By Hassan Ali Khaire - Former Prime Minister of Somalia and Presidential Candidate.
“Somalia’s economy did not weaken because its people lack enterprise or ambition, but because governance failed them—and rebuilding accountable institutions must now be a national priority.” Hassan Ali Khaire
Four years and three months have passed since Somalia elected a President whose term has now ended. It is a fitting moment to ask the question every citizen has the right to ask of any government: are we better off today than we were on election day? For Somalia, the honest answer is no.
This is not a matter of opinion. It is a matter of record.
The World Bank's Somalia Economic Update, published in May 2026, shows that our real GDP growth slowed sharply in 2025, contracting by three percent. Household purchasing power fell by 5.7 percent. For our businesses, 2025 was the weakest year for output and profit in a decade. Companies closed their doors, entrepreneurs moved their capital abroad rather than risk it at home, and many firms that stayed were forced to cut jobs or reduce wages simply to survive.
Behind these figures are Somali families who did everything right and still lost ground.
Consider land, which for generations has been the way ordinary Somalis built and preserved their wealth. Today, families who invested their savings in land can no longer recover what they paid for it, because its value was hollowed out by unlawful seizures carried out for private gain during the outgoing administration. Because so much of this land changed hands through black market deals that bypassed the public treasury, the proceeds of these seizures were funneled abroad, pulling liquidity out of the Somali banks that once financed our businesses. The World Bank reports that bank cash holdings fell from 40 percent of national assets to 35 percent last year, while the credit our banks extend to businesses collapsed from 30 percent in 2022 to just 14 percent in 2025. Our entrepreneurs cannot grow what they cannot finance.
Corruption is not a victimless failing of government. It is among the gravest threats to a nation's economy and to its statehood, and it carries a cost that every Somali family now bears. It is present in the sixteen checkpoints between Afgooye and Mogadishu that tax our farmers on the road to market, driving many out of business and pushing up the price of vegetables in our capital. It is present at the Port of Mogadishu, where traders are forced to pay $320 per container to arrangements that exist only to extract rents, a burden that has helped cut food imports by 2.5 percent and push inflation to 6 percent, double what it was a year ago. And it is present in the hundreds of millions of dollars in development financing that our international partners committed to Somalia and that we simply failed to use. Of more than $330 million allocated in 2024, 73 percent went unspent. Of more than $407 million allocated in 2025, 70 percent went unspent. That is over half a billion dollars in jobs, growth, and services that Somalia left on the table, not because the world turned its back on us, but because mismanagement and graft left us unable to receive what was offered.
The human cost of these choices is not abstract. The number of internally displaced Somalis has grown from 2.9 million in 2022 to 3.4 million today. An estimated 6.5 million of our people now face food insecurity, and malnutrition among low income families is at its worst level since 2011. These are not distant statistics. They are our neighbors, our relatives, our children.
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I do not raise these facts to relitigate the past for its own sake. I raise them because Somalia's next government will inherit this balance sheet, and our country deserves leadership willing to speak of it honestly rather than paper over it. Good governance is not a slogan. It is the discipline of rule of law, transparency, and institutional integrity that determines whether a nation's wealth builds roads, schools, and jobs, or disappears into private hands. Somalia had begun to make real progress on these fronts in years past. That progress was reversed, and setting it right again must be among the first duties of whoever leads our country next.
That means restoring the integrity of land tenure, so that Somali families can trust that what they buy is truly theirs. It means dismantling the informal taxation, the checkpoints, the port fees, the shadow arrangements, that quietly drain our farmers, traders, and consumers. It means rebuilding the credibility of our public financial management, so that when the World Bank, the African Development Bank, and our other partners commit resources to Somalia, we have both the institutional capacity and the integrity to put every dollar to work for our people. And it means recognizing that the displaced families sheltering on the outskirts of our cities are not a peripheral humanitarian statistic, but a direct measure of how well or how poorly we are governing.
Somalia's economy did not weaken because our people lack enterprise, resilience, or ambition. Our traders, our farmers, and our families have shown extraordinary resourcefulness even in the hardest of years. Our economy weakened because governance failed them. That is a solvable problem, but only if we are willing to name it honestly and commit, together, to the harder work of good governance, accountable institutions, and an economy that serves its people rather than a privileged few.
Four years from now, the measure of success will be the same one I apply today: not what was promised, but what ordinary Somali families felt in their pockets and in their daily lives. That is the standard I ask to be held to, and it is the standard our country's next leadership must meet.
* Hassan Ali Khaire, is the former Prime Minister of Somalia and Presidential Candidate.
*The opinions expressed in this article are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect the views of Dawan Africa.