Issue No. 407

Some policy advice for Somalia's new president: If you build it, they will come

Somalia’s Federal Government is steadily taking shape around President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud (HSM), who has moved quickly to appoint a core team of advisors and name his Prime Minister, Hamza Barre, just two days ago. Formation of a cabinet will follow in the coming weeks, probably accompanied by a reshuffle of senior security service officials. Foreign and domestic observers alike are already hard at work interpreting these early nominations, feverishly trying to ascertain what kind of leader HSM is likely to be and the character of the administration he intends to build. 

Based on HSM’s previous term of office and his profile as an opposition politician, some features of his emerging government are not difficult to predict. The President is experienced in the art of governance: an accomplished technocrat with a firm grasp of policy. Despite a Provisional Constitution that awards executive supremacy to the Prime Minister and his cabinet, HSM is likely to assert himself as a hands-on leader, serving as head of state, chief strategist, and supreme commander of the security forces. This has its benefits and its drawbacks. A president who has a fine grasp of policy is a great advantage for a fragile country like Somalia. On the flipside, there is a risk that HSM will become entangled in the minutiae of day-to-day decision making and lose sight of the overarching strategic direction of the state. 

HSM is a pragmatist and a good listener. These are important qualities if you intend to consult widely and make the best policy choices. Defining an effective and efficient division of labour between the President and Council of Ministers has historically proven problematic. HSM has already taken an important step in the right direction by appointing a Prime Minister from his own party, whom he has mentored and cultivated over many years in politics together. As a ‘policy president’, he will also need to have an equally competent and skilled team of advisors around him, as well as a mature council of ministers and a capable Policy Unit.

This will allow him to translate his ideas quickly and reduce the time between formulation and implementation. If HSM can harness the best and brightest, he stands a good chance in making progress on security sector reform, constitutional review, and rebuilding the federation.

So far, the president has made a few good appointments. Crucially, he has appointed an exceptionally capable figure to the National Security Advisor docket – Hussein Sheikh Ali, as well as some seasoned intellects to oversee constitution-making and federal affairs. His special envoy for humanitarian affairs is a highly respected and fearless political ally with a reputation for getting things done. But these are still early days and HSM’s ship of state requires a great deal of repair work before it will be sufficiently seaworthy to navigate the turbulent and tempestuous environment of Somalia and the Horn of Africa.

For a start, the new president has inherited a politicised, partisan, and inept bureaucracy. The Nabad iyo Nolol (N&N) party of former President Farmaajo spent the past five years forging a model of governance that mirrored the one-party rule of 1970s Somalia: a ruthlessly centralised authoritarian system. Hassan Sheikh is a democrat, and his vision of state-building is consultative and cooperative, not exclusionist or coercive, but eradicating N&N’s insidious influence and replacing it with a culture of consultative, inclusive politics will take time. In the meantime, it is almost certain that – absent major changes – HSM’s reforms will be subverted and sabotaged by N&N remnants from within his own government.

A rapid, extensive purge of Farmaajo holdovers is all but inconceivable and, in any case, it could prove counterproductive. But the new president nevertheless needs to  move quickly to stamp his authority on government by taking control of key state and security institutions. HSM's immediate appointment of a new intelligence chief was an urgent matter of national security, and he cannot long postpone the replacement of other top security officials, including his Chief of Defence Staff and Police Commissioner, both of whom are tainted by their underwhelming past performance and their unquestioning loyalty to the Farmaajo regime. The president also needs to appoint a trained and competent security official to assume the role of NISA deputy, to give some heft to his appointment of the competent but inexperienced director general, Mahad Salad. Deeper bureaucratic reform will take much longer: Somalia’s institutional stability requires the establishment of a depoliticised civil service and public servants who are able to work under successive administrations – a long term endeavour that HSM can set in motion, but not realistically hope to complete during his term of office. 

Somalia’s donor partners have generally welcomed the FGS change of leadership, but they are less likely to embrace the practicalities of HSM’s reform agenda. Donor programming cycles are totally divorced from the ebb and flow of Somali politics, leaving a host of projects and capacity building initiatives commissioned by the previous N&N administration in limbo. Centralised programmes that greased the wheels of federal government at the expense of the Federal Member States (FMS) and other stakeholders are no longer fit for purpose. The HSM government will find it difficult to work with the small army of foreign consultants and Somali technocrats seconded by donors to ministries and key departments, because many had progressively become ensnared by the N&N partisan agenda and actively worked against the FMS and Farmaajo’s political rivals. Not surprisingly, many of these putative ‘experts’, sensing the writing on the wall, are sniffing around for new jobs, shopping their CVs around an international aid community with a notoriously short-term memory. 

In the same vein, some of Somalia’s international partners are likely to fight tooth and nail to defend obsolete, ineffective strategies and initiatives in which they have become heavily invested – politically, financially or both. The dangerously incompetent Somalia Transition Plan and its international corollary, the ATMIS Concept of Operations, are two hopelessly ill-conceived relics to which the African Union, United Nations and certain Western governments exhibit a fetishistic degree of loyalty.

The new president would be wrong to take a scorched earth approach to the policies of his predecessor, eliminating all traces of Nabad iyo Nolol as a matter of principle. But neither should he and his administration be browbeaten or cajoled into retaining obsolete, ineffective, and hugely wasteful projects to which their international partners have become selfishly or irrationally attached. On the contrary: if the new Somali government charts a persuasive path into the future, anchored in cogent, realistic and reflective policy frameworks, international partners will follow. HSM must not be afraid to lead.

The Somali Wire Team