In one recent election cycle, a Somali president signed a law extending his own mandate by two years. Soldiers loyal to different factions of the army took up positions in the capital; within days he backed down; within a year he had lost the election. In the cycle that followed, his successor went further. His government pushed amendments to the first four chapters of the Provisional Constitution through the federal parliament without the agreement of the federal member states, restructuring the electoral system around a directly elected presidency and a vote he now intends to contest. The largest federal member state withdrew recognition of the federal government the next day; a second has since taken a similar distance. One president reached for a law. The other reached for the constitution itself. The trouble in both cases was not that a bad man had reached the presidency. It was that a plausible one, elected on a reform ticket, had by year three or four run out of ways to remain relevant except by staying in office, or by rebuilding the office around himself.
Somalia’s seventh presidential election since 2000 was constitutionally due this year and is now the subject of internationally mediated talks in Mogadishu about when it will be held and what form it will take. It is not alone in the pattern its politics has produced. From Nigeria to Iraq to the Democratic Republic of Congo, fragile democracies keep electing leaders who arrive believing that winning is proof of ability, and who leave, or try not to leave, having proved the opposite. Somalia’s version is unusually legible, because six elections in twenty-six years give the arc time to repeat. What it repeats is worth naming.
A pattern with a history
The pattern has not always looked this way. Between 2000 and 2012, three men held the presidency under conditions that made this kind of promise impossible. Abdiqasim Salad Hassan, elected in Arta in August 2000, led an internationally recognised government whose authority withered within months against a warlord coalition, and which controlled only fragments of Mogadishu. Abdullahi Yusuf, who took the transitional presidency in Embagathi in October 2004, resigned in December 2008 after clashes with his prime minister as insurgents advanced on the capital. Sharif Sheikh Ahmed inherited, in January 2009, a government that soon held less than a third of what Yusuf had left him, and by August 2011 had recovered Mogadishu from al-Shabaab with the help of AMISOM. He handed over to an elected successor in 2012. These were not men building the well. They were digging out the ground on which a well could stand. Only from 2012 onwards, once the space existed, did the presidency become a platform from which to promise a country’s transformation.
The Denmark reflex
Call it the Denmark reflex. The leader wins the election and takes the winning itself as evidence that he possesses the capacity his predecessors lacked. He arrives on day one wanting to build Denmark, or Deng Xiaoping’s China, or Lee Kuan Yew’s Singapore, inside a year or two. The destinations shift with the speech. The compression does not. All three names describe horizons, not one-term projects, and certainly not one-year projects. Denmark is centuries of layering; Deng’s opening took two decades; Lee’s Singapore was the compound of a generation of iterated work. A leader who cites any of the three as a plan for his own term has misread what they are.
The Denmark reflex is not a substitute for experience, and Somalia’s presidents have not, on the whole, lacked it. Yusuf was a senior officer under Siad Barre, joined the 1978 coup attempt, spent close to seven years in an Ethiopian prison, led the Somali Salvation Democratic Front through the 1980s, and served as founding president of Puntland from 1998. Abdiqasim had spent eighteen years in Barre’s cabinet. Nur Hassan Hussein, prime minister from 2007, had been attorney general in the last years of that state. The president elected in 2017 had served briefly as prime minister. The president elected in 2012 and returned in 2022 had run a university and led a civic movement through the war years. Office was not the missing ingredient. The missing ingredient was the mindset.
The office and the institution
The mistake is to confuse the office with the institution. A president who has never worked inside a foreign ministry picks up the phone and calls his counterpart directly, without first consulting his own prime minister, his own foreign minister, his own permanent secretary, or his own ambassador on post. The counterpart answers politely. When the counterpart’s government later moves to act on what was discussed, its ambassador in Mogadishu is asked to confirm the Somali position. The ambassador calls the Somali foreign ministry. The ministry does not know. The permanent secretary does not know. The desk officer does not know. In some cases the ministry does not know the call was made.
What the receiving government learns from this exercise is not that the Somali president has a strong view. It is that the Somali institutions were not in the room when the view was formed, and cannot confirm it now. No country invests in a state whose foreign ministry is bypassed by its own head of state. The institution is there to serve the president. A president who has never seen one work does not know that,does not use it, and will not be told, because the ministry will absorb the damage in silence and try to fix it. He mistakes the silence for success.
A president who understands institutions makes a different kind of call, and often does not make it at all. Somalia is a parliamentary system. Executive authority runs through the prime minister, and the foreign policy machinery sits inside his cabinet. A president with an idea does not lift the receiver. He speaks to the prime minister. The prime minister engages the minister of foreign affairs. The minister engages the permanent secretary, the director general, and the desk officer with the file. The civil service brings the record of what has already been discussed with the country in question, what has been settled, what remains open, and what a new intervention would disturb. The minister returns to the prime minister with an assessment. The prime minister returns to the president with advice.
Only if the matter warrants it does the president take the call, and when he does, he takes it knowing what the country he is calling has already asked for, already refused, and already committed to. Most matters do not warrant a presidential call at all. The ministry can carry them at working level. A side meeting at the UN General Assembly can carry them. Reserving the presidential call for the moments that actually require it is itself a discipline of institution-building. The president who bypasses this process is not being decisive. He is destroying the country’s continuity of memory, one impulsive call at a time, and he is doing it because he believes his election was proof that he did not need the memory in the first place.
A country is a well being dug. Every president inherits the digging. Some understand this and continue it, so that whoever comes to draw water in twenty years has a well to draw from. Others arrive with a shovel and think they can complete in one afternoon what fifty years of digging did not complete. They dig faster, not deeper, and when the water does not come they blame the country.
Being handed the presidency is not evidence that you know what a state is. It is being dropped by helicopter onto the roof of a building you have never entered. You can see the city from the penthouse. What you do not know is where the electrical panel is, or which floor the archives are on, or who the doorman is and what he knows. The building is not the view from the top. The building is what the people inside it are doing right now, and the president who has never walked its floors does not know them, does not know their work, and does not know what they can do for him if he uses them.
Not every contender fits the pattern. One serving regional president in the current field entered politics as a federal member of parliament, served in the federal cabinet while still sitting in the House, and then returned to his region to win the regional presidency, and to win it a second time. He has worked the machinery from the federal side and from the regional side, and has stood before voters, and been returned. Whether that arc alone would make him a builder rather than a drinker only the federal office, if he reaches it, can answer.
There is one Somali precedent worth naming. Aden Abdulle Osman lost the presidency in July 1967 to his own former prime minister, accepted the result, walked out of office, and lived in Mogadishu until his death in 2007 without attempting to return. He is the only Somali head of state who refused to identify the office with himself, and the only one the country, six decades later, still names with reverence. The lesson has been available the whole time. It has simply not been re-elected.
What the ballot is asked to see
Six elections in twenty-six years have now produced two clear cases of the same reflex, and a longer list of near misses. The fragile democracies named at the top of this piece are watching similar arcs on their own timelines. The diagnostic that travels is not about post-office behaviour, which the voter cannot inspect before voting. It is about the campaign itself. The candidate who promises to make the country Denmark in a term is describing a horizon he cannot deliver. The candidate who admits that the building takes longer than his time is describing the work honestly. Somalia has had one of each. The country knows the difference. It has been waiting for the second.
Somalia does not need a president who is Deng in a year or Lee in two. It needs one who accepts that he will not be either, and who is content to be a worker who dug before the well was needed. The country has had such a president. It has not forgotten him. It has been waiting for the second.
Awale Kullane is a former Ambassador of Somalia to China, former Deputy Permanent Representative to the United Nations, and former Chief of Staff in the Office of the Prime Minister. This piece is A version of his longer essay, Before the Well Is Dug.