Somalia needs a good mayor not a president

Somalia does not need a president. It needs a good mayor. The country does not require a leader who revels in the ceremony and pomp of the office of head of state, but a figure devoted to understanding that the primary function of a state is to serve the people it is responsible for. Consider Mogadishu: the capital city, the seat of the federal government, the face of Somalia to the world. It should be the hub for commerce and diplomacy—where embassies are based, international guests are received, and the sophistication and impact of the Somali state most visible. Instead, Mogadishu is probably the most dysfunctional city in the country. The majority of its residents suffer due to the state’s dereliction of its duties.

The roads are torn. Security is fragile. Sanitation is neglected. Basic public services are virtually non-existent. Armed groups operate with impunity. There is no visible sign of a functioning government—no traffic lights, no garbage collection, no public transport, no reliable water or electricity. Ministries announce policies which rarely materialise. Courts barely function. The police are either absent or indistinguishable from militias. What passes for governance is a patchwork of checkpoints, private security firms, and NGO offices tucked behind blast walls. In much of the city, the state is not weak—it is just absent.

This is why most embassies are not based in Somalia. Diplomats, UN officials, and aid workers operate remotely or fly in briefly—rarely staying more than a few hours. Most ambassadors are stationed in Nairobi. Even Somali ministers, parliamentarians, civil servants, and NGO staff live and work from Kenya. This isn’t just about security. It’s about the complete absence of the basic infrastructure and urban amenities that make life possible—even inside the so-called green zone.

In this context, what Villa Somalia needs is not a president who rides in a 25-car convoy to cut ribbons, sit with ambassadors chit chatting and deliver lofty speeches. It needs a leader grounded in the practical, not in rhetoric.

In this context, what Villa Somalia needs is not a president who rides in a 25-car convoy to cut ribbons, sit with ambassadors chit chatting and deliver lofty speeches. It needs a leader grounded in the practical, not in rhetoric. A leader obsessed not with abstractions and lofty promises but with basic functionality. Somalia needs someone who wakes up every morning thinking about how to make the capital city work: repairing roads, managing traffic, collecting rubbish, ensuring the water flows, that the power stays on, schools are open, hospitals are running, and neighbourhoods are safe. A leader who understands that building a functioning capital is not just one task among many—it is the only task, because scaled-up, this solution would get the country working and set a strong example.

But Somali presidents view this kind of work—rubbish collection, pothole repair, street cleaning—as beneath them. These are “domestic” chores, the kind of responsibilities they believe should be left to someone much lower in rank—not presidents or ministers. It’s like expecting a father to wake up early, bathe the kids, iron their uniforms, prepare breakfast, and walk them to school. To them, that’s the mother’s job—or the maid’s.

When a president can’t point to a single decent street in his own capital that is paved, clean, and free of plastic bags, sand, or weeds growing through the cracks?

They see the presidency as an exalted role: speeches, summits, motorcades, and foreign travel. They’re drawn to the trappings of power: the tailored suits, the five-star hotels, the expensive dinners, the endless conferences. But what use are speeches and ceremonies when the state itself doesn’t function? When a president can’t point to a single decent street in his own capital that is paved, clean, and free of plastic bags, sand, or weeds growing through the cracks?

It’s like that same father walking through town in a designer suit, riding in an expensive car, while his wife and children are drowning in squalor. What kind of delusion does it take to think that’s normal?

Across the world, national leaders treat their capitals as reflections of their national dignity and state prestige. When President Clinton visited Morocco, King Hassan ordered sweeping renovations across Casablanca and Rabat. Ahead of the recent G20 summit, India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, revamped large parts of New Delhi—even building walls to hide what couldn’t be fixed in time. In Ethiopia, Abiy Ahmed has poured resources into beautifying Addis Ababa to reinforce his image as a modernising reformer. He’s keeping with the tradition of Ethiopian rulers who viewed the capital as “modernist monument for the rest of Ethiopia and the world in general”, as the late scholar, Elleni Centime Zeleke, put it. 

In the 1860s, Khedive Ismail of Egypt nearly bankrupted the country in a similar bid to modernise Cairo in time for the opening of the Suez Canal. More recently, Egypt’s president, Abdel Fatah al-Sisi, built a brand-new capital—more modern than Dubai or Doha—because Egypt’s elites were embarrassed that Cairo looked like a third-world city. Not to be outdone, Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman announced The Line, a new kind of city on the Red Sea which he likened to Egypt’s pyramids, whose initial cost of $500bn has increased to almost $9 trillion (25 times the Saudi budget). Despite setbacks he has persisted. His vision 2023 project also includes a significant revamp for the capital, Riyadh. 

A Somali president could live in a palace in Mogadishu—or in Hargeisa, Garowe, Baidoa, or Dhusamareb—wearing custom suits, riding in convoys of luxury cars, flying private jets, and staying in five-star hotels abroad, while squalor surrounds his doorstep: cracked roads, open sewage, collapsing buildings, barefoot children, and mountains of rubbish.

Around the world, leaders understand that the condition of their major cities is a matter of national pride and global image. But not Somali leaders. They are completely disconnected from the reality around them. There is no sense of shame. No urgency. A Somali president could live in a palace in Mogadishu—or in Hargeisa, Garowe, Baidoa, or Dhusamareb—wearing custom suits, riding in convoys of luxury cars, flying private jets, and staying in five-star hotels abroad, while squalor surrounds his doorstep: cracked roads, open sewage, collapsing buildings, barefoot children, and mountains of rubbish. And it would never occur to him to say: “let me at least clean the street in front of my palace.”

It would never cross his mind to pave and clean even a single street—a street that shows the presence of the state and the bare minimum of urban order. And none of this strikes them as wrong. It doesn’t even register. They flaunt wealth and power in the middle of visible decay, without a second thought. It reflects a deeply broken mindset—a mind that has normalised poverty and dysfunction. If all you’ve ever known is squalor, it stops looking like a problem.

There’s a telling video of Puntland’s president Said Deni leaving Garowe in a convoy of black SUVs, raising clouds of dust behind him. But in the final frame, he’s standing at Dubai Airport, arms raised at security like any ordinary traveller. At home, he plays head of state. Abroad, he accepts being nobody.

What Somalia needs is a president who thinks like a mayor. Someone who doesn’t see himself as a ceremonial figure delivering speeches, but as a hands-on leader making the city function. Someone who treats Mogadishu as his primary constituency—and sees infrastructure, public services, and urban order as his core responsibility. Given the federal government’s inability to project authority meaningfully beyond the capital, this is the least he could do.

What Somalia needs is a president who thinks like a mayor. Someone who doesn’t see himself as a ceremonial figure delivering speeches, but as a hands-on leader making the city function.

We need a president who surrounds himself with a cabinet that shares this mindset—not a group of men in dark suits, cosplaying people who have the power to determine the fate of a country. If the president starts thinking like a mayor, he might actually become a good president. But if he keeps thinking like a president, he will be neither.

Two of the most transformative leaders in recent memory are Türkiye’s prime minister-cum-president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and the former Indonesian president, Joko Widodo (referred to as Jokowi).

Erdoğan rose to national prominence by fixing Istanbul.

Erdoğan rose to national prominence by fixing Istanbul. In the 1990s, it was a broken city—choked with rubbish, crippled by water shortages, traffic jams, and pollution. The Golden Horn, a natural harbour which straddles the city’s old quarter and juts into the Bosphorus, was renowned for its awful smell. “Halic had been completely turned into a waste container,” Bekir Kacaycan, an economics professor at Istanbul University, told TRT World. Erdoğan tackled the problems head-on, operationalising the popular conservative slogan, “hakk’a ve halka hizmettir” (serving the public is serving Allah). 

His success as mayor made him a national figure as he vowed to scale up his municipal achievements to the country more widely. When Erdoğan came to power at the beginning of the 2000s, he approached the project of modernising Türkiye in much the same way as he had Istanbul. The AKP cleaned up the country’s banking sector, invested in education, infrastructure, connectivity, and health, and brought their budget under control. In 2013, the popular, award-winning economist and professor Jeffrey Sachs penned a piece for Project Syndicate in which he argued: “There is nothing flashy about Turkey’s rise, which has been based on fundamentals, rather than bubbles or resource discoveries.”

Joko Widodo (Jokowi) followed a similar path. Before leading Indonesia, Jokowi was mayor of Solo and then governor of Jakarta, where he took on entrenched urban problems: traffic, pollution, broken infrastructure, nepotism, and disorder. Like Erdoğan, he started out focusing his energy on extending services to the poor. His success and his common touch propelled him to the presidency. And even as president, he focused on urban transformation—launching high-speed rail, expanding public transport and access to schools. Jokowi managed to combine that local ethos with larger projects, such as laying out a plan for a new capital, building thousands of kilometres of roads, more than a dozen dams, new airports, and almost 20 ports.

Cities are the heart of the modern state. They are where politics is practised, where economies grow, where ideas circulate.

Running a city is the essence of running a country. Modern cities are complex ecosystems, requiring planners, engineers, sanitation experts, utility managers, health officials, educators, and IT specialists. A city like Istanbul functions because all these moving parts are coordinated—because systems are in place. Cities are the heart of the modern state. They are where politics is practised, where economies grow, where ideas circulate. They are home to institutions: ministries, courts, universities, banks, media outlets. They host and incubate elites, civil servants, entrepreneurs, and the next generation of leaders. The condition of a capital can then be thought of as a mirror of the nation’s health.

Urban life also produces a new kind of citizen. Cities bring together people from different regions, clans, and cultures. They foster shared public spaces, new behaviours, and habits rooted in rules, systems, and schedules. Cities encourage civic-minded, socially integrated, modern personalities—something rural or clan-based life rarely produces. Cities don’t just build infrastructure. They build and regulate citizens.

For Somalia, rebuilding the nation will not come from power-sharing deals or endless constitutional tinkering. It will come from building a city that works. A real, functioning capital can become a national anchor—a gravitational centre that brings communities together, disarms militias, restores dignity, and enables reconciliation. Without a functioning capital, the Somali state will remain hollow—an idea without substance.

Rebuilding Somalia begins with rebuilding Mogadishu. And rebuilding Mogadishu must be the first and only task of national leadership. Leadership is not about looking important. It’s about solving problems. Rebuilding the state begins with rebuilding a sidewalk.