There’s a Logic to Somali politics
To not ‘sell a single foot of Somalia’s territory’ we’re often told, yet reality paints a starkly different picture every time. To the observer unfamiliar with a deeper conceptual engagement of ‘politics’ beyond its ordinary meanings and manifestations, feelings of confusion and disillusionment mount as the true reality of what it means to ‘protect Somalia’s sovereignty’ begins to take shape. However the routine, cyclical engagement with this contraction - in a credulous and dangerously sterile manner, even amongst our ‘analysts’ - points to a deeper problem: the failure to recognise the organising logic of a system that produces distinct outcomes, almost always to the detriment of the Horn’s most dispossessed.
Yes Mr President! Somalia mustn't cede ground…
Oh no, Mr President, what are you doing?...
How could he do this?... Has he lost his mind?...
‘Promises’ of safeguarding the interests of the people too often materialise into antithetical realities, rendering any critique of such assurances as mere ‘platitudes’, ‘lies’ or in the hysterical fashion aforementioned as deeply insufficient and shortsighted. It isn’t simply a matter of missteps or misplaced intentions that can explain the dramatic oscillation between calls for the unwavering defence of Somalia’s national sovereignty, and political decisions that often contradict such declarations. There is instead a coherent logic to this system that has evolved historically and reproduced itself (shaped by both local and global dynamics), with an overarching objective of intensifying processes that concretise Somalia’s relationship of dependence to the world-system and global capital. How useful then is it to engage political struggles as merely personal or tribal feuds?
And it is from this analytical vantage point that demystifies the place within which a Hassan Sheikh or an Ahmed Madobe sit, as part of a broader constellation of compradors whose legitimacies as political leaders cannot be rooted in a truly national-popular project, constituted by a transformative, redistributive social agenda. So how else can we come to explain their relevance as political leaders? And ultimately what is this system in which, contrary to the established narrative, renders decisions taken by the likes of HSM, Madobe and their likes as entirely logical and coherent?
‘The corruptionist…draws his wealth from his associations with the established political power holders and the foreign masters of the system - the representatives (especially of the CIA) of the imperialist states or of the oligopolies. He operates as a highly compensated intermediary, profiting from an actual political rent that is the essential source of his accumulated wealth. The corruptionist adheres to no system or moral values whatsoever’ (Amin, 2013)
As scholars have shown historically, successive post-colonial regimes presided over a ‘disarticulated’ economy of which its principal features were (Samatar, 1989);
The underdevelopment of Somalia’s productive forces.
Contestation amongst various factions of the ruling elite towards private appropriation of the state’s resources.
In briefly unravelling the conditions that gave rise to the latter we can then come to understand the prevailing organising logic to Somali politics today.
When scholars explore the causes for the state’s disintegration in 1991, they often cite the loss of control over the ‘political marketplace’ - a contested environment in which ‘...public office became kleptocratic, patronage became competitive and monetised, and political services including violence were put up to sale for the highest bidder’ (De waal, 2020). The market logic of state politics largely stemmed from the ‘disarticulation’ of Somalia’s economy, in which the absence of regenerative domestic regimes of surplus creation (as a result of the depleted productive capability within the Horn’s key agro-pastoral sector), rendered the state itself as the principal site of accumulation with its vast reserves of capital stemming from the aid regime.
The sort of corruption witnessed by the end of the 1980s was such that in spite of ‘skyrocketing’ unemployment and inflation, dysfunctioning of social institutions etc., responses were that of ‘politics of the belly’ and the ‘shameless’ consumption of the state resources by a faction of the ruling class (Kapteijns, 2012). This does not occur in isolation, but rather inextricably tied to the debilitating structural adjustment interventions in the early 1980s that happened to increase Somalia’s dependence on food aid at a rate of 31% per annum, ‘trade liberalisation’ that would see 75% of earnings from Banana exports leave the country, amongst other crippling projects that oversaw the systemic disempowerment of the primary producer (Chossudovsky, 1993 and Samatar, 1993). The resulting political landscape was thus not an aberration, but rather a direct outcome of these larger, structural shifts in Somalia’s integration within the global capitalist system.
Thus, when we consider the extortionate amounts of aid Somalia was subjected to in this period, part of the loss of control over the political marketplace created by the state stemmed from the doomed logic of attempting to ‘establish a patrimonial system’ (using aid flows) ‘wholly disproportionate’ to the surpluses of the productive economy (De waal, 2007). In other words, with aid becoming the only significant contributor of domestic revenues despite no betterment in living conditions or productivity, outrage soon compounded into social unrest amongst the pauperised masses, and opportunism amongst those looking to unseat the Barre regime to rent-seek from the cash-cow that was ‘international aid’.
It becomes clear what the objective of successive post-civil war political settlements came to be and hence the logic of contemporary politics in the Horn: achieving some amicable arrangement between the material interests of the ruling state, business and traditional elite classes, whose objectives remained achieving control over the flow of capital in Somalia’s most important sites of accumulation - the rentier state, import-export industries, the logistics economy etc., as Elder (2022) explores in depth. What transpired was a collective understanding that ‘peacebuilding’ and ‘state-building’ represented ‘lucrative projects’ and as Menkhaus (2018) succinctly details, the organising logic of today’s federal government ultimately reflects a ‘’limited access order’, an elite division of spoils in which rival political cartels control and divert financial flows through the rentier state’.
Hence widespread hysteria surrounding recent tensions between various players within the federal setup ultimately stem from a misled engagement of the political order routinely abstracted from the structural reality. Such struggles should not be viewed as signs of ‘national discord’ or arbitrary feuds amongst incompetent bureaucrats, but rather as an intra-ruling class disagreement over the terms through which state power and capital is appropriated. Such struggles cannot be divorced from the interests of foreign states that operate as sub-imperial entities (e.g. Ethiopia, Kenya, Turkey, UAE, Qatar etc.) determined to preserve a certain balance of power for specific ends - the protection of trade routes, resource extraction and security interests.
What then do the professed ideals of sovereignty really mean today expressed by actors entrenched in a system that perpetuates a neocolonial political order? This dissonance between the routine, cynical invoking of ‘national sovereignty’ amongst mere intermediaries in a state apparatus committed to doing the exact opposite, and the structural reality aforementioned, should become the principle contradiction that informs the day-day engagement of politics in the Horn.
And thus to some of our ‘political analysts’ whose commentaries instead remain unfortunately grounded in a methodological individualist framing offering a hollow engagement of these structural realities, I ask: what is Mogadishu, Garowe and Kismaayo’s notion of protecting Somalia’s sovereignty, if not the securing of elite control over national resources, as arbitered and at times even directed by foreign powers, who maintain sight over the Horn as an environment of immense strategic significance? Is the political landscape such that ‘struggles’ at the government level cannot be understood except as conflicts over the terms that condition participation in the rent-seeking system, and competition over access to international financial flows?
We must then ask, what is the fate of a system in the absence of any concerted challenge against these entrenched interests? How might this derail efforts towards constructing a truly transformative social agenda that doesn’t compromise what ‘sovereignty’ truly entails? The critique of Somalia’s political trajectory all in all requires a shift of focus away from attributing importance to individuals because of their mere names, personalities and/or lineages, or the hyperfixation on ‘moments’ of crises divorced from history, and instead an empathic confrontation of the underlying structures of power that perpetuate conditions of social death. There is indeed a logic to Somali politics. ‘What is to be done?’ becomes a task of dismantling a system and its logic that has only served to fasten the mechanisms which serve to hold a people captive within the cycles of exploitation and underdevelopment. And henceforth, imagining a just future for Somalia begins. In sha Allah.
Bibliography
Amin, S., 2013. The implosion of contemporary capitalism. NYU Press.
Chossudovsky, M., 1993. The IMF’s role in the creation of famines in Somalia. Third World Resurgence No. 251/252, July/August 2011, pp 23-24 (The IMF's role in the creation of famines in Somalia)
De Waal, A., 2007. Class and power in a stateless Somalia. Social Science Research Council, 20, pp.1-14.
De Waal, A., 2020. Somalia’s disassembled state: clan unit formation and the political marketplace. Conflict, Security & Development, 20(5), pp.561-585.
Elder, C., 2022. Logistics contracts and the political economy of state failure: evidence from Somalia. African Affairs, 121(484), pp.395-417.
Kapteijns, L., 2012. Clan cleansing in Somalia: The ruinous legacy of 1991. University of Pennsylvania Press.
Menkhaus, K., 2018. Elite bargains and political deals project: Somalia case study. DFID Stabilisation Unit.
Samatar, A.I., 1989. The state and rural transformation in Northern Somalia, 1884-1986. Univ of Wisconsin Press.
Samatar, A.I., 1993. Structural adjustment as development strategy? Bananas, boom, and poverty in Somalia. Economic Geography, 69(1), pp.25-43.