Somalia: federating citizens or clans? Dilemmas in the quest for stability

ABSTRACT

This paper is concerned with the theoretical analysis of the legitimacy challenges faced by the federalist structure of the Somali state, as established with the 2012 constitution. Understanding federalism in Somalia, I argue, is not a simple question of political power distribution: there is also a dichotomy between a predominant European-based conceptualisation of the state and the bulk of often-neglected Somali notions of communitarian organisation, to which the clan is a part. If the decentralised structure of clans in Somali tradition seems to realise a certain convergence with the current federalist project, the dichotomy is rather evident when it comes to the definition of ‘(civil) society’ in Somalia. Thus, in order to assess both the progression of the federalist project, more than four years after its launch, and the factual legitimacy it holds among the Somali population, this paper will focus on the complex relation between state and citizens.

KEYWORDS:

• Citizenship
• federalism
• security
• Somalia
• welfare

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Marco Zoppi http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8201-9183

Notes

1 Some of these political entities are explored in Møller (2010).

2 As a matter of fact, federalism was long debated as potential governance form for newly independent African states in the 1950s and 1960s; Frederick Cooper (2014) provides a valuable historical account of those years in his book Africa in the World. Today, several yet not many African countries present federalist structures of government (a list is available on the website ‘Forum of Federations’, accessible at: http://www.forumfed.org/en).

3 These regions are Hargeisa and Burao (ex-British Somaliland); Benadir, Hirau, Upper Juba, Lower Juba, Migiurtinia and Mudugh, former Italian territories.

4 Renders and Terlinden have valuably described the essence of Somaliland’s statehood (2011, 197): they emphasise the bottom-up approach that has characterised its development.

5 No fewer than 14 national reconciliation processes were held outside Somalia since 1991, leading to ‘the repeated failure of top-down efforts to revive Somalia’s central government’ (Menkhaus 2007, 74). Reconciliatory attempts represented a ‘failure’, as Somalia had proven to be ‘resistant to efforts to revive its central government’ (Menkhaus 2003, 405). According to Hoehne (2010, 34) warlords and political elites involved in the processes presented even a lack of ‘interest in peace or broad based legitimacy in Somalia in the long term’.

6 To start with, the election of the Federal Parliament and the formation of the Boundaries and Federation Commission were delayed. The latter, in particular, meant that prospective federal states like Jubaland and South West took the initiative before the Commission, by preparing a draft constitution and appointing local government organs in defiance of constitutional requirements. Similarly, the missing agreement over resources and revenue has been evident in the recent debate about the award of oil contracts and the revenue-share deal in Puntland (Liban 2014). Moreover, at today the status of Mogadishu and the citizenship question represent other points of criticism.

7 I am thinking, for instance, about the ‘failed state’ discourse, which has been convincingly debunked by Hagmann’ and Hoehne’s article: Failures of the State Failure debate: evidence from the Somali territories.

8 Cf. For example Ioan Lewis’ definition for xeer: ‘Its closest equivalent in English are compact, contract, agreement or treaty in a bilateral sense’ (1999, 161). Awde’s Dictionary and Phrasebook translates it as ‘law’.

9 ‘Mag’ is the Somali term for blood. These groups are also called ‘diya-paying’ with the same meaning (‘diya’ is the Arabic for blood).

10 The political affiliation to a clan is determined by kinship, that is to say the common agnatic descent; therefore, differences in agnatic origins correspond to political divisions.

11 The pertinence of the expression ‘social contract’ for the Somali case will be discussed later in this paper. Evidence on the xeer’s role in promoting stability has been provided, for example, by Lewis 1999, 2008; Samatar 1992; Grande 1999; Gundel 2006.

12 The massive killings in the time of the civil war left clans in the impossibility of paying the appropriate compensations required by xeer norms and of applying other traditional customary conventions on war. In that situation, retaliation became the instrument substituting traditional norms for conflict resolution (Ssereo 2003).

13 I intend to use ‘legitimacy’ here to indicate the support that institutions enjoy among the population, drawing on what Hurrelmann (2007, 17) calls ‘empirical legitimacy’: in addition, in this type of support there is an implicit, ‘normative belief by an actor that a rule or institution ought to be obeyed’ (Hurd 1999, 381).

14 A consolidate literature exists on the role of clan ties in diasporic contexts. Here I will limit myself to the set of reports produced the Open Society Foundation about Somalis living in some of the major European cities, like Amsterdam, Helsinki, Leicester, London, Malmö and Oslo.

15 The main reference is to Banfield’s renowned book The Moral basis of a backward society. Analyzing the life of a village in Southern Italy, he talked about ‘amoral familism’ to indicate the inability to concert activity beyond the immediate family level. Amoral- because ‘the hope of material gain in the short run will be the only motive for concern with public affairs’ (Banfield 1958, 85). It is interesting also to recall what Ekeh wrote in 1975 about the existence of two publics in Africa. The ‘primordial’ public, characterised by ties and sentiments that influence the individual’s public behaviour, which is moral and follows the moral imperatives of the private realm. And the ‘civic’ public, which lacks instead the moral imperatives, for a number of reasons explored by the author: it is consequently amoral, and people seeks to gain from it for the benefit of the moral primordial public. The civic public is the locus of the state and of the ‘Westernized sector’ of African societies in general (Ekeh 1975, 100).

16 Law No. 28 of 22 December 1962 established that citizenship is acquired by any person whose father is a Somali, the latter described as any person who by origin, language and tradition belongs to the Somali nation (Article 3). Somali citizenship could also be acquired by law, renouncing however to any other former citizenship.