Is there any hope for Somalia?

Wednesday marks the 20th anniversary of Somalia’s last president, Mohamed Siad Barre. Since then the country has been reduced to a battle zone with its image overshadowed by war and conflict.

The BBC Africa Have Your Say program is asking what role young Somalis hope to play in their country’s future.

The program will be broadcast from the Horn of Africa community center in west London, and will link an audience in Mogadishu with an audience at MPR’s headquarters in St. Paul. Young Somalis “will be able to talk about their sense of identity, and their relationship with their homeland under the most trying of circumstances.”

Is Somalia simply ungovernable? Is there hope?

The program begins on air and online at 10 a.m. CT tomorrow. I’ll be live-blogging it here.

The panelists in St. Paul are:

>> Mukhtar Osman. an engineer with MNDOT.

>> Hoodo Hassan, studying psychology and English literature at the University of Minnesota

>> Zuhur Ahmed, a pre-med student at Concordia University. She also hosts the radio program Somali Community Link on KFAI. (She was part of MPR’s >)

>> Ruqia Mohamed is a student at the University of Minnesota majoring in political science and global studies.