Father Mindset or Mother Mindset

What the Somali Home Teaches Us About Politics

As I reflect on governance in Somalia, a familiar image keeps coming to mind: the Somali household.

In the Somali home, the father is the head of the household. He works outside, earns the income, and is legally and socially recognized as the provider. But once he hands over the money, his role is largely finished. The rest—stretching that money, managing the family’s needs, anticipating problems before they arise—is left to the mother.

She’s the one who budgets, juggles competing needs, and makes impossible decisions with limited resources. Rent, food, school fees, clothes, emergencies—she handles it all. Often the money isn’t enough, but she finds a way. She borrows, negotiates, prioritizes, sacrifices—whatever it takes to keep things going. She knows the state of the fridge, which child is sick, who needs new shoes, and who’s falling behind in school.

Now imagine the house without the mother. The entire operation grinds to a halt. No matter how much money the father brings home, he cannot fill her role. He simply doesn’t have the knowledge, experience, or discipline to run a household. The work she does is technical, demanding, and rooted in constant, hands-on problem solving.

Somalia today is like that household. It is a motherless house run by fathers—politicians who enjoy the status of leadership but lack the mindset and practical skills needed for administration.

But what does it mean to be a mother in governance?

It means taking on a role where the work hasn’t been done—where the structures are missing and the basics still need to be built. In Somalia, holding public office doesn’t mean managing a system. It means creating one—offices, staff, procedures, and a way to make things function. None of it exists unless someone does the work.

Directors aren’t supervising operations; they are inventing them—filling gaps, training unprepared staff, drafting rules no one has used before, and getting things running in real time with minimal resources. It means being fully present in the work of reconstruction—taking initiative, making decisions, and staying close to the details, because the task is not to manage what exists, but to build what does not.

This is not governance as theory. It is governance as construction, improvisation, and exacting labor.

But few Somali officials operate with this understanding. From the president down to the secretary, most imagine themselves as fathers whose job is to preside. They associate leadership with symbolism and delegation: travel, meetings, appearances. The substance of the work—the discipline, the detail, the grind—is foreign to them.

Too often, Somali officials imitate what they see foreign leaders doing on television—cutting ribbons, giving press statements, flying to summits. But they miss what makes those activities possible: the layers of people and systems working quietly behind the scenes. When a minister abroad cuts a ribbon, it’s after hundreds of civil servants have handled the budget, designed the project, approved the contractors, managed the logistics, and delivered the work. In Somalia, none of that exists. Here, there is no functioning payroll, no real procurement office, no transportation plan. But the ribbon-cutting still happens. Officials perform power as if the state is already built, while nothing underneath has been done. It's like holding a graduation ceremony before the school even exists.

Somalia needs a mother mindset: a mindset that treats the state as a set of responsibilities, not a platform. It needs a mindset that recognizes how much remains undone, that works without ceremony, and that understands that public service in a country rebuilding is not prestige—it is difficult, necessary, and unfinished work.

Perhaps Somalia just needs mothers!