In the absence of state employment, the largest job market in many developing countries, the clan or tribe, provides individuals with necessary economic and social security. Individual resort to clan for insurance, social welfare, protection, and justice.

In the West the individual takes precedence over the community. People worry about their personal incomes, personal welfare and personal security. In Africa it is the clan that is central while the individual takes the backseat. Members of a whole extended family can share a US$100 check sent by an overseas clan member. Every Somali person I know extends some financial assistance to clan members scattered across borders and continents.

So it is the whole clan that owns each individual's salary. One is obliged to extend financial assistance for living, education, and medical and social welfare programs to any clan member who needs help. Development projects initiated by clan elders are financed by clan members inside and outside the country. These include schools, clinics, water wells and roads.

Because of such concerted clan efforts, the people of Somalia and Somaliland now have more universities, hospitals and community-based development projects than ever existed during the heyday of the debt-washed central government. For example, as a result of these clan efforts, my hometown in Somaliland today has a university, more schools, a better managed public hospital, several private clinics and reliable water and power distribution agencies.

Clan structures favor free trade and teach people to rely on their own resources to develop their own services rather than waiting for a government to provide them.

Dictatorial regimes in countries like Somalia and Iraq had destroyed the time-tested, traditional clan networks, losing their economic and social value. Instead, they provided a semblance of statehood with massive government employment, wasting the country's meager resources and foreign loans on buying tribal loyalties. Radicalism and militancy which have hitherto been kept at bay by the closely knit clan system filled the void created by the destruction of the clan structure. This has hastened the collapse of states and ushered in chaos and internecine wars.

Aain tribes were instrumental in quickly fixing failed state structures and restoring peace and stability. In Somaliland, for example, the clans there had resorted to their traditional pastoral democracy to reconcile among themselves and establish state structures. Ironically, it is the British colonial divide and rule system based on the preservation of every clan's geographical locality and on administrative sovereignty that has become a blessing in disguise. In the South, where the centralized system placed by the Italian colonizers and later consolidated by the military dictatorship, chaos remains.

It is therefore imperative to derive a lesson from the British divide and rule policy: it empowered tribal chiefs, delegated most of the administrative power to the clan system and created checks and balances among clans to keep their homegrown conflict resolution systems.