ADDIS ABABA (Reuters) Somalia’s President Abdullahi Yusuf and his prime minister signed a deal on Tuesday to work together after a weeks-long rift that threatened to wreck their interim government.
Yusuf fell out with Prime Minister Nur Hassan Hussein earlier this month after Hussein sacked Mogadishu’s powerful mayor, who was a key ally of the president.
Both men have been locked in crisis talks for days with officials in neighbouring Ethiopia.
“We hope the agreement will end the differences between the Somali leaders,” Ethiopia’s Woyanne Foreign Minister Seyoum Mesfin said after the pair signed the deal in Addis Ababa.
“Ten days ago, the very existence of TFG (transitional federal government) was at a critical point. The differences were a deciding factor that makes or breaks the transitional period, including the peace agreement in Djibouti.”
Despite the rift between Yusuf and Hussein, the government did sign a tentative peace agreement with a faction of the rebel Islamists at U.N.-led talks in Djibouti last week.
But that pact has only served to stoke violence led by another faction of the opposition, whose fighters seized the strategic southern port of Kismayu on Friday.
The deal reached in Addis Ababa came as more than 90 anti-Hussein members of parliament called for the prime minister to be impeached. They accuse him of failing to curb violence and for alleged misuse of government finances.
But Hussein was bullish that the new agreement would work.
“We’re confident that the cabinet will not be defeated in the exercise that is going on in the Somali parliament,” he told reporters in the Ethiopian capital.
(Additional reporting by Mohammed Ahmed in Baidoa; Reporting by Tsegaye Tadesse; Writing by Helen Nyambura-Mwaura; Editing by MacDonald Dzirutwe)
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