*This question originated on the Q&A site Quora. The response below is my own content copied from the site. Due to the nature of my participation on Quora, all such answers quite off the bat, and relatively crappy (but better than nothing) quality as my original WordPress articles. That said, I still feel that some IrateNotPirate readers stand to benefit from my inclusion of them.
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Answer: I’m going to take your meaning of “bad” to mean unsafe for the average person and materially impoverished. First off, I’m in Somalia right now and loving it, feel safe 95% of the time, and will in fact recommend brief visits to Mogadishu for my Somali friends and family back home in the US (where I’m from). This is largely because I blend right in. I’m tall. Rail-thin. Dark-skinned. The works. To summarize my assessment of the safety level for the average Joe, I’d say the degree of safety one has is proportional to their ability to blend into the society as it is, in other words, to not stick out and be visible to individuals who wouldn’t hesitate to harm you for your money. That said, I would not recommend visiting or staying in Somalia to anyone who lacks the ability to blend in here. It’s still too risky for that, although, depending on how narrowly you make your radius of exploration, it’s not impossible to spend a very brief time in Mogadishu as a tourist and visit some of the breathtaking sites the city has to offer. It becomes even more possible if you hire personal security guards and have local friends here who can guide you and steer you clear of the riskiest zones based on their experience. Finally, “is Somalia materially impoverished to an unacceptable degree for humanity?” Uhh yes. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist or knowledge of many details of Somalia to know that people are needlessly suffering on a mass-scale here given the kinds of technologies, medicines, wealth-hoarding and innovation the rest of the world could offer, if enough ppl gave a damn. It’s too bad the people demanding libertarians and anarchists to “go live in Somalia” don’t realize that just because there admittedly hasn’t been a formalized structure of laws and a justice system in the Western conception, social order and justice have persisted in other ways, like violent small-town warlords, hard-fought peaceful regional administrations and traditional law or “Xeer” as it’s called in Somalia which uses clan structures and elders to establish law and order the way it did for centuries before Western models of government came on the scene. And, in the spirit of answering your original question, it’s true that Somalia has improved dramatically in terms of “safety” over the past decade or so, but the poverty still persists virtually untouched, coupled with growing economic inequality between Somali Diaspora (like me!) and the poor locals, and with roots far beyond what a few years of relative peace can effectively extricate. Oh, and in case this wasn’t made clear in the above, the politicians who are saying go back to Somalia are using what politicians have used for centuries: rhetoric. They don’t really know what Somalia is actually like today, and they don’t care that they’re using the word insensitively to further their aims. Thank you for asking this. Not enough people get past Black Hawk Down and Captain Phillips in their study of Somalia.