," spat Farah Mohamed
Abdi, 23. "Schools, nothing. Hospitals, nothing. All they do is
eat the money."


      Abdi's brother was recently wounded by a stray bullet. Abdi's
two sons don't attend school, like 90 percent of Somali children.


      Founded centuries ago, Mogadishu was once an important trading
city on the shores of the Indian Ocean. Some inhabitants still
speak the Arabic of traders who brought Islam to Somalia, and the
Italian of the country's former colonial power. In the 1930s, the
city featured broad avenues, a Roman Catholic cathedral and - in a
sign of peaceful religious coexistence - a mosque with a gleaming
white minaret a block away.


      A city that developed over centuries crumbled swiftly. Rebels
forced out President Mohammed Siad Barre in 1991. Factions then
turned their guns on each other.


      Elegantly dressed women used to stroll down the seafront. Women
now wear long, drab Islamic robes. In areas controlled by
al-Shabab, they often must abandon their jobs if the work involves
contact with men, leaving some families destitute.


      Today the cathedral, like most of Mogadishu, lies in ruins. In
2005, insurgents dug up Italian corpses from the graveyard and
flung them into the sea. The mosque still stands and was recently
repainted and repaired with money from Somalia's diaspora, but
block after block is nothing more than collapsed buildings,
bricked-up windows and walls scarred by bullets.


      Ugandan and Burundian soldiers, members of a 7,100-strong
African Union peacekeeping force that has been in Somalia for three
years, trundle down dusty streets in long convoys of white armored
vehicles past vegetable sellers and overloaded, ancient minibus
taxis. Sweating gunners scan for snipers or bombs buried in the
road.


      The peacekeepers have been expanding their perimeter into what
were once luxury hotels overlooking the seafront, reinforcing their
positions by filling sandbags under bright bougainvillea where
children once played.


      They have punched through walls of villas, many with caved-in
roofs, so they can move among them without being exposed to enemy
fire. Any valuable items were lost to looters long ago but the
items that remain - moldering school certificates, scraps of
clothing - point to a vanished life.


      The peacekeepers help fill a vacuum left by the government,
treating more than 12,000 ill and injured Somalis every month and
distributing water and food. Sometimes they feed and supply the
government's own demoralized fighters, whose wages, if they receive
them, are mostly paid by Italy and the U.S.


      A total of $213 million was pledged at a donors conference in
April 2009. The U.N. says most of that was for security and the
bulk of it went to the peacekeeping force. More than two-thirds has
been paid out but exactly where it went has not been made public.
Many pledged donations come late, if at all.


      Aid organizations say the government doesn't satisfy basic
transparency requirements but also acknowledge that they themselves
do not pool and publish information centrally themselves, so no one
knows how much money flows into Somalia. Some cash arrives in
briefcases carried by diplomats or handed over in coffee shops in
Nairobi, the capital of neighboring Kenya.


      Most of the money collected by government officials never shows
up on the books, said Abdirizak Jama, the head of the public
finance management unit.


      In this nexus of corruption and lawlessness, Mayor Nur's goals
for providing primary education, health care and sanitation seem
daunting if not impossibly ambitious. He plans to reopen a center
to give out vaccinations, rebuild roads and re-establish a central
office to issue identity documents and record births, deaths and
property certificates.


      As he described the plans to a group of journalists this week,
gunfire crackled in the distance.
      

Gallery

Suburban dad leaves Burnsville to govern in Somalia

Social Issues

Mogadishu's new mayor has paid his employees,  gotten some of the garbage picked up and turned the
lights on. In this city of rubble and bombed-out buildings, where gunfire erupts every few minutes, that counts as progress.

Mogadishu mayor aims to restore basics amid rubble

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