How the .5 plus 4 destroyed Somalia...

MI’s 5 Minutes of Fame | Week 27, 2026 Coming to you from Venice I am writing this from Venice, where I have spent short time wandering through some of the more compelling exhibitions at the 2026 Biennale Arte. Venice in June has a particular quality: the light off the canals, the unhurried pace of people encountering art from every corner of the world, the quiet reminder that culture travels further and lasts longer than most political arrangements. Several exhibitions caught my attention, but none more than Somalia’s contribution. This year marks the first time Somalia has participated in the Venice Biennale with its own national pavilion, and the work on display at the Palazzo Caboto stopped me. Artists Ayan Farah, Asmaa Jama, and Warsan Shire have produced something genuinely moving under the title SADDEXLEEY: an exploration of memory, cultural continuity, and Somali identity expressed through textiles, film, and poetry. It is, in the most precise sense, an act of civilisational reconstruction. I left with a great deal of quiet admiration. I left with pride. It was that admiration, and the contrast it quietly provoked, that inspired what follows: a friendly note, or perhaps a gentle reminder, to the Somali philosopher kings we have long been hoping for, and who, for the moment, remain missing in action. Dear Somali Leaders You have reached the age at which, in our culture, you deserve to be celebrated. Odayaal. The elders who sit beneath the shade of a tree they planted, watching the next generation flourish. In Somali tradition, age carries its own dignity, its own honour. We do not dispute that. Age, in our culture, is not something to be argued with. What history will argue with, however, is what was done with it. The generation of leaders who shaped Somalia’s post-1991 political architecture made consequential choices. Whether those choices reflected strategic calculation, institutional incapacity, or the particular pressures of a collapsed state is a question historians will continue to debate. What is less debatable is the cumulative outcome. The civil service, the judiciary, the banking system, the national curriculum, the institutional memory of governance itself: all were either dismantled or allowed to decay beyond recovery. What filled the vacuum was not alternative governance. It was the tribally organised patronage structure that became the only available social contract for a generation that grew up knowing nothing else. The 4.5 power-sharing formula, introduced as a pragmatic reconciliation mechanism, became something rather more permanent than its architects perhaps intended. It codified clan identity as the primary unit of political currency, and in doing so, trained an entire political class to compete along ethnic lines rather than policy ones. The men and women who entered politics under this framework did not invent tribalism. But they inherited a system that rewarded it, and most chose not to challenge it. The consequences for institutional capacity have been significant. Somalia’s federal member state presidents operate within a governance architecture that was not designed to produce technocratic leadership. Several have limited formal educational backgrounds. Most have built their careers within the patronage and security networks that the post-conflict period made available, rather than through the professional institutions, the civil service, the academy, the judiciary, that a more stable state might have offered. This is not a personal criticism, but rather a structural observation. When a system does not produce or reward educated leadership, it should not surprise us when educated leadership does not emerge. The environmental dimension of this governance gap receives far less attention than it deserves. Unregulated charcoal production has accelerated land degradation across large parts of the country. Coastal resources remain largely unmonitored and unprotected. The droughts and floods that have periodically devastated Somali communities have been met with humanitarian response rather than structural adaptation, and the language of crisis has become so familiar in Somali political speeches that it no longer registers as urgency. It registers as routine. There is a particular irony worth noting here. From Villa Somalia to Somali embassies in Geneva, New York, and Beijing, barely a diplomatic address passes without a proud reference to Somalia’s blue economy potential and its coastline, the longest on the African continent. The talking points are polished and the PowerPoint slides are professional. Yet that same coastline remains largely ungoverned, its fisheries plundered by foreign vessels, its communities exposed to climate shocks without protection, its economic potential deferred indefinitely while the rhetoric flourishes. A nation cannot simultaneously claim its coast as a strategic asset in international forums and treat it as an afterthought in domestic policy. The distance between those two positions is not a funding gap. It is a credibility gap. The young people who will inherit this land are being handed not merely a political challenge but an ecological one, compounded across decades of deferred responsibility. Against this backdrop, the Venice Biennale offers an instructive counterpoint. The three artists representing Somalia this year produced work of considerable depth: through textiles, film, archival practice, and poetry, they engaged with questions of memory, displacement, and cultural continuity. As curator Mohamed Mire observed, poetry has historically functioned as Somalia’s social architecture, the mechanism through which knowledge and collective identity were transmitted across generations when formal institutions were absent. The contrast is worth sitting with quietly. While governance structures have struggled to move beyond the patterns of the 1990s, a generation of Somali artists has been reconstructing cultural memory and projecting Somalia’s complexity to international audiences, without state support, without institutional infrastructure, and without waiting for permission. The question of leadership quality takes on particular salience when one considers recent developments in northern Somalia. The strategic partnership between Somaliland’s current administration and Israel, formalised through a recognition agreement announced in December 2025, raises questions that an informed citizenry deserves answered. Even former president Muse Bihi called publicly in February 2026 for the terms to be disclosed. When a former head of state must make that request of his own successor, something in the accountability architecture has failed. Waan baahnahay bakhti looma cunno! Every generation of leaders operates within constraints not entirely of its own making. That much is fair, and worth acknowledging. But leadership also involves the exercise of judgment within those constraints: the choice of which systems to perpetuate and which to disrupt. Somalia’s young people, the ones building quietly in the cracks of an imperfect state, the ones who stood in a Venetian palazzo this year and offered the world a vision of Somali culture that was neither helpless nor angry but simply, carefully, human, those young people did not choose their inheritance. They are choosing what to do with it. That, ultimately, is the distinction that history tends to remember. To (mis)quote Abraham Lincoln: “You, current Somali leaders, can fool all of the people some of the time [with constitutional amendments, etc.], and some of the people all of the time [one person, one vote in other times], but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time [because the 4.5 formula hasn’t stopped working yet].” 4.5 remains, as it has always been, just far enough over the horizon to be useful as a slogan and just close enough to be dangerous as a reality. Lincoln understood something that Mogadishu’s political engineers keep relearning: the laws of p… This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit somalia.substack.com