1. The Porcupine Dilemma: Governance and Transition in Somalia
- Author:
- Ahmed I. Samatar
- Publication Date:
- 06-2007
- Content Type:
- Journal Article
- Journal:
- Bildhaan: An International Journal of Somali Studies
- Institution:
- Macalester College
- Abstract:
- As of this writing, too far from “civil happiness,” Somalis continue sliding deeper into a fallen time—pitiful victims of their own follies and an ill-informed, if not manipulative, international and regional system. More precisely, the fight over the state in the past decade and a half has been at once violent and so disabling that, in the eyes of the rest of the world, Somalis have become the paradigmatic embodiment of self-inflicted politicide. Dismayingly, though the Somali state institutions are no more, the contestants wage their battles as if the prize is just waiting to be picked up. Oblivious, then, to the fact that the state and governance are more than the sum of capricious self-promotion and claims of Potemkin political appellations and appointments, the aggressively ambitious bestow a vulgar concreteness to Jorge Luis Borges' metaphor of the condition of “two bald men fighting over a comb.” The ultimate costs of the death of the state and subsequent communal strife are a withering of the national civic identity and spirit and, therefore, a descent into a form of moronic existence. Six instantiations of this condition are: (a) disunity exemplified by some in the northern Somali Republic (Somaliland) calling for a separate sovereignty in that region; (b) an essentialization of clanist maneuvers and mischief that have proven to be incapable of producing legitimate and competent leaders fit for the challenges of the epoch, let alone bring forth workable institutions for the immediate juncture; (c) the degeneration of Mogadishu from the once breezy, relatively cosmopolitan nerve-center of the post-colonial order to a dilapidated hell's gate overwhelmed by new deadly conflagrations and mountains of illdisposed filth; (d) a deepening socioeconomic impoverishment, barely assuaged by remittances from relatives in the diaspora, decline in educational opportunities and standards, and deteriorating public health, including the return of polio; (e) an acute national vulnerability to easy bamboozlement, and now direct military intervention or invasion by foreign actors, particularly neighboring Ethiopia; and (f) a mixture of incredulity and contempt on the part of the larger global community. To be sure, these negative attributes (and many more) make up the defining face of Somali reality. But it is also vital to note that, among the paradoxes of the current sharp cut in time (the meaning of civil war), numerous ordinary women and men, in every zone of the country, have taken it upon themselves to address the immediate concerns of their families and neighborhoods, the virus of sectarian cabals, and, commensurately, keep the candle of civic values flickering for a future undergirded by a peaceful and legitimate and competent governance.
- Political Geography:
- Ethiopia and Somalia