Institution Building for Somali Progressives

[Deeq A.]

The Italian and English colonies in Somalia had one unique feature that separated them from the rest of the colonies in Africa, and that was these colonies never became self-sustaining, meaning the homeland had to give constant financial aid to keep the colonies afloat even though the colonizers attempted to create self-sustaining colonial administrations that were able to finance themselves from the extractive agricultural economy but due to combination of poor soil, poor mineral resources, low population density and hostile environment they were unable to do so, but those financial losses were offset by the geo-strategic importance of horn of Africa.

This budgetary aid was to continue even after the independence with Italy and Britain alone covering 30% of our government budget with rest coming from other countries and only tiny fraction of the government revenue coming from domestic sources. Mohamed Osman Omar long time government insider would later on remark in his memoir about this period saying:

Regarding the aid received by Somalia, there was an attitude of easy-come-easy-go. No one cared to invest such funds in production. Government just relaxed and consumed these funds. Anyone in a position to handle funds siphoned off as much as possible for himself, his relatives, his friends and acquaintances. National interests took a back seat.

This laid back attitude about reforming the colonial economy with its exploitative and ecologically destructive Banana based agricultural economy on top of a financially unsustainable government with bloated (and corrupt) patronage system would only serve to perpetuate what many Africans would later on term as “neo-colonialism” but in our case at least, neither of our former colonizers had any large-scale interest in Somalia, we easily could’ve reformed our society and perhaps designed form of governance that was more suitable for our needs but our national leaders perhaps blinded by the possibilities of conquering political power saw fit to perpetuate the colonial economy, and the so called “revolutionary” government would unearth the long dead fascist militarism with even greater zest to loot and corrupt, although he was a quite skilled in playing the cold war rivalries to attract untold amount of military aid, but he invested it in the most unproductive ways, creating the largest army in East Africa and with the end of the cold war that aid money he took for granted came to an abrupt end, with it the house of cards he built came crashing down, and the highly armed security apparatus he came to rely on for his survival saw themselves without their pay and his generals and colonels (who would later on become the warlords) would only do what the tyrant was apt at doing; divide the nation and exploit clan antagonisms and sit on top of an extractive rent economy, sending their militiamen to conquer seaports, airports, premium real estate and arable land to keep them afloat.

Beledweyne floods

The dark days of the civil war are long gone but what is emerging today is nothing but a repeat of the same old story, the thirst to attract foreign aid has reached to the point of forcing rural farmers who’ve fled the famine and conflict into aid camps around the capital in order to keep the aid money flowing, the horrendous effects aside our leaders are even unable to organize cleaning efforts to remove rubbish out of our streets without making it into a foreign aid scheme. One shouldn’t confuse this with individual malice but its an institutional imperative, I don’t think this system was any more designed consciously but rather the ethos of the old colonial administration left an imprint on the newly established independence government, and the chips fell to their places. The government expenditure overshadowing the real economy attracted entrepreneurs who would otherwise leave the politics to their patrons, business of government becoming in effect the only profitable business in town. The institutions that were meant for the public to re-affirm their independence and self-determination became a source of brazen profiteering and social discontent, the leaders skillfully deployed tribalistic rhetoric to keep the common folk divided, in summary it wasn’t a malicious design per se, but our independence leaders took the path of least resistance.

Had they reformed the terrible banana sector (which was only kept alive by Italian subsidies) and done a serious land reforms to give back farmland that was confiscated by the colonizers, had they cut the ridiculously high government salaries with bloated inefficient ministries and downsized the whole government that was inherited from the colonial administration and devolved power to the hands of local communities in effect returning to our past democratic communalist traditions, empowering the citizenry, that would’ve had double effect of decreasing the cost of governance and by creating participatory decision-making institutions it would thwart the bad actors from arising and lastly we could’ve designed economic policies conducive to the needs of all rather then perpetuating the colonial economy.

The colonizers always held that the Africans were unable to rationally administer themselves and that insecurity perhaps affected our independence leaders who mostly were graduates of small quranic schools, perhaps the world that they were thrusted into intimidated them, even though they hated the colonizers with all their heart,but blinded by the spectacle of power, they nevertheless wanted to emulate their regal, confident and commandeering ways. If that was the case it would make sense for why they didn’t change anything even the first constitution was a copy of the Italian one.

Sudanese boy reciting a poem against the Omar Bashir dictatorship 2019

Justifications For The New Institutions

“One cannot in the nature of things expect a little tree that has been turned into a club to put forth leaves”

Martin  Buber

The institutions we ought to build should embody the goals and values we uphold, in other words striving for modes of organization that best reflect the future society we seek. Rejecting the patronizing elitism that is all too characteristic of our governments and NGOs, rejecting their top-down management style which rather than seek long-term solutions that could empower the citizenry they choose vanity programs that keep them in power, justifying their existence by convincing communities that they are incapable of taking care of themselves, their paternalism can only be countered by an assertion of confidence and control by the people. We must use our creative genius to innovate new forms of organization that strive to achieve these goals of empowerment. From peripheries to center, from bottom-up and from simple to complex, these will not only be just values but institutional designs to overcome our problems.

You might question the merit behind spending time and effort in creating new institutions when we can reform the existing ones, for that I say even if we can reform them (and that is a big if), the limitations these existing institutions have are enormous, if we were a country endowed with better climate and better natural resources, you could make that argument but due to our unique poverty, to have a class of capitalist using the meager resources of our country foolishly would doom millions to hunger and abject poverty (as it does today) that doesn’t mean there isn’t enough resources for all to live in comfort, but the institutional imperatives of capitalism prefigures economic practices that are ecologically disastrous (over-grazing, cash-crop production etc.) limiting any prospects for ordinary people to live in satiety, hunger is not some unfortunate amoral by-product of our socio-political order but it’s the driving force in our economy which is based on donor-funded kleptocracy and cash-crop production, both necessitate hunger by taking farmlands from the rural poor and filling them in aid camps stealing their dignity as independent productive citizens and turning them into emaciated spectacles for the pity of international community (and of course that aid money is then looted by our elites)

Cancelling the “Tragedy of the Commons”

The inception of colonial capitalism caused ripple effects that altered our society in drastic ways and one major way it did so was how the consequent Somali governments like their colonial predecessors refused to accept the old tenure laws of the land, in effect taking land away from the local communities and the turning it into property, unlike the community the property owner had no interest in sustainably utilizing that land, immense degradation of soil and land followed, today our governments with rhetoric of “nationalizing” lands away from the “tribal” communities, which we all too often take their rhetoric at face value, accepting the imagined collective goals of nationalization which in truth is just crude privatization handing over community land to private entrepreneurs, furthering the destruction of our already fragile ecology.

One study done in Puntland concluded that 50 000 hectares of land is lost annually to degradation and desertification, and it is estimated to reverse this destruction would cost 1.5 billion dollars at minimum or to put it in perspective; the whole Puntland economy.

Elinor Ostrom in her groundbreaking work on common-pool resources, starting with her thesis research on how a group of stakeholders in southern California cobbled together a system for managing their water table, and culminating in her worldwide study of common-pool resource (CPR) groups, the message of her work was that groups are capable of avoiding the tragedy of the commons without requiring top-down regulation either state-led or market-led, at least if certain conditions are met. This work was so groundbreaking that Ostrom was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics in 2009

In her worldwide research she discovered that common pool resources were often more equitable, cost-effective and productive than their commerical counterparts but the main feature differentiating the two was how the commons were vastly more ecologically oriented, since the members of those enterprises were the inhabitants of that community unlike some faceless corporation they have vested interest in maintaining their environment. Infact unrelated to her study the Puntland study I referenced earlier came to that same conclusion that rural clan elder-led communities and pastoral and farmers association showed more effectiveness in combating illegal charcoal productions and overgrazing than their more educated and highly financed state and private institutions.

RWHI: rainwater harvesting irrigation

The Puntland resource management study is incredibly insightful and due to the scope of the study it can be generalized to large portion of Somalia, one important lesson I learned was that the enormous ecological destruction that has already occurred due to our economic practices can be reversed while simultaneously increasing the productivity of the land. Almost every year during the rainy seasons millions of liters of fresh water is carried away to the sea, with it the top soil is carried away as well, these flash floods which cause enormous ecological damage can be utilized to recharge the underground water-table and nurture the drought stricken landscape and even utilize it in irrigating farms, which can decrease the hunger and the cost of food which accounts for over 70% of the household expenses in Somalia. With the global warming some climatologist have suggested that Horn of Africa might become more wetter and warmer, exacerbating these flash floods and droughts but this is not an inevitability. Check dams can be constructed cheaply in major drainage outlets to collect that rain and also percolation pits,terraces and dozens of other reconstructive water harvesting methods modern agricultural science can teach us, can easily be built to foster food security. The challenge isn’t in the cost of these projects but labor since these are labor-intensive projects, workforce that isn’t necessarily present in rural areas but far away in urban centers. expensive check dams can be built like the huge one built by UAE in Xumboweyn but the difficulty will be in scaling that up to rest of the country cost-effectively.

Non-perennial river flowing to the sea in Bari, Puntland (Near Caluula) Ancient terrace agriculture techniques used in Oman in a climate very similar to ours: source

By far the most common way water resources are utilized today are by berkad (water tanks) which are filled by rainwater and to my surprise beyond the mostly hand-dug shallow wells (who occasionally dry out), few deep underground boreholes have been constructed as the table 5b shows. This means we have no idea of the scope of underground water reservoir we have that we could use to alleviate the chronic water crisis.

Even the problems that comes from charcoal burning can be offset by biogas digesters that can be constructed very cheaply, one study reviewing its adaptation in Sub-saharan africa concluded that this technology could reverse the effects of deforestation and the by-product from this process can be utilized as natural fertilizer (thus improving food security). The cost of building has even come down with using interlocking stabilized soil blocks (ISSB) that use local soils mixed with 5% cement. Cement, which is a major requirement for construction of a fixed dome biogas unit, contributing to its cost but utilizing ISSBs and teaching the rural population how to build them as a community further makes it more cost-effective. Its estimated one small unit 4m³ which produces four hours of cooking gas per day costs around 500-800$ to build (but cost is variable depending on cost of labour, materials, design etc.) with bigger community biogas digesters can be constructed to be used for community kitchens decreasing its cost on the individual households thus making it even cheaper and cost-effective.

From peripheries to center: Rural-Urban linkages

Trade unions in any society have always been a force for progress since they emerge as a response to a system that is intrinsically unable to satisfy the needs of the great majority of the working class. They provide a key place for solidarity among ordinary people in a very alienating society and in some cases they are able to forge a better path, What is the aim of having a well-organised or democratic union in the first place? There are many choices to be made, even if we have democratic unions. Should unions be just business unions, basically dealing with wages and conditions? Or run by experts as service organisations, similar to insurance firms? Or be aiming at something more?

Sam Mbah and I.E Igariwey two Nigerian anarchist analyzing the failure of labour movement in the African continent concluded that the core failure of the movement was that the labour leaders alligned themselves with the nationalist parties thus turning the movement into voting base to reach political power neglegting the cause of the labour, in fact something similar happened in Somalia as well, before they were destroyed by the military regime they used to courageously fight for progress, creating general strikes whenever workers were abused and in general playing pivotal role in independence and beyond, but when they were integrated into bureaucracy of the dictatorship, their leadership subverted, the institution workers relied upon to protect their interests and yearn for progress were in effect replaced by the totalitarianism that engulfed Somalia for two decades, the generation that emerged from that darkness would suffer from institutional amnesia unable not only to organize themselves but even unable to identify their own interests, like a person waking up from a real amnesia stupefied and upset they fell to the divisive clan-nist rhetoric of the warlords, some even carrying out their crude self-serving designs, unable to even reflect upon the moral perversion of their acts, even feeling the need to protect their reputation long after their demise.

Even with the failure of labour movement (can you even call something that was consciously destroyed failure?) or fall to be more accurate, it had serious design limitations since it was only limited to certain sector of the urban workers, failing to organize with the urban precariat and the larger rural population (subsistence farmers and pastoralist) but even with these limitations their victories were highly consequently and a reason for acknowledgment. We should seriously consider a renewal of the labor movement using the 20^th century as our teacher to build on their victories and learn from their failures.

If you today tried to organize workers solely to protect their existing employment and their meagre rights you would face a serious challenges in gathering even dozen memberships to your union or even motivating workers to yearn for progress, for a simple reason most of the employment is temporary and with huge unemployment (over 60%) the workers have little bargaining power to demand anything, but nevertheless so much work must be done both in the cities and in the countryside, to overcome this challenge we should abandon that artificial divide between urban and rural workers, and create labour schemes to get urban workers to work in the countryside to build check dams, terraces, bio-gas digesters and other infrastructure to increase the rural productivity and in turn the farmers and pastoralist would give certain amount of their surplus for free to their urban counterparts, in effect creating an internal food economy (within the union) that would drastically decrease food expenses to worker’s households, this would then attract even more memberships and create this positive feed-back loop where more labour-intensive projects could be done in the countryside to further increase the food production which would have multiple effects if successfully implemented: the chronic hunger would be alleviated, the rural-urban gab would be bridged and the workers would gain a confidence in their ability and demand drastic reforms to be made.

In 2015 Puntland’s Co-operative farmers association organized a congress in Garowe with many farmers coming from all the nine regions of Puntland, they criticized the government for not helping them and they pleaded with the diaspora to help them get access to modern tools of agriculture to increase their production. They proudly showcased the variety of crops and vegetables that they cultivated from beans, tomatoes, maize, potatoes etc. This is a testament that we can become food self-sufficient and overcome that ruinous beggar’s mentality.

This reminded me of how the researchers in that Puntland study listed as one major obstacle to successful ecological resource management as an attitude of “helplessness” among the population

Existing situation of “helplessness”, characterized by the perceptions and
impressions that it is only government that can do something about the gullies (land erosion from flash floods)

but government is totally unable to do so, its institutional imperative is counter to the needs of the population, that is why institutions that will replace them must be those that grow from the organic needs and desires of the population. The institution that successfully can give the population their confidence in themselves and at the same time giving them an achievable vision to strive towards, those institutions will radically change Somalia.

From Bottom Up: Organizational Hierarchy

The labour scheme that i described was actually designed by an Ethiopian group working in conjunction with the local government, they designed it as such that the urban workers would give 20-45 days a year of free labour which transformed the Tigrey region of Ethiopia, As witnessed by many researchers the landscape restoration in Tigray was implemented in a highly organized and participatory manner (which is quite unique in Africa) with 85% of the landscape treated with various soil and water conservation interventions (check dams, terracing, afforestation etc.) in few years transforming a drought-prone region into resilient and highly productive in agriculture.

Top-down institutions, run by officials, are actually very ineffective, and often fairly lifeless. They struggle to respond to changes, they place the interests of the officials over the interests of their members, and their leaders who often suffer from “Moses syndrome” are prone to co-optation by governments, businesses and political parties. Centralism, as Rudolph Rocker noted in his book,Anarcho-Syndicalism, “turns over the affairs of everybody in a lump to a small minority, is always attended by barren official routine and…crushes individual conviction, kills all personal initiative by lifeless discipline and bureaucratic ossification.”

We need to move away from the idea that movements must be top-down. A radical movement of this sort defends its members, and fights for daily improvements. It is a participative model where the members are the movement, not patients, and where leadership is essentially about facilitating a bottom-up organization. The important thing is accumulating organisational power and promoting popular consciousness to contribute to a society where ordinary people are in charge in other words real democracy.

These progressive institutions will not only create enthusiasm in overcoming hunger they can also prefigure and then help create a radical change in society, by developing the ideas and structures that can lay the basis for a new social order. To place power and wealth in the hands of ordinary people requires, not a state, not a party, but a system of worker and community assemblies and councils in a self­-managed, egalitarian order based on participatory planning, common ownership and distribution by need. It is said that only the people can create history and this shall be the tool to which they shall use to build such a beatiful future.

By: Guuleed Bakuuni

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