Somalia’s recurring strongman problem is structural, not personal: the presidency concentrates appointment power, security command, resources and emergency authority, creating incentives for whoever holds the office to protect and expand it.

Three enabling conditions are unchecked executive appointment power, a security sector loyal to individuals rather than the constitution, and the absence of real accountability for constitutional violations.

Durable reform requires distributing executive authority, insulating security institutions from personal control, enforcing consequences through independent oversight, decentralizing resource control, and designing constitutional change outside the presidency itself.

The strongman is not a Somali invention. He is a global recurrence, from Moscow to Ankara to Budapest, and he is now reappearing in democracies once thought immune to him (example, USA). He keeps returning because he answers an old temptation: the promise that one unrestrained leader can deliver order faster than institutions can. Somalia has lived that promise, and its wreckage, longer than most. The question is no longer whether the strongman model fails. It always does. The question is why Somalia keeps rebuilding the machinery that produces him.

A Structural Output, Not a Personality Defect

I have watched Somalia treat the strongman as a character flaw for decades, on the theory that a better man will bring better outcomes. Six decades and a long line of presidents, generals and transitional chairmen have disproven that theory. Siad Barre was replaced. The warlord era was replaced. Islamist governance was tried and displaced. Diaspora technocrats were installed and later criticized for the same centralizing habits.

The pattern is not coincidence. It is design. Somalia’s presidency,........

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