On December 29, 2008

On December 29, 2008, Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed announced before a united parliament in Baidoa his resignation as President of Somalia. In his speech, which was broadcast on national radio, Yusuf expressed regret at failing to end the country's seventeen year conflict as his government had mandated to do.[91] He also blamed the international community for its failure to support the government, and said that the speaker of parliament would succeed him in office per the charter of the Transitional Federal Government.[92]

Over the next few months, a new President was elected from amongst the more moderate Islamists,[93] and Omar Abdirashid Ali Sharmarke, the son of slain former President Abdirashid Ali Sharmarke, was selected as the nation's new Prime Minister. The Transitional Federal Government, with the help of a small team of African Union troops, also began a counteroffensive in February 2009 to retake control of the southern half of the country. To solidify its control of southern Somalia, the TFG formed an alliance with the Islamic Courts Union, other members of the Alliance for the Re-liberation of Somalia, and Ahlu Sunna Waljama'a, a moderate Sufi militia.[94] Furthermore, Al-Shabaab and Hizbul Islam, the two main Islamist groups in opposition, began to fight amongst themselves in mid-2009.[95]

As a truce, in March 2009, Somalia's newly established coalition government announced that it would re-implement Shari'a as the nation's official judicial system.[96] However, conflict continues in the southern and central parts of the country between government troops and extremist Islamist militants with links to al-Qaeda.[97]
Embassy of Somalia in Paris, France.

In 2009, Transparency International ranked Somalia in last place on its annual Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI),[98] a metric that purports to show the prevalence of corruption in a country's public sector. In the decade since its launch, the CPI has drawn increasing criticism, specifically with regard to the methodologies it uses to obtain its averages; the varying definitions of corruption that are employed; the reliance on the views of a small number of people to obtain data; the inclusion of up to three years of data, which serve to obscure more recent reductions in corruption; the inability of the index to take into account recent anti-corruption reforms, the latter of which can take a while to take effect; and the reliability of the actual sources on which the CPI's rankings are based

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BLUE MOUNTAIN COFFE