If so, send a résumé, photo, and $2,000 to a hotel in Djibouti.

Most people know two things about Somalia: It has more pirates than any other place in the world, and it has no government.

The news media have fixed on these two identifying characteristics. The fifth or sixth paragraph of any 400-word wire story about Somalia will contain both the latest update on piracy and a reminder that since 1991 Somalia has not had an effective government.

Right now in Djibouti, a small, hot country on the Red Sea populated by ethnic Somalis, the Kempinski Hotel is full of people trying to solve these two issues—unfortunately, not together.

An electoral committee of Somali parliamentarians is examining the résumés and photographs of a dozen or so candidates who applied to become president of Somalia. The election is scheduled for Friday, Jan. 30, and many of the résumés arrived on Jan. 29. Being a citizen of a foreign country is no problem. The only prerequisite is an application fee of $2,000. There is not enough time for background checks, since the new president, whoever he may be, is expected at this weekend's African Union summit in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

The piracy conference, meanwhile, boasts stakeholders from 22 countries in Africa and the Middle East. It's safe to assume they consider their project of negotiating legal procedures for prosecuting Somali pirates to be a higher priority than stabilizing Somalia through a legitimate presidential election. They are not the only ones.

The United Nations has directed the 30-day process leading to what they are calling an "election" for Somalia's sixth transitional president in 18 years. The new leader will almost certainly not be able to live or work in Somalia, nor will his parliament, because radical Islamists have taken over the country, following the recent withdrawal of Ethiopian troops.

So, it seems that nobody cares about democracy for Somalia, except the people who are currently stuck there having their hands cut off for theft, being kidnapped for ransom by their own government officials, dying of malnutrition in camps for "internally displaced persons," paying off teenage gunmen at roadblocks, being shot for watching movies, or getting stoned to death for the sin of being raped.

"The formation of another ghost government … is a cruel option for the Somali people," says Somali activist Mohamud Uluso in a mass e-mail titled, "Political Scam Serves No Purpose."

The West, represented by the European Union and the United States, would prefer to install a new transitional president as soon as possible to replace the transitional transitional president who replaced a warlord named Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed who blighted the country for four years with nepotist policies and gangsterism. Otherwise, claims a Western official, there might be a leadership vacuum.

Any thinking person would be confused by this suggestion. Doesn't Somalia already have a leadership vacuum? Isn't that why it has so many pirates?