Somalia Doesn’t Have a Solution Problem. It Has a Problem-Finding Problem.

First published as a thread on X, 12 September 2026.

Somalia is not short of solutions. It lacks identified problems.

Every few years the same package comes back: train more soldiers, hold an election, finish the constitution, convene the donors, and declare total war on Al-Shabaab. None of that is made up. There is an insurgency. The political calendar is broken. The federal bargain was never finished. A government can take ground and still fail to keep it. The real failure sits before all of that. People start selling solutions before anyone has said, plainly, what the problem is.

Presented, discovered, created

Jacob Getzels spent years on that earlier step. He called it problem finding: the work of noticing what is missing before anyone has given the difficulty a name. He divided problem situations into three kinds.

Someone hands you a presented problem; the formulation already exists. A teacher wants the area of a rectangle. A donor wants an election roadmap. A president wants more troops. The task was defined elsewhere. A discovered problem already exists in the world, but nobody has put it cleanly. You have to see it and say it. A created problem did not exist until someone invented it. A scientist asks a question nature was not asking. An artist invents a still life. A political thinker frames a gap the slogans cannot see.

Finding or creating a real problem is often the larger act. Solving a problem that arrived already packaged is the smaller one.

After Jacob Getzels

Getzels was blunt about the ranking. Most of what is considered Somalia policy focuses on the smaller task of addressing pre-existing issues, often at a high volume.

The handed list

The handed list is familiar. Defeat Al-Shabaab. Hold one-person-one-vote elections. Complete the constitution. Keep the African Union mission alive. Restore federalism, or restore a strong center. These are the problems that fit a communiqué. They can be budgeted, photographed, and briefed to a visiting envoy. They also explain how a government can spend a year on parliamentary results in Galmudug, military appointments in Garowe, and the legality of its own term while the insurgency takes towns back.

Al-Shabaab is still the most violent al-Qaeda affiliate on earth. Federal member states have cut ties with Mogadishu. The political calendar is an argument about who still has a mandate. Drought and displacement grind on. None of that is a media invention. It is still possible to treat the visible fight as the whole problem. That is how you get offensives without a plan to hold, elections without an agreed-upon referee, and constitutions without the entities that would have to live under them. A presented problem is easy to campaign on. The presented problem is rarely the one that, if solved, would alleviate the other issues.

Problem finding starts when you stop taking the list as given and look at what is already true.

What is already true

There is no political settlement. Federalism went into the 2012 text and never became an agreement about substance: who commands forces, who taxes ports, who appoints whom, and what Somaliland is. Puntland and Jubaland’s decision to walk away, the existence of rival administrations, and a presidency that continues to govern past a disputed date — these issues are not side plots. They are the unsettled settlement. What exists in Mogadishu is often a performance of sovereignty for the diplomatic compound: flags, ministries, and press conferences. Empirical authority stays thin outside a few cities.

Al-Shabaab is not solely a terrorism issue. In much of the rural south, it taxes, adjudicates, and remains. The federal government can clear a town and lose it again because there is no political bargain behind the soldiers and no administration that people prefer to the militants’ predictability. Officials have said the quiet part. The weakness is not the attack. It is holding.

The state is organized as a clan marketplace. Clan is not a disease. This system has historically structured trust, protection, and dispute resolution within Somali society. The problem that needs naming is different: ministries, brigades, contracts, and aid pipelines treated as clan rents. Then every national project becomes another round of 4.5 arithmetic, and every president looks like a tribal president to anyone outside his coalition.

Crisis is also a business model. Aid, security assistance, and the khaki economy produce elites who need the emergency to continue. A government that relies on external subsidies has little incentive to establish a fiscal contract with its own citizens. That is why more aid and more training keep arriving, and why the empirical state does not.

Until we name those things, the solutions remain theatrical.

Problems you have to invent

The most useful problems are those you must invent yourself, since they don’t come pre-defined in a donor template.

1. How can a Somali government primarily rely on its own revenue rather than on funding from troop-contributing countries and humanitarian appeals?
2. What security architecture can Mogadishu, Puntland, and Jubaland accept so that national forces are not a sitting president’s coalition tool?
3. What does holding actually look like after a town is taken — local administration, taxation, courts — so Al-Shabaab does not remain the default landlord?
4. What bargain can exist without asking Somaliland to surrender its claim or asking Mogadishu to pretend the north is just another member state?
5. How do you keep the presidency separate from the last indirect vote’s clan arithmetic so the army and ports don’t change hands with every coalition?

Those questions are harder to put on a banner. They also explain why two decades of presented solutions have produced a capital with a diplomatic corps and a hinterland with another flag.

Human beings are not only problem solvers. We often admire work in science, art, and serious politics for its ability to identify problems. For a generation, Somalia has been governed as if the opposite were true. The international system likes problems it already knows how to fund. Local elites like problems that keep the rent flowing. Both sides then act surprised when the solution does not stick.

You cannot solve Somalia. You can only find the problem you are actually in.

Most of the imported templates — federal copy-paste, donor-designed elections, train-and-equip — were solutions looking for a Somali problem. The discovered problem is an unfinished bargain among Somalis about power, money, and force.

Whether Einstein said it or not, the ratio still holds: spend far more time defining the problem than solving it. Somalia has spent years on the five minutes. The fifty-five are still waiting.