Tafelberg Short: Somalia - Fixing Africa's Most Failed State
By Greg Mills, John Peter Pham and David Kilcullen
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About this ebook
Greg Mills
Dr Greg Mills heads the Johannesburg-based Brenthurst Foundation, which was established in 2005 by the Oppenheimer family to strengthen African economic performance. He holds degrees from the University of Cape Town and Lancaster University, and he was the national director of the South African Institute of International Affairs from 1996 to 2005. He has directed numerous reform projects in African presidencies (including in 2019 and 2020, for example, with the governments in Ghana, Mozambique, Ethiopia, Kenya, Lesotho, Malawi, Somaliland and South Africa); he has sat on the Danish Africa Commission and on the African Development Bank’s High-Level Panel on Fragile States. He has also served on four assignments to Afghanistan with NATO as the adviser to the commander. A member of the advisory board of the Royal United Services Institute, he is the author of the best-selling books Why Africa is Poor: And What Africans Can Do about It, Africa’s Third Liberation: The New Search for Prosperity and Jobs (with Jeffrey Herbst) and Making Africa Work: A Handbook (with Jeffrey Herbst, Olusegun Obasanjo and Dickie Davis). In 2018, he completed a second stint as a visiting fellow at Cambridge University, completing a book on the state of African democracy, which was published in 2019 as Democracy Works: Rewriting Politics to Africa’s Advantage (with Olusegun Obasanjo, Jeffrey Herbst and Tendai Biti). The Asian Aspiration: Why and How Africa Should Emulate Asia (with Olusegun Obasanjo, Hailemariam Desalegn and Emily van der Merwe) followed in 2020, which identifies the relevant lessons from Asia’s development and growth story. His leisure interests include cycling and motorsport. A grandson of the pre-war Grand Prix driver Billy Mills, Greg received his national colours for motorsport in 2016. In 2019, he headed the first South African team to participate at Le Mans, driving a Bentley GT3, and he was appointed as the president of the Western Province Motor Club in Cape Town in the same year. He has written eight books on southern African motorsport for various charities, the last being Saloons, Bars and Boykies: Legends of South African Motorsport.
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Tafelberg Short - Greg Mills
Somalia – Fixing Africa’s Most Failed State
Greg Mills, J. Peter Pham and David Kilcullen
Tafelberg
Chapter 01Somalia: the archetypal failed state
Dotted-LineIn 1941, Conrad Norton and Uys Krige wrote of the ‘White City of Mogadiscio, Capital of Italian Somaliland, [a] town won by man from the desert. . . . Literally without a tree, a shrub or a bush, Mogadiscio clings to the edge of the desert, strikingly picturesque with its snow-white buildings, many of great antiquity, its slender white towers, minarets and cupolas, and its rose-red Arab mosque. Towards evening, the town is invested with the most delicate pastel colours, and the encircling red sand-dunes glow like rubies lit by an inner fire.’¹
Today, the picture is very different.²
As one measure, the language associated with the Horn of Africa country of Somalia (from which the self-declared Republic of Somaliland broke away in 1991) is virtually uniformly negative. It is usually deemed to have been ‘destroyed’, is ‘failed’ or ‘ravaged’, ‘a territory without a state’ or ‘stateless’. British Foreign Secretary William Hague referred to Somalia as ‘the world’s most failed state’.³ Mogadishu is ‘Africa’s most wounded city’, the capital of a country where ‘descriptions of chaos, hunger and anarchy’ abound, with problems ranging from ‘religionist authoritarianism’ to ‘clans’ to ‘foreign interests’.⁴
To take a somewhat more quantitative benchmark, by 2012 Somalia had been listed for five straight years at the bottom of the ‘Failed States Index’ published annually by the Fund for Peace and Foreign Policy magazine.⁵ Indeed, it has become the archetypal failed state,⁶ a caricature of misery, dearth and excess to which photojournalists travel in search of images of destruction, collapse, human suffering and helplessness. And it’s not hard to find them.
Parts of Mogadishu today look like those pictures one sees in sepia of Ypres or Amiens or Stalingrad or Berlin. In the old part of town, in the area around the once-prestigious Lido Beach, the shells of buildings, pockmarked carcasses of war, form monuments to more than two decades of fighting, most recently between the African Union’s peacekeepers (known widely as Amisom – the AU Mission in Somalia) and the militant jihadist Al-Shabaab movement. The roads are unpaved, less a path than bucking bronco, testament to decades of no investment; there is rubbish everywhere, smouldering underneath the human and goat scavengers, with plastic bags flying and lying around. The grandstand at Tarabunka, where the former dictator Mohamed Siad Barre took the salute of his armed forces, is a tangled mess of concrete and reinforced steel, discarded car chassis and panels, and pathetic refugee shelters and shops.
Image797.JPGSomalia has more than 1.2 million refugees, including 300,000 in Mogadishu alone, among them these in Camp 77.
And the locals say things have really improved recently.
On the western outskirts of the city there are thousands of refugees crammed into Sonak and Camp 77, enveloping the once-proud Gaheyr University facilities. When one turns off towards the old stadium (now a camp for some of the 300,000 internally displaced people in Mogadishu, from more than 1.2 million countrywide) just after Village Restaurant where two suicide bombers killed themselves and a dozen civilians in an attack shortly after the election by parliament of a new president in September 2012, the Bakara market complex beckons, a site for regular Al-Shabaab suicide bombings and assassinations. Regardless, it remains a hive of commercial activity. People go about their business on foot and donkey carts, peddling petrol, fussing outside brightly decorated premises advertising building material and auto spares, with women constantly moving in brightly coloured scarves and veils like flares in the dusty gloom.
Image808.JPGYears of war have placed Somalia at the bottom of the ‘Failed States Index’ for five straight years, and the effects are visible everywhere.
But Somalia is also said to be a ‘place of great promise’, one of those ‘opportunities in a lifetime,’ as a Mogadishu businessman has put it, ‘when you can start at the bottom, all over again’. It has bountiful fisheries, as befits a country with a 3,300km coastline, the longest in continental Africa, now that the pirates have forced those fishing illegally to think again. It has a great Dubai-like location, ‘a portal’ between the Gulf and Arabia and Africa. It exported a record 4.2 million head of livestock in 2010,⁷ mostly to the Gulf and Saudi Arabia through Berbera (in Somaliland) and Bossaso (in Puntland), and has the potential for as much as 110 billion barrels of oil.⁸
And it is remarkable