Somalia at a Crossroads: moving beyond emergency fixes to durable statecraft
Somalia has achieved one of the landmark technical milestones of post‑conflict recovery—completion of HIPC debt relief in December 2023 and continued engagement with the IMF under an Extended Credit Facility—but the country’s deeper fractures are widening rather than closing. IMF staff forecasts for 2025 now point to growth near 3 percent, down from about 4 percent in 2024, and officials warn the economy is vulnerable to political paralysis, climate shocks and reform fatigue. Those are not just economic footnotes: they are the arithmetic of fragility.
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Security built on sand
Al‑Shabaab remains Somalia’s principal security threat, able to attack urban centres and contest authority across much of the south and centre. United Nations reporting shows violence rising: attacks climbed roughly 15 percent compared with 2023 and more than half a million people were displaced in recent waves of fighting. But the insurgency is not a lone actor; it operates inside a permissive ecosystem of smuggling, illicit taxation and patronage that feeds both guns and grievances. The UN Panel of Experts estimated that as much as 40 percent of Al‑Shabaab’s revenue streams overlap with state‑linked commercial activity—an unnerving indicator that the insurgency’s finances are tangled with Somalia’s political economy.
Equally worrying is the corrosion inside Somalia’s own security institutions. Years of politicised recruitment, patronage and the absorption of defectors into federal security services have hollowed out morale and professionalism. One former senior officer who fled the capital told colleagues that “experienced commanders are exhausted—too often reward follows loyalty, not competence.” The result is a patchwork of agencies that overlap, compete for donor contracts and serve factional interests more than the national good. Security has become, in too many corridors of power, a marketplace rather than a public service.
Arms, oversight and the risk of relapse
The lifting of the UN arms embargo in December 2023 was meant to restore sovereignty, but without robust oversight it has created new perils. Monitoring groups and the Small Arms Survey warn that weapons entering the country are already being diverted into militias and black markets. In a polity where command chains are fragile and accountability systems uneven, newly available materiel risks amplifying the very fragmentation the embargo removal was supposed to correct.
This is not only a Somali problem. It is part of a global pattern: when fragile states acquire more lethal hardware without governance improvements—transparent procurement, centralized inventory controls and community‑anchored security institutions—the odds of relapse into violence rise. Somalia’s challenge is therefore twofold: degrade the insurgency while preventing the instruments of state rebuilding from fuelling new conflicts.
Local ownership: lessons from Puntland State and the CONOPS
There is an alternative model that has worked in pockets. The African Union Transition Mission’s Concept of Operations—built around Clear, Hold and Build—identified the “Hold” phase as the linchpin of sustainable stabilization. Its authors argued that strengthening Federal Member States (FMSs) and empowering locally rooted forces—such as the Darwish—would create enduring control over recovered areas. Too often, that prescription went unimplemented.
By contrast, Puntland State’s campaign against entrenched ISIS cells in the Cal‑Miskad mountains demonstrated what disciplined, locally owned operations can accomplish. Regional forces working with communities and tailored governance commitments reduced space for violent extremists and helped restore basic services—exactly the “hold” logic international planners have advocated. This is not romanticising subnational authority; it is practical politics. Legitimacy on the ground grows out of local buy‑in, not from the top down.
Politics, aid and a fragile federal bargain
Somalia’s governance crisis is largely self‑inflicted. Successive presidents have pursued centralising instincts that undermine the federal compact written into the provisional constitution. The result is electoral logjams, constitutional disputes and cycles of mistrust between Mogadishu and the regions—conditions that stall reforms and feed instability. As the Heritage Institute for Policy Studies put it, “the pursuit of centralised control has consistently undermined trust between the center and periphery, eroded institutional legitimacy, and hindered service delivery.”
Foreign assistance, too, has been a double‑edged sword. International agencies, rightly anxious about fiduciary risk, frequently build parallel systems—own payrolls, procurement channels and project management offices—that bypass Somali institutions. The consequence is predictable: short‑term delivery at the price of long‑term capacity building. Donors now face a strategic choice. Will aid continue to substitute for Somali governance, or will it be retooled to strengthen Somali systems with clear transparency and accountability safeguards?
A practical agenda for the next decade
If Somalia is to move beyond the treadmill of crisis management, political elites and international partners must pivot toward a practical agenda:
- Prioritize localized, FMS‑led security arrangements that are properly trained, paid and accountable—scale up the Darwish model where feasible.
- Implement robust arms management and tracking tied to parliamentary oversight and independent audits.
- Design a pragmatic political roadmap for 2026 that secures a peaceful transition rather than gambling on an unprepared nationwide “one person, one vote” experiment.
- Channel more donor finance through Somali systems while insisting on measurable transparency and anti‑corruption conditions.
- Develop a credible DDR (disarmament, demobilization and reintegration) plan to prevent new waves of armed fragmentation.
Somalia’s recent gains—debt relief, continuing economic engagement and pockets of local stability—are real. But they are fragile gains. The task now is to join the technical fixes to political courage: rebuild state institutions from the ground up, not from the top down. Can Somalia’s leaders and partners choose long‑term statecraft over short‑term control? The coming year will tell whether this moment becomes a turning point or another missed opportunity.
By Ali Musa
Axadle Times international–Monitoring.
