Abdirahman Mohamed Abdullahi did not walk into a struggling institution when he took the helm of the Central Bank of Somalia. He walked into something closer to a blank page. After decades of civil war, the bank was operating with almost entirely manual processes, regulating just five commercial banks and a handful of money transfer businesses, and functioning mainly as a fiscal agent for the government. By his own count, the challenge he faced was sitting at 85 percent.
That number is not abstract. It reflects what happens to financial institutions when conflict stretches across generations. The skills, the regulatory frameworks, the institutional memory, all of it had been interrupted. What remained was a basic foundation, and not much more.
Abdullahi is candid about where the real difficulty lived. It was not in sourcing technology or drafting legislation. It was in people. A central bank, he explains, is a highly specialised institution that demands a very specific kind of expertise, and that expertise does not rebuild itself overnight.
His story raises a question worth sitting with: what does it actually take to build a modern financial institution from near nothing, in a country still finding its footing? Watch this space.
Originally published by African Business.