Tuesday October 17, 2017
By Amanda Sperber
In the wake of the Mogadishu bombing, can its embattled government restore trust with its citizens?
Civilians carry the dead body of an unidentified man from the scene of an explosion in KM4 street in the Hodan district of Mogadishu, Somalia, on October 14, 2017.
Saturday’s twin-truck suicide bombings in Mogadishu, Somalia’s capital, have so far killed at least 320 people and injured hundreds. The assault took place at a buzzing intersection on a busy afternoon during peak traffic, causing maximum damage to people and property. In the aftermath, men and women searching for victims in the rubble looked small amid the mounds of steel that formed unnatural valleys. In the coming days, more are certain to die in the city’s few under-resourced and over-crowded hospitals.
As Somalia’s political class struggles to respond to Saturday’s attack, it will have its greatest opportunity to prove to a cynical but eternally hopeful people that despite decades of bloodshed, dysfunction, and corruption, the government is a legitimate, trusted entity, committed to protection and progress.
The most persistent lag with which the political elite will be forced to reckon is security reform. “Saturday’s attack took the deadly game to a new level,” Abukar Arman, Somalia’s former special envoy to the United States, wrote to me over Twitter. “The Somali government must understand this: Overhauling the security apparatus (both domestic and foreign aspect) is an existential necessity,” he said.
No entity has claimed responsibility for the atrocity, but al-Shabaab, the fundamentalist group whose roots in Somalia go back decades, and which officially affiliated itself with al-Qaeda in 2012, is the only real contender. African Union troops supported by local militias have pushed al-Shabaab out of major cities in the past few years—but the group has not lost influence. Its spies have embedded themselves in society, and its members may have infiltrated government bodies. It still controls vast swaths of the heartland.
Over the years, a tangle of countries, most significantly Turkey, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, the United States, Britain, nations in the European Union, and the African Union (especially Djibouti, Kenya, Uganda, Ethiopia, and Burundi) have invested billions in Somalia to boost its education system and infrastructure, to aid its humanitarian relief efforts following droughts and disease, and to fund capacity-building for its national army. For the international donor community, Somalia, which forms the eastern rim of the horn of Africa, is strategic both financially and militarily. More than 2 percent of the world's goods travel through its nearest waterway, the Gulf of Aden, making it a major commercial chokepoint for Europe. The country’s proximity to Yemen and ties with the Middle East and Central Asia open it to influence and spillover from radical groups. The Islamic State, for one, has tried to infiltrate the country from the northeast.
But despite all the foreign dollars, little has changed: The Somali government has received billions but has been ranked by Transparency International as the most corrupt on earth for 10 years running.
Somalis tend to expect little from from their government, ever since the formal state collapsed more than two decades ago, brought down by internal power struggles and clan politics. Recent years have brought a relative calm to the country, with the first widespread representative elections held this past February. (It used to be too dangerous to vote outside Mogadishu, with polling stations regularly coming under attack.) But Somalis are well aware of the endemic corruption that runs through every sector: When it comes to al-Shabaab, they don’t expect the government to protect them, relying instead on family, friends, and local militias. What happened Saturday is a justification of that sentiment—the trucks chock-full of explosives drove down a busy corridor, passing multiple government check points before detonating in the capital.
“This has always been the billion-dollar question. If you think about how much money goes to Somalia every year, will this generate the political will to actually do what needs to be done to stabilize Somalia?” asked EJ Hogendoorn, the International Crisis Group’s Deputy Africa Program Director when we spoke on the phone.
Much of the money designated to rebuild a country synonymous with the term “failed state” has gone straight into politicians’ pockets. Last year, the government had a budget of $246 million. Just $0.8 million of that was designated for health spending, despite Somalia’s myriad problems including soaring maternal mortality rates (one in every 12 women in Somalia dies in childbirth), dearth of functioning hospitals, and collapsed sanitation infrastructure, which allows preventable diseases like cholera to run rampant. Meanwhile, the prime minister and president’s offices each received nearly $5 million in the budget, Reuters reported.