Politics & Power Quote by Jan Egeland

Egeland’s line has the clipped impatience of an aid official who has watched the same emergency repeat until it feels less like a “crisis” than a habit. The blunt opener - “It is only the Somalis themselves” - does two things at once: it rejects the fantasy that outsiders can engineer a functioning state, and it draws a moral boundary around responsibility. Humanitarians are often expected to sound endlessly sympathetic; Egeland instead performs tough love, signaling to donors and diplomats that the bottleneck is political behavior, not the volume of relief supplies.

The subtext is a careful repositioning of agency. By insisting he “doesn’t hide” this view when meeting leaders, he frames candor as a kind of integrity, contrasting himself with the international tendency to flatter local powerbrokers to maintain access. That aside also hints at the transactional world of humanitarian politics: you need warlords and ministers to let convoys pass, yet you’re also trying not to become complicit in the very systems that perpetuate disorder.

Context matters: Somalia’s post-state-collapse era trained the world to see famine, militias, and fragmented authority as a permanent loop. Egeland’s language (“old practices”) casts conflict not as destiny but as learned behavior - something that can be unlearned. Still, there’s an edge: “they have to learn” risks sounding paternalistic, as if peace is a lesson delivered from Oslo. The tension is the point. He’s arguing that external intervention hits a ceiling unless internal political culture changes, while acknowledging - without naming - how international money, arms flows, and geopolitical meddling have also kept the loop spinning.