That is the million-dollar question: how do you rebuild the state apparatus and the state institutions? They are fragmented, and rightly so. Post-independence states in many parts of Africa and particularly in Somalia were not viable enough to cater to the needs of the people. They were limited to capital cities. We witnessed and have seen and have lived through a one-state city: everything that you didn't have in the rest of the country was in Mogadishu.
The fall of Mogadishu was the fall of the entire government then. Now that is coupled with people who have been mobilized through political identities. Communities were not at war before then, but now people don't feel safe to go to certain parts of the country. Everybody retreated to their region. The federal system is a sort of compromise to decentralize that one-city state.
How do you contextualize it and create...? I think the intervention from the 1990s was heavy on the military side. There was a lot of military intervention. There were periods when the international community didn't even do anything, and Somalis were left to their own devices. With the African Union Mission, you have the military. There are more than 24,000 African troops from various countries on the ground, plus whatever national security people who are there, yet they can't seem to beat these groups than are not even 10,000 in size. They're more like 5,000 or something.
What is missing...and the crux of it would be to try to deepen these governance structures and build trust with the communities at the local level while you are simultaneously trying to reconcile and address grievances. I don't know if that answers the question, but I see the gap as being that as you have these military and humanitarian interventions, there needs to be some comprehensive political and social reconciliation at every level.
People are beginning to have conferences inside the country. For the longest time, conferences were happening in Nairobi and Kampala, even for the politicians to talk to each other. Now that we have federal member states and cities, politicians can actually go and meet inside the country, not only in Mogadishu but in different parts. Decentralizing the power and taking it away from just one city is the beginning of something good. Now we need to couple the military interventions and security apparatus with some sort of social and political reconciliation, as well as conflict resolution processes that are informed by the indigenous mechanisms.
I hope that covers it.