Top-heavy government flops in Somalia. Does the international community have it all wrong on Somalia?

By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN, New York Times
August 23, 2008

After 17 years, 14 transitional governments and more than $8 billion in foreign aid, the country is as violent, lawless -- and many say hopeless -- as ever.

This month, a man who had been running an orphanage for 18 years was fatally shot in the head. A few days before that, 20 women sweeping the streets were blown up by a bomb buried in a pile of garbage. No one is safe, and perhaps no place on Earth more closely resembles Thomas Hobbes' description of a state of nature in which life is "nasty, brutish and short."

Nothing seems to be able to lift Somalia's curse of anarchy. And part of the problem, a rising number of Western academics and Somali professionals argue, is that the bulk of outside efforts have concentrated on standing up a strong central government, which may be anathema in a country where authority tends to be diffuse and clan-based.

The United Nations and donor countries are plowing millions of dollars into the Transitional Federal Government, an entity essentially created by the United Nations, with the idea of bringing order to Somalia from the top down.

But the transitional government is essentially on life support. Its presence in Mogadishu, the capital, is limited to a few blocks that are constantly shelled. It is unpopular and, by extension, weak. Its leaders are consumed by yet another round of infighting.

President Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed, a former warlord, is enraged that Prime Minister Nur Hassan Hussein, a former Red Crescent official, had the nerve to try to fire Mogadishu's mayor, another ex-warlord -- the "ex" being a term of art, because the mayor is widely accused of running an extortion ring.

Ken Menkhaus, a professor at Davidson College in North Carolina who specializes in Somalia, likened the transitional government to "an hourglass," with no professional class or civil service at its core. Instead, there are "a whole bunch of ministers at the top, a whole bunch of soldiers at the bottom and nothing in between."

But there may be another answer: going local.

Many Somali intellectuals and Western academics are pushing an alternative form of government that might be better suited to Somalia's fluid, fragmented and decentralized society. The new idea, which is actually an old idea that seems to be enjoying something of a renaissance because of the transitional government's shortcomings, is to rebuild Somalia from the bottom up.

It is called the building-block approach. The first blocks would be small governments at the lowest levels, in villages and towns. These would be stacked to form district and regional governments. The last step would be uniting the regional governments in a loose national federation that controlled, say, currency issues and the pirate-infested shoreline, but did not sideline local leaders.

"It's the only way viable," said Ali Doy, a Somali analyst who works closely with the United Nations. "Local government is where the actua