By Abdisaid M. Ali
The Civilian Republic, 1960 to 1969: National Unity of Purpose, Constitutional Rule, and the Incomplete State Formation
Part II is divided in two because Somalia faced the same state formation challenge under two different political orders. The first sought to build the republic through constitutional rule, parliamentary politics, and gradual institutional development. The second attempted to solve the same problems through military command, centralization, and coercion. This essay has examined the civilian republic from 1960 to 1969. The next turns to the military period and asks why the attempt to complete Somali state formation through force ultimately deepened the crisis it set out to resolve.
Somalia entered independence with a nation already awake and a state still incomplete. The new republic inherited legal sovereignty, diplomatic recognition, a constitution, parliament, ministries, and courts. It also inherited a government with limited reach, modest revenue, few trained officials, and a public infrastructure too narrow for the scale of the mission before it. That imbalance defined the civilian decade. The central issue was not whether Somalis had political energy, legitimacy, or national purpose. They did. The harder question was whether those assets could be converted into durable rule.
On 1 July 1960, the former British Somaliland and Italian Somaliland entered into union and established the Somali Republic. Independence marked both the end of empire and the political union of two Somali territories. It brought two separately governed territories into one republic and gave many Somalis the sense that partition could, in time, be reversed. A people still divided by imperial frontiers could now imagine a common political future within a single sovereign frame.
Much of that achievement rested on the Somali Youth League (SYL). From the 1940s onward, it gave Somali nationalism political form. It built leadership, organization, and a reach that extended across towns and regions. Clerks, traders, students, religious figures, elders, and ordinary citizens were drawn into a wider cause, and the struggle for independence acquired a language capable of reaching beyond local loyalties.
Its force came from the fact that it worked with convictions already alive in Somali society. Somalis saw themselves as one people. Islam provided a shared moral vocabulary. The frontiers dividing Somali inhabited territory carried the feel of interruption rather than settlement. The League did not invent these sentiments. It organized them.
It also produced the first generation that would lead the republic. By independence, Aden Abdullah Osman, Abdirashid Ali Shermarke, Abdirazak Haji Hussein, and Mohamed Haji Ibrahim Egal had already passed through years of political contest. They entered office with experience in coalition building, bargaining, rivalry, and the conduct of politics on a national scale, before the state they inherited had acquired the means to govern with equal reach. Somalia therefore entered independence with leaders ready for office, but with a state still too slight for the full burdens placed upon it.
The first government revealed both the promise and the difficulty of the moment. Aden Abdullah Osman assumed the presidency, Haji Bashir Ismail Yusuf took the speakership of parliament, and on 22 July 1960 Aden Abdulle appointed Abdirashid Ali Shermarke as prime minister. Those appointments carried a significance beyond the allocation of office. They established the first civilian architecture of the union and gave the new republic an initial balance between presidency, parliament, and cabinet at the very moment two former territories were being asked to function as one state. The cabinet drew figures from both former territories. The new republic thus began as nationalist fulfillment and administrative compression at once. Union gave the state moral force. It also imposed an immediate integration problem. Cabinet formation therefore carried a burden larger than policy. Every government had to balance north and south, accommodate major lineages, preserve the broad centrality of the Somali Youth League, and satisfy the expectation that independence should benefit the whole republic.
This was the first layer of the sovereignty problem. External sovereignty arrived quickly. Somalia entered the international system with recognition, embassies, a flag, and formal equality among states. Internal sovereignty required slower construction. Authority had to reach beyond Mogadishu in regular form. Revenue had to be collected through law and routine. Administration had to become continuous enough to bind the republic to everyday life. The new state therefore acquired international standing faster than governing depth. That gap between sovereignty in law and sovereignty in practice formed the central structural challenge of the decade.
The constitutional order of the 1960s remains the most open political period in modern Somali history. Elections were contested. Parliament mattered. Governments rose and fell through constitutional means. Newspapers criticized ministers and exposed scandal. Political leaders argued in public and lost office without military intervention. In comparative African terms, this was no small achievement. At a time when much of postcolonial Africa was moving toward one party rule, presidential concentration, or military guardianship, Somalia preserved a wide political field.
That openness gave the republic real strengths. Constitutional politics created a visible arena for rivalry. Public competition gave authority procedural legitimacy. Parliamentary life offered institutions through which elite conflict could be mediated rather than merely suppressed. In 1967, Aden Abdullah Osman transferred power to Abdirashid Ali Shermarke through an electoral process, one of the earliest presidential successions by constitutional means in postcolonial Africa. Its significance lay in the principle it affirmed: authority could change hands without breaking the state.
Power could change hands without destroying the republic itself. Aden Abdullah Osman’s significance lay precisely there. He gave the presidency constitutional proportion. He governed at a time when parliament still had real authority, ministers could lose office, newspapers criticized the government openly, and the president stood within the constitutional order rather than above it. By accepting defeat, he established a precedent stronger than any constitutional provision: office could pass to another man without placing the republic at risk.
Shermarke’s early premiership carried equal weight. His governments helped stabilize the union and translate constitutional principle into practical rule. His cabinets sought regional balance, included northern and southern figures, and preserved the centrality of the Somali Youth League without reducing the state to a narrow factional instrument. That was the political labor of early state formation. Cabinet making in those years was not simply about distributing portfolios. It was also about proving that union had produced a genuine republic rather than a southern state clothed in nationalist language.
The constitutional order also retained reforming capacity. Abdirazak Haji Hussein represented the clearest effort to strengthen the republic through civilian means. His government pursued administrative seriousness, a firmer public ethic, and a stronger stance against corruption. He matters because he shows that the parliamentary system still had means of self correction. The order was under pressure, yet reform remained possible within it. That fact deserves emphasis because later military claims of national rescue rested on the proposition that constitutional politics had run its course. By the late 1960s, the civilian system was feeling the weight of mounting pressures, yet it still had life in it. Parliament still met, governments could still be challenged, and the republic still had some ability to correct its course through constitutional means.
After his election to the presidency in 1967, Shermarke chose Mohamed Haji Ibrahim Egal to head the government as prime minister. Egal took office while the republic still had a democratic energy rare in postcolonial Africa. Parliament mattered, newspapers wrote freely, and governments still rose and fell through politics. Yet beneath that surface, party fragmentation, weak administration, and the growing scramble for office, patronage, and access to the state were slowly pulling the system apart.
He broadened the cabinet, incorporated more northern figures and rivals, and gave greater emphasis to development and a more moderate regional posture. Yet he governed in a political field in which party multiplication widened representation while reducing coherence. Parliament reflected many interests, but the competition for office grew sharper because the state controlled the few resources that mattered most.
Here the political economy of the civilian decade comes into full view. Ministerial office, customs revenue, development allocations, foreign aid, and public employment acquired extraordinary value because the institutional base of the state remained narrow. Where governing depth is limited, the center becomes politically precious. Access to the state becomes the main route to influence because few alternative institutions exist through which recognition, resources, and protection can be distributed. This was not simply a moral failing of elites. It was a structural incentive built into the state they had inherited. Participation widened more quickly than the machinery capable of organizing and containing it. The center therefore became more fiercely contested precisely because the republic remained institutionally shallow.
Read more: Somalia’s Political Class and the Fate of the State, 1925–Present: A Strategic Historical Analysis Part IIA
Abdisaid M. Ali
———–
Abdisaid is the chairperson of Lomé Peace and Security Forum and Former Somalia’s Minister of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation, Somalia. X:@4rukun
Read Part I: The Making of Somalia’s Political Class, 1925–1960: Colonial Mediation and the Selection of Leadership- By Abdisaid M Ali
