The Effect of Overlapped Roles of Ownership, Leadership and Management in Post-Civil War Somali Universities

This paper examines the overlap that exists in the governance systems of higher education institutions (HEIs) in Somalia. Then, it tries to contribute to the appropriate remedies for effective higher education leadership. With the exception of four universities, all of the investigated universities and their boards exist nominally. Only eight university boards of trustees/directors are structured in ways where the delegation of responsibilities is achieved in a way that gives other bodies a sense of who answers to whom. For the publicly-owned Somali National University (SNU), it is the incumbent President of the Federal Republic of Somalia is the rector and patron. There is a great deal of confusion and overlap in the respective roles of its council and Senate. As a result, the immediately felt knock-on effect has been the quality of education delivered, which in turn impacted the employability of graduates. To achieve better, a good corporate governance system, which is cascaded down into middle and lower-tier management that guarantees a balance of power between different investors and management, is sine qua non. Finally, the FGS and FMEs need to set up proper external quality control mechanism bylaws for the universities to form an internal quality assurance (IQA) apparatus.