Somaliland: Self sufficiency And Self reliance Are The Foundations Of A Healthy And Sustainable Society.

[Deeq A.]

 

Beginning from 19th century, two measurements have been used to get a sense of how well developed countries are doing. One is gross domestic product, the monetary value of all finished goods and services made within a country during a specific period. The other measurement is a country’s unemployment rate.

But when it comes to figuring out how well an underdeveloped country like Somaliland is doing and serving its citizens, the above measurements are not taken into consideration. There are other factors that are taken into account when assessing how well a third world country such as Somaliland is progressing and providing services to its people.

There is nothing more common to measure economic strength and social progress of an underdeveloped country than self-sufficiency or self-reliance.

First, self-sufficiency is having the ability and resources to take care of yourself without outside help. In other words, it is a country’s ability to meet the basic needs of its people, such as basic food and clothing, and/or a country’s ability to identify unmet needs and implement proper use of resources. One good example of self-sufficiency is growing your own food and making your own clothing.

Secondly, self-reliance is the ability to depend on yourself to meet your own requirements.   The capacity to rely on one’s own capabilities, and to manage one’s own affairs independetly.

The concept of self-sufficiency is basically taken to mean the extent to which a country can satisfy its needs from its own domestic production.

The difference between self sufficiency and self-reliance is that self-sufficiency relates to the fulfilment of a nation’s basic needs and proper use of its resources, while  self reliance refers to control over decision making, which is the reliance on one’s own judgment, abilities, actions etc.

Of all the needs that come under self-sufficiency concept, there are two elements for humans to survive. The first one is food, the second is water.  Without food and water, human beings cannot live, but without other services humans can survive.

How often does insufficiency of food and water supply come into Somaliland’s concern and consideration? Do Somaliland people hold any view of the extent to which their country can satisfy its food needs from its own domestic production, if global food scarcity or shortage will happen?

A nation which fails to address its basic needs, encourage itself to improve its learning skills, arrange its ideas with the future challenges, protect the environment, and initiate projections to invest in getting its needs from its own domestic production is not succeeding.

Taking life as it comes is simply never pursuing or predicting aspects of what the future would look like. It is a condition in which preparation for tomorrow is not part of one’s culture (How a society leads its own life).

In such condition as this, things seem that going forward is unlikeliy to happen, because viewing the world through rose colored glasses is not the answer to overcoming adversity.  What scope people wearing rose colored glasses see, determines what story they see and how they look at the world.

Of course, seeing the world through different ways is about securing things, defending things, copying technology in order to save cost, as Chinese people do, controlling things, inventing things, protecting and preserving both renewable and non-renewable resources. It’s mostly a fear-based view of the world that is preparing for future events. This approach is humanly normal.

Experience shows that developed countries always base their national strategies for their present and future needs on a fear-based stand to minimize the danger that may arise, for instances, from the occurrence of food scarcity or outbreak of world war, while underdeveloped nations mostly fail to set out strategies that can ensure the means to produce sufficient supply of their needs at the domestic level that will help them find a sweet space at which dependence on what others produce is minimized.

The difference between the two approaches is that rich countries mostly utilise their mental mechanics for shaping their life as they want, while poverty-stricken countries neither use their effort nor their mental imagination for trying to tame their lives.

The shame on Somaliland societies is that they take life as it comes to them. And taking life as it comes is fundamentally an “anti-change state.”  That is, the way Somaliland people lead their lives is not about thinking in regards to the survival of the tribe.

Nothing is more bitter than truth. Who among us can deny or disagree the fact that Somaliland has been, and still continues to be the dumping ground for the massively produced foreign goods?

This reality goes further from this and probably begs the questions such as:-

a) What do Somaliland people control?
b) What do they own?
c) What do they produce?
e) What do they distribute?
f) What are the goods that are the produce
of Somaliland country that citizens of Somaliland consume?

In fact Somaliland people are incredibly consumers and have no special creation. They never ever produced an iota of their basic needs in their entire life. Their food, their cloth, their cars, their tea, their phones, their mobiles, their lotion, their guns, all their white goods, etc, are not their own make, but all are made and controlled by people who don’t look like them, who may retain their goods for their own needs in hard times, who may not even be happy to see Somalis and their likes to survive.

Academics had it right when they predicted 50 years ago on the prospect of parasite societies: “Non-productivity reduces output, represses levels of living standard for the masses and engenders strife.”

A nation is alive only when it constantly revives and revitalises the way in which it manages its problems, aligns its national vision with what is going on in the world and discards its outdated traditions, habits, rituals and assumptions.

Of all the problems Somaliland now faces, lack of local production is the elephant in the room. The old saying which goes to say “necessity is the mother of invention” is applicable to Somaliland. A bleak future is for he who knowingly ignores or escapes from this reality.

How should Somaliland state get itself out of foreign-produce dependency? How Somaliland would deal with the lack of local production?

The solution is simple. Doing what others did and still do, is the answer as to how Somaliland state can free itself from foreign goods and become self-reliant on its own resources rather than that of others.

Apart from light, water and air, food is what makes humans survive; what provides human bodies with what they need to stay alive; what makes human beings grow, active, energetic, move and work; what keeps human bodies healthy and heal themselves; what every human who is born into this world requires.

Thus, Somaliland must innovate and intellectuslise its weak policies towards its economic growth and come up with the ability, skill and knowledge to boost domestic yield to satisfy its basic needs from within its own domestic production without foreign produce?

In the heat of these alarming moments, Somaliland must make sense of food insufficiency and insecurity, recognize climate change and global warming, protect its environment, dream of a regenerative agriculture, envision a green revolution, create an awareness throughout Somaliland, so that the population must plant sea and herd its animals, and dig the land for farms to produce more and better food.

A lesson that sends a powerful message to every country that cannot stand on its feet without foreign aid is that, as a result of the sudden outbreak of the pandemic, Covid-19, rich nations have already started intensive researches on de-globalisation and indeed focused on setting up urgent objectives to develop their local production and measures to stop outsourcing supply chains.

Remember, environment does not need humans to survive, but humans need it. So, let us get used to the truth that we are all connected to it and must like to live an environment-centered life.

Nothing is more attractive than the reality to acknowledge that a healthy environment is the foundation for a healthy and sustainable society.

This hope can only come true when all of us look ahead and always try to use our resources wisely for the sake of our future generations.

Who knows what the nature will bring to us tomorrow? What matters to us is to get ready for how we can arrange our ideas with how we can shape the sense of tomorrow.

By:JamaFalaag.

       Hargeisa, Somaliland.

 

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