By Wilo Abdulle
Somalia does not lack laws. It does not lack institutions, frameworks, or internationally drafted roadmaps. What it lacks, persistently and at great cost, is the quality of leadership required to honestly breathe life into those structures. This is the conversation Somali political and intellectual discourse keeps circling without landing on. It is time to land on it. There is a Somali saying that frames this moment with precision: “Ammuuri waqtigeeday falantaa.” All matters, time is their executor. Somali oral tradition
This is not a counsel of patience. It is a recognition that time itself is the active agent, the one with the real power to act on human affairs regardless of what people in positions of authority choose to do or avoid doing. Unresolved matters do not dissolve themselves or disappear. They accumulate. The governance failures that Somali citizens have lived with across three decades are not abstract historical events. They are active, compounding, and daily in their consequences.
When we speak of governance failure in Somalia, we tend to reach for external explanations first. Foreign interference, historical trauma, colonial division, regional fragmentation, donor conditionality. These forces are real and they matter. But they have also become a convenient curtain behind which a more uncomfortable truth hides: that the people occupying the highest seats of Somali governance have frequently lacked the professional formation, the strategic depth, and the ideological grounding necessary to govern a complex, wounded, and proud society toward stability.
Leadership is not a title. It is a practice that must be built. It requires stewardship, the tested ability to hold something in trust for others. It requires strategic wisdom and vision, not just cleverness in negotiation or survival in political games, but the capacity to read a society’s historical trajectory and make decisions that compound in the right direction over time. It requires qualifications that are not merely academic but experiential, ethical, and contextually intelligent. Somalia needs leaders who understand not just policy but people, not just power but accountability. Without these dimensions embedded in governance, what Somali citizens witness is not a state in progress but a state that keeps failing at the same joints, in the same ways, for the same reasons in every four years.
A captured field
A population cannot elect or select its way to competent governance if the options available to it are uniformly shaped by the same internal war criminals connected to external colonial networks, the same foreign-cultivated or trained, foreign-funded, internally invalidated and externally validated political elites whose first loyalties are too often to the institutions that locally fabricated and financed their training rather than to the communities that raised them. This is not an argument against education, lived experience, or international engagement. It is a valid argument for rootedness.
Let us be precise about what is happening in Somalia’s political field, because imprecision has protected the wrong people for too long. The first distortion is the most dangerous. A significant portion of the individuals who have occupied or continue to seek Somalia’s highest offices carry direct or indirect responsibility for the violence of the 1990s and the years that followed. These are not historical abstractions. They are men whose decisions contributed to the destruction of Somali state institutions, whose militias displaced millions, whose negotiations in Nairobi and Djibouti and Addis Ababa were conducted not in the interest of reconciliation but in the interest of their own re-entry into power.
The international community, for reasons of its own convenience, recycled these figures into the transitional frameworks because they controlled territory and commanded armed men. Legitimacy was manufactured. Community consent was bypassed. And so the Somali state, in its post-collapse reconstruction, was handed back in significant part to the architects of its collapse. That transaction has never been fully named, and it has never been resolved. Its consequences are still governing.
The second distortion operates alongside the first, and in many cases merges with it. Somalia’s political elite has been substantially shaped by an external validation economy that has almost nothing to do with Somali civic trust. The pathway to leadership has too often run through foreign capitals, international NGO headquarters, UN agency rosters, and diaspora networks whose relationship to the Somali interior is mediated by remittances and nostalgia rather than daily accountability. The individuals produced by this pathway arrive fluent in the language of international frameworks, capable of writing the right reports, saying the right things in the right rooms in Geneva or Brussels or Washington. They are legible to external audiences. They are frequently illegible to the communities they are supposed to serve.
This illegibility is not accidental. It is structural. When a political figure’s career is built on external recognition rather than internal mandate, their accountability runs upward and outward, toward the funding body, the diplomatic mission, the international monitor, not downward and inward toward the constituents whose lives their decisions shape. The community that raised them is not the audience that matters for their survival. This is what internal invalidation means in practice. It means that ordinary Somali citizens, the farmer in Shabele or Juba, the displaced woman in Baidoa, the young man in Kismayo with no formal employment, hold no real leverage over the people governing them, because those governors/presidents do not require their validation to stay in power. External legitimacy substitutes for domestic legitimacy. And the gap between the two is where governance goes to die.
The third distortion is the fabrication of local credentials. Somalia has developed an elite of male dominated of political actors who present domestic roots and community ties as their qualification while operating almost entirely within externally financed structures. The local NGO funded by a single foreign government and answerable to its reporting requirements. The civil society platform convened not from grassroots demand but from a project design document written in a donor country. The policy institution whose research agenda is determined by what the funder country’s interests and wants to know rather than what the community needs answered. These structures are not neutral. They produce a form of local knowledge curated for external consumption, a version of Somalia that is dehumanized, manageable, legible, and fundable, rather than a version of Somalia that is real, human-centered, contradictory, and sovereign. The people trained and promoted within these structures carry that curated version as their political worldview. In most cases they have genuinely internalized it. That is what makes the problem so persistent and so difficult to dislodge.
The democratic aspiration and its distorted field
The democratic aspiration at the heart of Somalia’s constitutional order is one person, one vote. But the vote only has meaning if the field of candidates represents genuine alternatives rooted in Somali social, economic, and political realities. When that field has been pre-selected, narrowed by war-era bargains, external patronage networks, and the systematic exclusion of genuinely community-accountable voices, then the act of voting becomes a performance rather than a decision. Somali citizens are being asked to choose between options that were never really theirs to begin with.
Somali political culture has too often rewarded group loyalty over competence, clan arithmetic over institutional qualification, and short-term coalition management over long-term state building. The result is administrations that are politically balanced on the surface but strategically hollow at the core. Ministries staffed by appointment rather than merit. Decisions made by calculation rather than by policy. A governance elite whose survival does not depend on getting things right for the people but on managing relationships with those who finance and legitimize them from outside.
This is not a peripheral problem. It is the central problem. Somalia has been governed for too long by a political men dominated elite that is simultaneously too foreign in its accountability and too compromised in its history. These two conditions reinforce each other. The warlord war profiter who reinvented himself as a senator, parliamentarian or statesman needed international cover to do so. The international community needed local partners willing to sign agreements and staff ministries. A transaction was made. The Somali people were not party to it. That transaction is still running, and it runs through every election cycle, every new administration, every freshly drafted national development plan that goes unread by government officials and thereafter unimplemented because it was never rooted in the society it claimed to serve.
What rootedness actually means
Somali tradition understood the architecture of accountability before any modern governance framework was drafted. There is a question that was asked and answered collectively for generations:
“Yaa dhibaato tirsanaya? Geedka hoostiisa ayaa xeerbeegtu ku kulmi jireen, kagana xaajoon jireen, kuna xalin jireen dhib walba. Sidaana bulshadu uga qaybqaadan jirtey qeexida, soo bandhigida, falanqaynta iyo xalinta xaalad walba oo bulshada dhexdeeda ka jirta ama banaankeeda kasoo wajahda.”
Who has a problem? Who has an issue? Under the tree, the elders of customary law (local council members) would gather, consult, and resolve every hardship. That is how the community participated in defining, presenting, analyzing, managing, and resolving every situation arising from within the community or approaching it from without.
Somali oral tradition
The question “yaa dhibaato tirsanaya”, who has a problem, who has an issue, was an open call. Any member of the community could bring their matter to the tree. Access was universal. That is the first thing to understand.
The second thing, equally important and far less discussed, is that the seat at the tree was not open to anyone. The Xeerbeeg were not elected by whoever showed up, nor appointed through political deals, nor selected to satisfy a quota. Membership was earned through a standard of demonstrated qualification that many of Somalia’s current parliamentarians could not meet. To sit as xeerbeeg, a person had to carry knowledge across multiple domains simultaneously: mastery of customary law and its application, grounding in religious principles and their moral demands, and familiarity with broader universal norms and the logic of agreements between peoples.
Beyond knowledge, they had to demonstrate active listening, the capacity to hear what was being said beneath what was being said. They had to bring skilled negotiation, holding competing interests without collapsing them prematurely into a false resolution. They had to exercise critical analysis, reading situations in their full context rather than their surface presentation. And above all, they had to have a proven record of judgment grounded in justice and accountability, not in loyalty, not in personal advantage, not in the preferences of whoever held the most power within and without the communities they represent.
This is the contrast that must be named plainly. Somalia’s federal parliament today is filled through a process shaped by clan arithmetic, financial transactions, and political patronage. The tree was filled through a process shaped by proven wisdom, plural knowledge, and demonstrated integrity. The parliament claims to be the more modern institution. In the matter of qualification standards for those who hold power over others, it is the more degraded one.
None of the argument in this piece is against education, international engagement, or community and diaspora participation. Somalia cannot and should not close itself off from the world. Somali diaspora communities carry extraordinary intellectual, financial, and civic resources, and their engagement with the country’s development is not only legitimate but necessary-lifeline. International partnerships, when structured honestly,without back-thought interests, can support rather than distort. The argument is for the condition that makes all of these things useful rather than extractive, and that condition is rootedness.
Rootedness in this context means political legitimacy that originates from within Somali society, not from without. It means leaders whose formation, however international their education, has been tested against the lived realities of Somali communities, whose judgment has been shaped by proximity to ordinary suffering rather than distance from it. It means accountability structures that run toward the people rather than away from them. It means the vetting of candidates and officials against standards of integrity that include their conduct during the years of violence, their record of resource, stewardship, and their demonstrated commitment to the communities they claim to represent. It means that the question of who leads Somalia is answered by Somali people operating from an informed position, not choreographed into endorsing a field pre-selected by external interests and internal power brokers before any vote is cast.
Locally grounded durable solutions are not a slogan. They are a method. They require that the people designing and implementing governance carry real accountability to the communities affected, not just to the donor program cycle. The leader who can be questioned under the tree, figuratively or literally, who must return to the community and answer for what was done in its name, is a fundamentally different figure from the leader whose political survival is managed in a hotel conference room in another country or in an office of another country’s ministry of foreign affairs.
The cost and the call
The cost of the missing layer is not abstract. It shows up in a child who cannot access a functioning clinic. In a farmer whose land dispute goes unresolved for decades. In a woman whose testimony carries no weight in any formal institution. In a young person who sees clearly that the system was not built for them and was never intended to answer to them. These are not governance statistics. They are the accumulated cost of transactions conducted over the heads of ordinary Somali people, in their names, without their consent.
Somalia has enormous intellectual capacity, an extraordinary diaspora, communities that have maintained social cohesion through decades of state collapse, and a younger generation that is watching and forming judgements about what is possible. What that generation needs to see is that the question of who leads and on what basis is being taken seriously, not managed, not performed for international audiences, but genuinely reckoned with as the foundational question of the country’s future.
Identifying the missing layer clearly is the first act of rebuilding it. That layer is not a technical fix, not a new framework, not another round of international consultations. It is a political culture that demands rootedness as the price and base of power, that insists on accountability as a condition of legitimacy, and that refuses to extend either to figures whose record disqualifies them regardless of how effectively they have been rebranded. It is a civic infrastructure capable of making that demand stick.
The state exists to serve its people. Somalia deserves leadership that answers to Somalia. Not to Mogadishu’s political season, not to the preferences of a capital on another continent, but to the lived realities of Somali people across every region of this country. That kind of leadership does not arrive by accident. It is cultivated, demanded, and chosen/elected. The question of who has a problem, who has an issue, was once answered under a tree, by people whose accountability ran in one direction only: toward the community. Rebuilding that direction is not a return to the past. It is the precondition for any viable future.
Ammuuri waqtigeeday falantaa. All matters, time is their executor. The demand for rooted, accountable leadership in Somalia is not idealism. It is the most practical political position available to a people who have waited long enough.
Wilo Abdulle,
Email: Wilo.abdulle@gmail.com
——
Wilo is Somali writer and governance practitioner working at the intersection of policy, equality, inclusion, human rights, community accountability, and the politics of development in the Horn of Africa. Her work on governance, accountability, and development in Somalia is rooted in a single conviction: that Somalia’s solutions must be Somalia’s own.