By Bashir M. Sheikh Ali
For most of human history, people lived in small communities where survival depended largely on family, kinship and custom. They settled disputes, protected one another and organized social and economic life through personal relationships and shared obligations. As societies grew in size and diversity, however, some responsibilities became too large and too complex to be carried by kinship alone. Governments emerged to organize public authority, and public institutions developed to perform essential public functions on behalf of society as a whole.
Today, nearly every aspect of daily life depends on institutions. We buy homes from strangers, entrust our savings to banks, send our children to schools, rely on medicines produced by foreign companies and enter contracts with people we just met. Millions of individuals cooperate every day because functioning public institutions establish and enforce the rules that make such cooperation possible.
Institutions make modern life possible by performing three broad public functions. They deliver services to individuals, provide collective services on which society depends and organize and restrain the exercise of public power. The first consists of services delivered directly to a particular person. A citizen obtains a passport, registers ownership of property or asks a court to enforce a contract. A patient enters a public hospital expecting diagnosis and treatment. In each case, the institution deals with a particular person, document, dispute or application.
An institution may continue to process applications, issue documents, hear cases, treat patients and teach children while still failing in its public purpose. Failure occurs when access depends less on legal entitlement and more on influence, personal connections or informal payments. If a passport or business licensing office does not process an application according to law, a person may be unable to travel or open a business without finding an influential intermediary or paying a bribe. If a land registry is unreliable, a buyer may lose the property or spend years in litigation. The consequences are immediate and personal: lost opportunities, denied rights and wasted time.
The second category consists of services that no individual receives alone but that everyone depends upon. For example, a person may never call the police, yet depends on them to maintain public order, prevent and investigate crime, protect life and property and create the security in which communities and businesses can function without private armed forces. People also depend on road authorities to keep ambulances, buses, traders and families moving; on revenue institutions to fund schools, roads and hospitals; and on courts to create confidence that contracts will be honored, property protected and violence punished. These benefits are spread across society and often become visible only when they are lost.
Institutions providing collective services begin to fail when those who control them signal, for example by appointing an incompetent but well-connected person, that serving the public is not the institution’s governing purpose. Officials may still serve those in power when required, but the same signal teaches them that public authority may also be used for their own purposes. In policing, the result is officers who abuse, intimidate or extort the public rather than protect it, shops that close early and businesses forced to rely on private security to operate.
The third function is to organize and restrain government itself. Constitutions and laws distribute authority among the legislature, executive and judiciary and among different levels of government. Courts perform two related roles. They resolve disputes between private parties, or between a citizen and the state, and they review the exercise of public power by determining whether presidents, parliaments, ministries and regional administrations have acted within their legal authority. They also resolve disputes between branches or levels of government. This second role is less visible, but it allows disputes over power to be resolved as legal questions rather than through political confrontation or force. When courts cannot perform it, unresolved disputes over public authority repeatedly become political crises.
Institutions therefore do far more than process paperwork. They create the conditions under which people can live with confidence that their rights, property and personal security will be protected. They also organize public authority, limit the exercise of public power and provide lawful means of resolving disputes within government.
This is why institutional failure concerns everyone, including those who never work for government. When institutions fail, individuals, families and communities are forced to mitigate the consequences where they can by turning to relatives, elders, Al-Shabaab or private providers. But some public functions cannot be replaced privately: only public institutions can issue passports and business licenses, register legal title or resolve disputes with binding authority. Institutions are not remote structures belonging to ministers or civil servants. They belong to the public.
Once this is understood, the central question becomes unavoidable: are Somalia’s institutions organized to perform these public functions, or are they organized around purposes largely unrelated to the functions they were created to perform?
Institutions do not fail merely because they occasionally fall short of their intended purpose. Human beings are fallible, resources are limited and no institution performs perfectly. Well-functioning institutions are designed with mechanisms to detect, correct and prevent mistakes. They begin to fail when those mechanisms are absent or ineffective. Failure becomes structural when another objective displaces the public purpose for which the institution exists.
An institution may become a source of patronage instead of public service, an instrument for rewarding loyalty instead of solving public problems or a means of distributing opportunities among political constituencies instead of performing its public function. Political inclusion and social balance may themselves be legitimate objectives. The problem arises when they become the primary principle by which an institution is organized.
An immigration office organized primarily to satisfy political demands cannot administer immigration laws fairly and consistently. A land registry organized primarily to reward political allies cannot provide secure and reliable property rights. A court organized around political interests rather than law cannot administer justice impartially or credibly resolve disputes over the exercise of public power. When courts lose that second function, political disputes are settled not by law but by whoever can exert the greatest pressure.
The institution does not disappear. Its offices remain open and appear to function, but personal influence fills the space where procedures established by law should govern. The outward appearance of government exists even though the institution’s public purpose has never determined how it operates.
The central question in governance is therefore not whether one minister is more capable than another or one administration more honest than its predecessor. It is whether public institutions are organized and operated to perform the functions the law assigns to them. If they are organized around other objectives, changing individuals will not materially change institutional outcomes because those outcomes are determined by the system’s underlying design.
Somalia did not begin as a country wholly indifferent to institutions. After independence, ministries administered public affairs, courts resolved disputes, schools educated children and hospitals treated patients. The system was imperfect, and political influence, clan considerations and patronage certainly existed, but public offices remained connected to identifiable legal responsibilities.
By the time the government collapsed in 1990, however, it did not take with it a functioning institutional order trusted by the public. Many state institutions had already ceased to serve their public purposes and had become instruments of coercion, patronage or political control. Somali society nevertheless did not cease functioning. Markets reopened, communities organized security, elders resolved disputes and businesses expanded, demonstrating an extraordinary capacity for resilience. That resilience was real, but it came at enormous human cost: millions lived without dependable security, justice, education or health care.
The limits of that resilience were unavoidable. Families, businesses and local communities could educate children, protect neighborhoods and purchase private services. They could not provide equal access to justice, maintain public security across the country, regulate commerce, protect the country’s borders or deliver public services consistently nationwide.
The task after 2000 was therefore not simply to establish another government. It was to build public institutions capable of performing the functions for which governments exist. The immediate political problem, however, was how to constitute that government. Communities emerging from civil war needed a settlement that would distribute power and reassure competing groups that none would monopolize the new state. Political representation therefore became the overriding objective because, without an accepted settlement, there could be no government from which rebuilding could begin.
Those arrangements were necessary, but they answered only one question: who governs? Institutions answer another: how are public functions performed? Somalia’s difficulty began when the answer to the first question became the organizing principle for the second.
Public institutions are defined by the functions they perform, not by the communities their employees represent. Representation may properly influence the composition of political leadership. But when it becomes the primary organizing principle of public institutions, without regard to the competence and capacity required to perform their functions, it undermines both their performance and their legitimacy.
As political accommodation displaced institutional purpose, public appointments increasingly became currency in political bargaining. A position could be offered in exchange for political support, reassigned to settle a dispute or used to compensate an ally whose interests had been disturbed elsewhere. One appointment could therefore trigger several others as political actors traded offices and favors among themselves. The question was no longer, “What does this institution require?” but, “What political support can this position buy?” Competence became incidental to the transaction.
Over time, appointment by appointment, this pattern became entrenched and institutional decline became self-reinforcing. As public services deteriorated, citizens increasingly relied on relatives, patrons and personal connections to obtain what institutions should provide. That reliance strengthened the political value of those networks and reinforced the use of public appointments to reward and maintain them, further weakening institutional performance.
The result is a paradox. Somalia possesses many of the formal institutions associated with a modern state: ministries, agencies, commissions, courts and public authorities. Yet many struggle to perform the functions for which they were created because political bargaining, representation and personal influence shaped how they were organized and continue to govern how they operate. The institutional forms exist, but their public purpose has never become their organizing principle.
Since 2000, Somalia’s political debate has understandably focused on constitutions, federalism, elections, power-sharing and political reconciliation because they determine who governs and how authority is distributed. But they do not answer an equally fundamental question: how should public institutions be organized to perform the functions for which they exist?
Institutions earn legitimacy through performance. When public purpose does not govern how they are organized, services become unreliable, disputes remain unresolved and citizens turn to relatives, patrons and intermediaries to obtain what institutions should provide impartially. Government continues to exist, but its institutions become collections of offices rather than organizations devoted to public purposes.
This helps explain why Somalia’s political crises recur so frequently. Each new agreement redistributes power, and each new administration promises a fresh beginning, but the underlying logic of public institutions remains unchanged. Offices continue to be organized through political bargaining rather than around the functions they exist to perform, while the institutions that should limit public power and resolve disputes within government remain unable to do so.
The challenge facing Somalia is therefore not simply to establish another government. It is to replace governance through personal relationships and political bargains with governance through public institutions organized around their public functions. Until that occurs, political agreements may change governments, but they will not change governance.
Bashir M. Sheikh Ali
Email: bsali@yahoo.com
————–
The author is a Nairobi-based Somali-American lawyer and governance and constitutional analyst. The views expressed are his own and do not reflect those of any organization with which he is affiliated.
