Somalia is in the worst status at the bottom of a completely failed state. As often as it tries to get up on its feet, it falls back to a much worse situation than when it was qualified as a standard failed state.

The people of Somalia have suffered from disease, hunger, poverty, insecurity, absence of effective authority and a total siege due to the spread of the coronavirus pandemic.

Somalia is not the same as it was four years ago, not even as it was last year. In the past four years, the people of Somalia have fought against a return of autocracy and are striving for democracy.

At the beginning of this year, COVID-19 devastated every possible aspect of human rights in Somalia. No money, food or good medicine are coming to the country. People are not capable of purchasing essential goods for a living.

Due to the spread of the coronavirus, Somalis in the diaspora stopped sending money remittances back home to their family members.

Local producers are affected by the virus, insecurity and lack of a functioning government.

For the past 30 years, the United Nations and international humanitarian organizations received great amounts of aid money from the wealthy countries of the world to help Somalia recover from its failed status. However, most of the aid money for Somalia ended up in luxurious overhead expenses of those international organizations. Very little of the aid money made it to Somalia, and much of that ended up in the pockets of corrupt senior government officials.

It is now time to save Somalia from the UN and international organizations’ scandalous mismanagement.

The United States of America is the wealthiest nation on Earth and should stand with the struggling people of Somalia. The moral obligation of the current U.S. administration is tested on how it can provide humanitarian aid that could help the Somali people recover from the death bed.

In 1992, President George H.W. Bush saved Somalia from the worst famine in the Horn of Africa that killed about a million adults and about a quarter-million of the children.

There is no hope of honest aid and the world is in a very difficult mood. I call for President Donald Trump to show Somalia his visionary, sincere world leadership and make the United States a partner with Somalis to restore hope. Somalia needs an honest partnership that encourages effective aid that is viewed as an investment.

Somalia needs about $18 billion to get back on its feet. That money would go to re-establish effective government institutions, re-establish income-generating small businesses, general welfare to fight against hunger and human poverty, and re-establish banks and investing groups. Most of that money would go directly to the people and their sustainable businesses. That would remove the deep pockets of the international organizations and their complicit senior government officials.

God gave the United States an extraordinary power to lead the recovery of struggling people in the poverty-stricken nations. Somali people are in the dusk of life and the Somali nation is in the dawn of a nascent democracy.

Please help Somalia to get out of the death path that led it to the worst status of a failed state.

Dr. Said Mohamud is a resident of Lewiston.