By Bashir M. Sheikh Ali, J.D., Ph.D

When Somalis discuss the crisis facing their country, the conversation almost invariably arrives at the same questions. Who should lead? Which coalition can hold? Whose turn has come? These are treated as governance questions. They are not. They are questions about the distribution of political power among elites, and while the answers matter in a narrow tactical sense, they do not address governance at all.

Governance is what happens, or fails to happen, when a mother takes her sick child to a public clinic and finds no medicine, no staff, and no certainty that care will be there tomorrow. It is what happens, or fails to happen, when a child goes to a public school and finds no qualified teacher, no consistent curriculum, and no assurance that the system will still be functioning next year. It is what happens, or fails to happen, when a family moves through their city with no trust that the police will protect them. It is what happens, or fails to happen, when a landowner registers a title and has no confidence that the record cannot be quietly altered by a government official. It is what happens, or fails to happen, when a business owner signs a contract and has no reason to believe a court will enforce it impartially. None of these outcomes depend on who sits in Villa Somalia. They depend on whether functional, impersonal institutions exist. In Somalia, they largely do not. And the country’s political conversation, conducted almost entirely at the level of leadership and coalition, has never seriously grappled with why, or with what kind of leadership it would actually take to change that.

An institution, properly understood, is a system of rules, norms, and enforcement mechanisms that produces predictable outcomes regardless of the individuals operating within it. A public clinic provides medicine not because a particular official is competent or generous but because the system procures it, tracks it, and ensures it is there when needed. A school functions not because a teacher is dedicated but because standards, hiring, and oversight exist beyond any one person. A land registry protects ownership not because an official is honest but because records cannot be easily altered, ignored, or seized without consequence. Security is maintained not because a police officer is well intentioned but because the system compels response and enforces accountability. Impersonality is not a bureaucratic nicety. It is the entire point. An institution that functions only when the right person is in charge is not an institution. It is a person with a title.

This distinction is not consistently understood in Somalia, and where it is understood, it is often ignored. The failure runs across the full spectrum of the country’s political class. The clearest evidence is the way public appointments are made and understood. Every significant government post is a clan entitlement before it is a functional requirement. The question asked of any appointment is not whether the candidate can do the job but whether the clan is entitled to the position and whether the individual is loyal to the right patron. This is not corruption in the ordinary sense of the word. It is the operating logic of a system in which institutions have never been allowed to function independently of the people who staff them. When every judge serves at the pleasure of the executive, when every civil servant owes his position to a clan calculation rather than a merit process, when every regulatory body is staffed to distribute entitlements rather than enforce rules, the result is not weak institutions. It is the systematic prevention of institutions from forming at all.

The vehicle for this systematic prevention has a name: the 4.5 clan power-sharing formula. It is important to understand precisely what 4.5 is, and what it is not, because the distinction matters enormously for any serious reform argument. The 4.5 formula is not constitutionally mandated. The Provisional Constitution of 2012 did not entrench it as a permanent feature of Somali governance. It was a transitional arrangement, used throughout the pre-constitutional period and carried into the formation of the first federal parliament, intended to give way to more durable representative mechanisms. After that first parliament was seated, the formula was supposed to expire. It continued because the elite decided it should, without legal basis. From parliament, the formula migrated to cabinet selection. From cabinet, it moved to senior civil service appointments. From senior appointments, it spread downward through every tier of public employment until it became the invisible operating system of the entire state. It is now everywhere, applied to positions its architects never envisioned and for which no legal authority exists. It expanded by elite consensus, by the shared calculation of every group with power that the formula serves their interest better than a merit principle whose benefits are diffuse and long-term.

This makes the 4.5 system more resistant to reform than a constitutional provision would be, not less. In Somalia, there is no judicial mechanism capable of reviewing or challenging constitutional or legal violations. An elite practice that has no legal foundation cannot be contested in court, because the courts themselves lack the independence and authority to enforce the law. It can only be ended by a political decision that every beneficiary of the system has every incentive to prevent. The result is a state in which the formal constitutional commitment to an independent civil service and an independent judiciary coexists with an informal operating system that makes both structurally impossible. Every institution is staffed for clan arithmetic rather than functional capacity. Every appointment is a negotiation between clan interests rather than a selection based on competence. The institutions that result from this process are not institutions in any meaningful sense; they are collections of clan placeholders occupying government space.

Somalia is not the first post-conflict society to face this challenge, and the comparative record is instructive, though not in the simple way that development discourse usually implies. The experience of the Western Balkans after the wars of Yugoslav succession is the most commonly cited parallel, and it is relevant, but for reasons that are rarely acknowledged honestly. The Dayton Agreement of 1995, which ended the war in Bosnia, constitutionalized ethnic identity as the organizing principle of Bosnian governance. It built the post-war state around constituent peoples rather than citizens, creating a system in which every public institution was designed first to distribute ethnic entitlements and only secondarily to deliver services. The result, thirty years later, is a country with functioning institutions on paper and dysfunctional ones in practice, where ethnic arithmetic governs every appointment and the delivery of public services is hostage to inter-ethnic negotiation at every level.

The 4.5 system is Dayton in Somali dress, with one important distinction that makes it worse. Bosnia’s ethnic power-sharing was at least formally constitutionalized, which means it can in principle be challenged and amended through constitutional processes, however difficult. Somalia’s clan power-sharing migrated beyond its constitutional mandate by elite decision, which means it has no formal legal status to challenge. It is a practice, not a provision, and practices are changed only by political will, not by legal argument. The structural consequence in both cases is the same: impersonal institutions cannot be built inside a system whose foundational logic is the distribution of group entitlements, because the two principles are architecturally incompatible. You cannot build a merit-based civil service inside a clan quota system. You cannot build an independent judiciary when judges are appointed directly by the president, with no appointing commission ever having been established, and every appointment is a clan calculation made at the pleasure of the executive. The form of the institution can exist. The substance cannot.

Reform did come, however partially and unevenly, to parts of the Balkans, and the mechanism matters for Somalia. What drove genuine institutional change in Kosovo and Serbia was not internal political will. It was the concrete, credible prospect of European Union membership, which came with binding conditionality: meet specific, externally verified institutional standards or you do not join. The prize was large enough and the requirements specific enough that leaders accepted real constraints on their behavior. Judicial councils were established, vetting processes were created, and civil service reforms were implemented under external pressure that had real consequences for non-compliance.

Somalia’s accession to the East African Community in March 2024 raised hope that a comparable pressure might take hold. The EAC Treaty, modeled on the EU, expects partner states to maintain functional courts, harmonize laws, and develop the infrastructure for trade, labor, and judicial cooperation. In principle, national courts may hear EAC disputes, but this presumes independence and capacity that Somali courts currently lack, making domestic reforms such as the Judicial Service Commission and federal courts prerequisites rather than aspirational endpoints. But the analogy has a limit. The EU’s conditionality worked because membership was genuinely withheld from states that did not comply; the prize was large and the cost of exclusion was real. The EAC has no equivalent mechanism. Membership is effectively unconditional, compliance is voluntary, and Somalia’s elites have every reason to treat EAC obligations the way they have treated every other external framework: as rhetoric to be managed rather than constraints to be honored.

What Somalia needs to build, and what the governance conversation must eventually confront, is the full architecture of impersonal public institutions across every domain where the state is supposed to function. Courts are the most critical single institution, for reasons that extend well beyond this essay. But courts alone cannot constitute a functioning state. A civil service with merit-based recruitment, transparent compensation, and protection from political removal is a precondition for any other institution to function, because every institution depends on the people staffing it having a relationship to the institution rather than to the patron who placed them there. A revenue authority that collects taxes through systematic processes rather than personal relationships is what makes a budget real. A land registry that records and enforces titles impartially is what makes property rights meaningful. A public health supply chain that delivers medicines because the system requires it is what makes the constitutional guarantee of health services something other than a political slogan.

None of these institutions requires a perfect constitutional settlement before it can begin to be built. Courts can begin to function before the full integrated model is established, if judges are appointed through a credible, transparent process. A civil service commission can begin to operate before every power-sharing dispute is resolved, if the commitment to hire on merit in the positions the federal government controls is made and honored. Institutions are built incrementally, through the accumulation of credible decisions and enforced standards, not through constitutional declarations that are never operationalized.

The public understanding of this point matters as much as the political will to act on it. Somalia’s governance conversation will not change until the educated public begins to demand accountability not for who governs but for how governance actually functions at the level where citizens experience it. A president’s clan affiliation is not a governance question. Whether the courts he oversees will hear a case from a citizen of a different clan on its merits is. A minister’s political alignment is not a governance question. Whether his ministry delivers services according to published standards and auditable processes is. The shift from the first kind of question to the second is the shift from politics as patronage distribution to politics as governance, and it is a shift that no external actor, not the EAC, not the donor community, not any regional power, can make on Somalia’s behalf.

The question of who governs Somalia will be answered, one way or another, in the coming months. The question of whether Somalia is governed, in the sense that matters to the citizen at the clinic, the student at the school, the family on the street, the landowner at the registry, and the merchant before the court, will not be answered by that process. It will be answered only when Somalia’s political class, its intellectual class, and eventually its public internalize a truth that should be obvious but has not yet taken hold: governance is what institutions do. And institutions do not build themselves. They are built by leaders who understand that their most consequential act is not the exercise of power but its deliberate limitation. The establishment of rules, processes, and bodies that will bind their successors and eventually bind themselves is not a concession. It is the work. Somalia does not lack people capable of that understanding. What it has lacked, consistently, is leaders willing to act on it. That is the leadership question worth asking.

Bashir M .Sheikh Ali, J.D., Ph.D
Email: bsali@yahoo.com
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Bashir is a Somali American lawyer based in Nairobi. The views expressed in this analysis are his own and do not reflect those of any organization with which he may be affiliated.