By Bashir M. Sheikh Ali, J.D., Ph.D. [1]
Somalis demonstrate high levels of individual capability across education, entrepreneurship, professional achievement, and economic mobility. In diaspora communities and regional markets, Somali individuals perform competitively in trade, business, academia, law, healthcare, and technology. Remittance flows and private investment reflect organizational capacity, adaptability, and risk tolerance at the individual and family level. Even within Somalia, many entrepreneurs have built significant wealth, navigating instability through networks, negotiation, and informal systems that reward flexibility over structure.
Yet Somalia’s governance remains among the weakest globally. The contrast between strong individual outcomes and weak collective governance performance is measurable across multiple international performance indicators. For example, the Fund for Peace’s Fragile States Index ranks Somalia as the most fragile state worldwide. The World Bank’s Worldwide Governance Indicators place Somalia at the bottom of global rankings for government effectiveness, rule of law, regulatory quality, political stability, and control of corruption. Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index similarly ranks Somalia near the bottom globally, reflecting persistent challenges in public accountability and enforcement. The Freedom in the World 2025 report by Freedom House place Somalia among the least free societies. The Social Progress Index ranks Somalia last globally, while the Mo Ibrahim Index of African Governance and the UNDP Human Development Index both place the country near the bottom of regional and global comparisons.
Somalia’s absence from several major comparative indices, such as the World Justice Project Rule of Law Index, reflects that Somalia does not yet meet the baseline institutional or methodological thresholds required for inclusion. In this context, exclusion itself is an indicator of institutional fragility. Taken together, these comparative outcomes reinforce the central paradox: a society capable of producing strong individual achievement continues to generate some of the weakest collective governance results globally. This reflects not a lack of talent or ambition, but a structural disconnect between the mechanisms that enable personal advancement and those required to build and sustain shared institutions.
To understand this divergence, it is necessary to examine where and how Somali success is generated, and why those pathways operate independently of formal state structures. The disconnect begins at the local level. Within Somalia itself, many entrepreneurs, traders, and professionals have built viable enterprises despite prolonged institutional weakness. They have done so by relying on informal dispute resolution, negotiated access to markets, clan-based guarantees, and adaptive private arrangements that substitute for predictable regulation. These mechanisms allow economic activity to continue even in the absence of strong public administration.
A second layer of success is anchored in regional and diaspora environments. Somali individuals often thrive within external education systems, foreign labor markets, and jurisdictions governed by stable legal and financial frameworks. These contexts provide enforceable contracts, property protection, and regulatory clarity, enabling advancement largely independent of Somali state institutions.
A third pathway emerged during years of conflict and persists in modified form today: a war-shaped political economy in which access, protection, and commercial opportunity are mediated through networks that include local actors, regional intermediaries, and members of the diaspora. In this environment, profit and survival often depend on navigating fluid authority structures rather than strengthening formal governance.
Although these pathways differ in legitimacy and long-term impact, they share a common feature: each reduces reliance on shared public institutions. Across these spheres, advancement increasingly occurs without dependence on a functioning Somali state. When mobility and security can be secured through private arrangements at home, through opportunity abroad, or through adaptive systems shaped by instability, the incentive to invest in collective governance weakens. Over time, this insulation from public systems reshapes expectations by normalizing success independent of institutions, allowing governance deficits to persist in the absence of sustained pressure for reform.
What remains outside these three loosely defined circles is the vast majority of Somali society, whose experience of governance is shaped less by functioning institutions than by the visible success of a small minority operating beyond them. With sustained pressure for reform absent and public authority weakened, corruption filled the institutional vacuum. A narrow political and commercial elite, often separate from entrepreneurs and professionals who succeeded through competence or adaptation, came to treat governance primarily as a mechanism for extraction. Over time, this extractive logic began to redefine public expectations themselves. Even individuals with genuine technical capacity increasingly encountered a political environment in which participation in governance meant access to rents rather than responsibility for building systems.
With no sustained constituency pressing for institutional construction, the result is a gradual collective drift. Successful actors remain insulated from institutional failure, extractive elites reshape governance norms around short-term gain, and the broader public adapts its expectations downward. In such an environment, institutional development erodes as the incentives that might sustain it gradually disappear.
This collective drift is reinforced by a political incentive structure that rewards control over resources rather than institutional restraint. Within this framework, elite competition centers on preserving influence and negotiating access rather than constructing systems that standardize authority or limit discretion. As a result, informal arrangements substitute for state functions: disputes are settled through negotiation rather than adjudication, enforcement remains uneven, and authority fragments along localized lines. Because these mechanisms often appear faster and more predictable than formal processes, citizens and businesses rationally rely on them. Over time, this reliance weakens national coordination and erodes confidence in shared rules, further entrenching private pathways at the expense of collective governance.
These political incentives do more than sustain informality; they help explain why the equilibrium endures. The paradox persists not merely because institutions are weak, but because key actors have adapted to — and in some cases benefited from — that weakness. Many successful domestic economic actors have accumulated wealth by navigating ambiguity, leveraging personal networks, and operating in environments where enforcement is negotiated rather than uniform. Institutional consolidation would standardize rules, limit discretion, and reduce the relative advantages such actors derive from flexibility. This creates a structural tension: those with the capacity and influence to demand reform are often the least reliant on formal institutions and increasingly view governance not as a shared public framework but as an arena for extraction, while those most constrained by institutional failure lack the leverage to alter the system.
The result is a durable equilibrium. Individuals can advance without functioning public systems, while governance remains weak because many of those with the capacity to reshape it have adapted to operating beyond it and increasingly view public authority as an arena of extraction rather than a shared framework. Individual success expands even as collective institutions stagnate.
Changing this trajectory requires more than technical reform or rhetorical commitment. Leadership matters only when it alters incentives. What is needed is a governing approach that binds political and economic elites to rules they cannot selectively bypass, making participation in collective institutions more viable than reliance on negotiated or external pathways. Expanding the fiscal base, strengthening courts, enforcing regulations consistently, and narrowing the advantages of operating outside formal systems are central to this shift, and resistance is inevitable because these changes redistribute power.
The central question is therefore not whether capable leaders or talented citizens exist, but whether enough of those who have achieved individual success are willing to invest in institutions that may constrain short-term advantage while expanding long-term stability. A government that serves the public does not emerge from private achievement alone; it emerges when incentives align individual security and opportunity with the construction of shared rules.
Somalia’s condition reflects incentives and patterns of behavior that have allowed individual success to flourish alongside institutional fragility. As long as education, income, and security can be secured through private or external means, pressure to build universal systems will remain limited. This equilibrium endures because those positioned to alter it have not chosen to do so. When individual success becomes tied to collective progress, the balance can shift, opening the possibility of institutions that reflect the capacity already visible across Somali society.
Bashir M. Sheikh Ali, J.D., Ph.D.
Email: bsali@yahoo.com.
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[1] The author 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.