A RELUCTANT guest of honour will arrive for his farewell party at Kenya’s State House this morning, shake hands with government ministers and listen to the very best wishes from a relieved international donor community.

Abdullahi Yusuf, the Somalian President-in-exile, is finally going home.

“He is going to a summit in Qatar, and then perhaps to another Arab country,” Yusuf Ismail Bari Bari, the President’s spokesman, said yesterday. “But then it will be Somalia. He is not coming back here.”

The departure of President Yusuf will come as a huge relief to the Kenyan authorities. They have hosted their neighbour’s Government since 2002. But bitter wrangling over the choice of a capital city and the matter of foreign peacekeeping troops had raised the prospect of the Government collapsing before it even returned home.

Neither issue has been resolved but the Kenyans and the donor countries who have been paying for the MPs’ accommodation have had enough of the Somalis’ prevarication. Last week the parliamentarians received eviction notices from their upmarket hotels in Nairobi. All are expected to return to Somalia — still largely a patchwork of warlords’ fiefdoms — by the end of the week.

A senior UN official, who asked not be named, said: “They now have simply got to take the risk of going home.”

Since his election by politicians last October, Mr Yusuf, 70, a former warlord, has argued that the risk of relocating to the traditional capital, Mogadishu, the epicentre of Somalia’s anarchy, was too great. He has insisted on moving the capital to the nearby towns of Baidoa or Jowhar, so infuriating many MPs and frustrating international officials.

A failed attempt by militia loyal to Mr Yusuf to take Baidoa by force two weeks ago served only to raise suspicions about his commitment to peace and national unity. Last month the UN proposed that the Government should move to Mogadishu under a plan in which a soon-to-be-established police force would secure the city while the President toured the country. And so more than 100 MPs have returned to Mogadishu. With civic groups, they have dismantled 20 roadblocks used by the warlords to extort money. This is being seen as a big step forward.

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