Mogadishu (Comment) — President of the Federal Republic of Somalia Dr Hassan Sheikh Mohamud attained a historic milestone. He is not only the first sitting President to ever earn a doctorate but he also, judging from the title of his thesis, made a remarkable contribution to knowledge about building institutions in a fragile nation state, Somalia.
In academia questioning orthodoxy, testing theories and unbridled discussions on the state of knowledge in a given field constitute the foundations of tertiary education. The emphasis is on free thinking. In this spirit, one is bound to ask: to what extent did President Mohamud and The University for Peace (UPEACE) uphold research ethics as far as the research topic is concerned?
Entitled “Examining the Challenges of Clan Politics in Statebuilding: A Case Study of Somalia”, the dissertation of President Mohamud upends a key term used in political science literature when discussing Somalia politics. ‘Elite bargain’ has been a phrase used by researchers who write on Somali politics. Elite bargain sheds light on political actors, their motivations and political consequences of their decisions. The phrase ‘clan politics’, on the contrary, obfuscates the situation, makes the Somali politician less influential and more beholden to the masses.
President Mohamud was first elected in 2012, and re-elected in 2022 after a five-year hiatus following the 2017 election of President Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed. Clans do not have political power in Somalia; politicians do. President Mohamud and the University of Peace did little to think through the title of the dissertation and its implications. It is deplorable that the University of Peace has had to adopt an anthropological approach to discussing the Somalia predicament. The title conveys the message that clans committed human rights violations, not politicians. It ignores the asymmetrical power relations of clans. The current power-sharing system notoriously known as 4.5, for example, was conceived in Djibouti in 2000. Four major clans were granted a status on the basis of their abilities to command clan militias and control a territory.
In Mogadishu where President Mohamud’s clan retains political supremacy by claiming to have clan ownership of the capital city, members of the Banadiri clan, who suffered at the hands of clan militias, are politically and economically underprivileged, so are the members of Jareer Weyne and other minority social groups in other parts of Somalia. It is not clan politics that relegates those Somali clans to what can be described as third class citizenship. It is a decision made by powerful politicians.
By enabling the President of Somalia to submit a controversial thesis, the University of Peace denies Somalis the right to hold their politicians accountable. While writing up the dissertation on clan politics, President Mohamud was obliged to mention clan names. This epistemological deviation accentuates the stereotype that the Somali civil war is not different from how Somalis waged intra-clan wars before the advent of colonialism and the modern state.
President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud took a leaf from the school of thought about Somalia associated with the late London School of Economics Professor of Social Anthropology I. M. Lewis, who wrote books on Somalia. Lewis was accused of conducting research in the ex-British Somaliland during the 1950s to publish his classic book Pastoral Democracy. Anthropological knowledge on colonised society arguably benefited the colonial masters. President Mohamud may use ‘insights’ in his dissertation to deepen the predicament of his compatriots, who are unable to rein in their oligarchic politicians who mimic the colonial masters of yore. It will give conflict entrepreneurship in Somalia a new lease of life.
© Puntland Post, 2022.
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