By Dr Zakariya Weyrax Warsame
There is a moment when criticism ceases to illuminate and becomes a ritual, when analysis turns to obsession. At that moment, scholarship no longer seeks truth — it hides from it. And in that darkness, the present rots and the future is left… orphaned.
For too long, Somali “intellectual authority” has been held hostage by a generation that mistakes bitterness for insight, inherited grudges for scholarship, and selective memory for courage. Boomers and Gen X academics — most comfortably settled in the West — have monopolised discourse not because they are profound, but because nobody has yet confronted the emptiness of their claims. This essay is that confrontation, long overdue.
Their writing begins and ends with one ritual incantation: an obsessive condemnation of the Barre era, delivered in borrowed Western vocabulary and laden with moral posturing that collapses under the slightest scrutiny. They instinctively label Somali governing structures—past and present—as “regimes,” a term reserved for foreign hostility that no self-respecting society would use to describe its own body politic. This is not academic precision; it is a borrowed cudgel, an unthinking adoption of a lexicon that quietly denies Somali sovereignty. They speak of “moral repression” while ignoring that such language implicitly justifies the chaos that followed. And in the process, they erase the very achievements that gave them their own opportunities: free schooling that educated them, free healthcare that treated their families, stability that allowed civil life to flourish, and a cultural renaissance that elevated Somali identity.
They lived through the only functioning Somali state in modern history — benefited from it, matured under it — and then, having consumed its fruits, they declared the orchard poisonous and the soil barren. They speak with the confidence of custodians while standing atop the wreckage they now justify with relentless zeal, lecturing those of us born into the ruins about a world that, in truth, never existed in the simplistic form they claim.
This fraud is compounded by a profound failure of moral and historical proportionality. They meticulously catalogue the flaws of a functioning state while offering no compelling explanation — and accepting no accountability — for the thirty-five-year inferno of statelessness that followed. To equate the challenges of past governance with the apocalyptic suffering of collapse is to lose all moral and analytical compass. The defining tragedy of modern Somalia is not Barre; it is the catastrophic, prolonged failure that began in 1991. Any intellectual framework that cannot centre this truth is not merely incomplete — it is immoral.
The central, unanswered question they forever avoid is this: How did the discourse that so meticulously critiques the era of a functioning state justify, explain, or prevent the thirty-five-year cataclysm of a failed one?
And what makes their behaviour even more audacious is that my generation has never tasted even a fragment of what they took for granted. We came into a world already on fire — no state to protect us, no institutions to guide us, no common narrative to anchor us. We inherited ruins, then were told to apologise for not appreciating the architecture of a house we never lived in. Our souls were starved of nationhood, dignity, unity, culture, belonging — all the nutrients they enjoyed in abundance — and yet they mock us for our malnourished identity.
The betrayal is grotesque because it divorces them from the lived reality of those still in Somalia. They fled the collapse early, built comfortable lives abroad, and now perform outrage at a distance so safe it borders on obscene. They lecture about “oppression” while sitting in societies with hospitals, courts, clean streets, and schools for their children. They have never queued for water, dodged stray bullets, or negotiated with a militia at a checkpoint. Their moral compass does not merely malfunction — it has been replaced entirely by tribal instinct, unexamined and unacknowledged.
In 2022, I travelled alone through Hargeisa, Berbera, Burco, and Mogadishu. No bodyguards. No entourage. No ideological filters. I drove across cracked landscapes and broken roads, engaging with people whose lives have been decimated by statelessness. Every conversation pulled me deeper into the grief of a nation suffocating in slow motion.
A taxi driver in Hargeisa rattled along broken asphalt, telling me he spends more on mechanics than he earns because the roads have not been repaired in decades. In Burco, a father caring for a chronically ill child explained how private clinics — untrained, corrupt, predatory — drain him dry while offering nothing but false hope.
In Mogadishu, a local cleric spoke with a trembling voice about nights when armed men would enter his home, demand his wife, brutalise her for hours, and return her at dawn — and he, powerless, traumatised, spiritually clinging to God, was forced to thank them for her survival. The air smelled of dust and smoke from distant shelling; grief pressed against my chest like a weight I could not lift. I saw fury beneath his calm, humiliation buried under his piety, sorrow living in his bones.
And in that moment, watching him hold back tears, I understood the cruelty of how some Somalis speak of the past: they treat the suffering that followed state collapse as something dismissible — as though it were less morally significant than the flaws of the twenty-year government that preceded it. How can that make sense? How can the torment of a people abandoned to warlords, rapists, profiteers, famine, corruption, and total institutional collapse be framed as the lesser of two evils?
How can anyone with an honest mind claim that this abyss — this barbaric statelessness — was somehow lesser than a flawed state that at least protected the basics of human life? What moral calculus measures suffering this immense as “lesser” than past imperfections? What intellectual authority claims maturity while ignoring the testimony of those who survived collapse?
This suffering is not unique to Mogadishu, Hargeisa, Berbera, or Burco. It is the silent testimony of every Somali city, every Somali region, every Somali life touched by collapse — something I can only partially witness in person, yet can imagine as a constant across the country. Yet acknowledging it is taboo. Criticise the condition of any region, and you are accused of insulting the local tribe. Point out the misery of a city, and you are told you harbour hatred. Empathy itself has become politically dangerous. These same academics freely critique governance in the West — councils, courts, public services — yet the moment anyone critiques Somalia, they cry tribal insult. Whataboutery becomes a shield. Deflection becomes doctrine. Honest conversation becomes forbidden. It is a mass psychosis of tribal fragility.
Their obsession with Siyaad Barre is not academic. It is tribal. Inherited. Obsessive — a psychological crutch to avoid responsibility. Easier to attack a dead state than confront thirty-five years of carnage they now justify with ease. Their critique is not courage; it is displacement. They resurrect a man rather than confront the living suffering of their own people. And because their entire worldview is built around an enemy who no longer exists — on what must be destroyed rather than what must be built — they cannot offer a narrative that nourishes the living.
And so, with nothing to offer but demolition and grievance, they turn their frustration toward us. They scold us for seeking pride, for longing for a past worth holding, for craving nourishment of the spirit. But how could we not seek it? We were born into a void — no state, no shared narrative, no memory of collective dignity. Our generation grew up without the emotional architecture that sustains a nation: no stories of unity, no symbols to rally around, no inherited sense of national possibility. Of course we search for nourishment; we are trying to fill the space where a country should have been.
They refuse to understand that every nation on earth redacts, romanticises, and mythologises its past to nourish its future; only Somali so-called “intellectuals” weaponise the past to impoverish their descendants. The United States romanticises its founding fathers and the pursuit of liberty, Northern Ireland its hard-won peace and a shared future, China its ancient civilisation and era of national rejuvenation. Different continents, different governing philosophies, yet the same principle: a nation tells its youth a story that inspires them, that gives them an identity to be proud of, a lineage to continue — something we are denied in Somalia.
And now I watch my peers — who cannot even speak Somali with confidence — reciting the hatreds and obsessions of 1991 as if they were holy scripture, proving that the seed of this madness has already been planted. Left unchecked, it will grow again, and we will follow them into the same abyss.
Look at Rwanda after the genocide: they did not indulge in endless academic quarrels about historical justification. They collectively decided that unity, forgiveness, and forward momentum were the only path from the abyss. South Africa, emerging from apartheid, built its foundation on truth and reconciliation — not on an intellectual arms race of blame. Both nations are imperfect today, yes, but they are functioning states with growing economies, national identities, and civic pride.
Compare that with Somalia, where decades after the collapse, we still have academics and commentators trapped in a performative obsession with Maxamed Siyaad Barre, dissecting him with almost ritualistic hostility while ignoring the immeasurably greater suffering that followed his fall. No one is saying his government was flawless — far from it. The point is not to glorify him. The point is to expose the pathology: the fixation on Barre has become a tribal weapon, a psychological crutch, a way to avoid confronting the failures of today.
This is why I speak forcefully. Not to defend any leader, not to erase any wrongdoing, but to expose the intellectual dishonesty that has paralysed us for thirty-five years. A nation cannot rebuild when its suffering is censored in the name of tribal pride. A nation cannot move forward if its academics recycle the same tired narratives instead of addressing the monstrous reality that followed the collapse.
And let us be brutally honest: these academics hold no influence among my generation. Ask a Somali millennial or member of Gen Z to name a contemporary Somali academic, and they cannot. In contrast, ask them to name a Somali Sheikh, and they can list several — figures who command attention because their preaching is positive, constructive, and transcends tribal divides. This disparity exposes a hard truth: these academics exist largely in an echo chamber, conversing with one another in infinite irrelevance. Their audience is themselves. Their words will not endure. Their impact is zero. Their legacy is already dissolving. History will barely note them.
If this approach were truly effective, would we not already see the fruits of it? Decades of ritualised anti-Barre critique, of moral posturing and tribal obsession, have yielded nothing but paralysis. It is the truest definition of insanity, as Einstein said: to double down on a strategy that fails again and again while expecting a different result. It is the truest definition of delusion: a fixed, firm belief sustained against all evidence. And the evidence is clear. The younger generation is checking out. We are not engaged because there is nothing to engage with — only repetition, bitterness, and despair. How can a nation’s youth invest themselves in a narrative that offers no hope, no nourishment, no path forward?
They stand on empty pedestals, raised by echoes of a generation that no longer represents Somalia’s future. And we — the generation born around the collapse — refuse to inherit their grudges, distortions, or psychological wounds. We are done with narratives built on bitterness. We are done with tribal masquerades dressed up as academic critique. We are done with the endless fixation on one man as though he is the axis of our entire destiny. We are done with scholarship that refuses to speak of current suffering because suffering exposes the uncomfortable truth: the collapse, not the state, destroyed Somalia.
We reject the empty pedestals built on tribal frameworks and selective memory. We reject the false equivalence between a state that built and a void that destroys. We reject moral posturing that obscures the raw truth of our prolonged collapse.
We choose truth — even when it is painful, even when it criticises our own, even when it dismantles the stories our elders repeat out of habit. We choose a future not built on inherited hatred but on clarity, maturity, and the courage to see suffering for what it is. We choose to rebuild a narrative that nourishes the soul rather than corrodes it.
Their pedestals stand empty, and their voices have already failed. The ruins remain. The questions remain.
No revolutionary theatre of “rising” can overwrite the responsibility they abandoned, the future they gambled, or the suffering they learned to justify. What we inherit is debris — and the task of discerning it, naming it, and refusing the lies that betrayed us. The academic architects of this void may retreat into comfort, but the silence they leave behind is ours to confront — and ours to reckon with.
Dr Zakariya Weyrax Warsame
Email: Aden133@hotmail.com