Political decision-making is rarely linear; it is often an entanglement of competing interests, historical wounds, structural limitations, and emergent crises. As the policy scholar Horst Rittel described, many public problems are “wicked” — not because they are unsolvable, but because they have no single, correct solution. In such contexts, good intentions must be married with deep contextual understanding, competence, and a willingness to confront hard truths. Somalia, and particularly Jubaland, sits at such a crossroad. Over the past two decades, Somalia has made fragile yet undeniable progress from the ruins of state collapse. However, the recovery remains uneven, marred by…