What Went Wrong? Why southern Somalia Failed and Somaliland

By Abdi Hussein Daud

April 12, 2012

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For the past two decades, southern Somalia has been plagued by sporadic and

unrelenting civil war, terrorism, pirates, famine, and wide spread diseases which

claimed the lives of up to 200,000 to 300,000 people. The persistent

multifarious ordeals that ordinary citizens have endured thus far are widely

reported by the international media as well as humanitarian agencies. Since its

effects and magnitude have been extensively scrutinized elsewhere, it is futile to

reiterate in here. There have been fourteen reconciliation attempts aimed at

restoring peace and stability in southern Somalia but all have failed to yield the

intended objectives. Subsequently, southern Somalia became, as international

community describes it, a failed state due to its manifestation of all its hallmarks:

an ineffective government, widespread corruption, lack of public services,

prevalent criminal enterprise, economic decline, and muddled movement of

populations.

In sharp contrast to southern Somalia, Somaliland has successfully constructed

the first democratic state of its kind in the Horn of Africa with emerging

laissezfaire

economy. Notwithstanding its challenges, Somaliland has formulated legal

frameworks intended for the extension of democratic institutions, e.g., various

political parties, free and fair elections, due process of law, freedom of assembly,

freedom of association, freedom of the press, and, above all, peaceful and

democratic transfer of power. It is indeed an oasis of peace, democracy and

prosperity. How did Somaliland manage, you may correctly inquire, attain this

unprecedented triumphant while their counterpart, southern Somalia, has

constantly failed to restore peace, let alone construct any type of governance?

To provide impartial answer to the aforesaid inquiry, this short piece strives to

scrutinize the underlying

southern Somalia as well as the unprecedented success of Somaliland. Numerous

individuals who have attempted to inspect the fundamental causes of these

differences failed miserably to appreciate and employ the principle of historical

materialism. Historical materialism holds that in order to unearth Read Morefactor that has played significant role for the failure of