Somalia’s recurring crises are rooted at home, not in the outside world

By Khadar AfrahSunday June 7, 2026

Somalia has long told itself a consoling tale about its own failure: that its troubles are always authored elsewhere. Colonial mapmakers, Cold War blocs, hostile neighbours, opportunistic donors and a parade of foreign conferences are cast as the chief culprits. Abdirahman Roble Ulayare’s recent Hiiraan Online essay, “Foreign interference and the struggle for Somali sovereignty,” sits squarely in that tradition. It is earnest. It is also evasive.

Ulayare is not wrong about everything. Colonial rule shattered local institutions, and major powers have certainly pursued their own interests in the Horn. The real dispute is over agency. His argument casts Somalis as the passive victims of outside designs, acted upon rather than acting. That framing is convenient for the political class, because it shifts responsibility beyond its reach. The more difficult truth is the opposite: Somalia’s long decline has been driven less by foreign ambition — which is a constant in world politics — than by Somali conduct, which remains in Somali hands.

When the European empires withdrew from the Horn, they did not simply abandon Somalia. In 1949, the United Nations General Assembly decided the future of the former Italian colony by vote. Instead of handing the territory to a neighbour or leaving it to drift, it placed southern Somalia under a UN-supervised trusteeship administered by Italy, with a clear condition: the territory was to be prepared for full independence within ten years.

That fact sits awkwardly with the standard interference narrative. The first major international intervention in modern Somali affairs was not a device to keep Somalis subordinate; it was a timetable for sovereignty, and it was met. The British protectorate in the north and the Italian-administered south gained independence in 1960 and merged days later into one republic. Few post-colonial states were given such a deliberate path to self-rule.

What followed was a Somali choice. The democratic republic of the 1960s eroded into clan patronage and electoral malpractice before any foreign power could dismantle it. The 1969 coup was carried out by Somalis. The dictatorship that came after it was a Somali creation.

Ulayare is right that great powers pursue advantage and prefer compliant partners to troublesome ones. But that is not a Somalia-specific plot; it is the ordinary language of international relations. Every country is courted, pressured and negotiated with by stronger states. The real question is not whether outsiders have interests, but whether national leaders defend those interests or trade them away to protect their own power.

Somalia’s Cold War experience makes that plain. It was Siad Barre, not Washington or Moscow, who aligned the country with the Soviet Union in the 1970s, and it was Barre again who shifted toward the United States after the 1977 Ogaden war turned against him. The superpowers supplied money and weapons; the decisions to invade Ethiopia, militarise the state and govern through clan favour and secret police were made in Villa Somalia. Foreign patrons did not impose those choices. They were welcomed by a ruler tightening his grip. Outsiders are usually invited in by Somalis seeking leverage over other Somalis.

The record since the collapse of the state in 1991, the period Ulayare treats as the height of foreign manipulation, tells a similar story. After famine followed civil war, an American-led force operating under a UN mandate landed in 1992 to help feed a starving population; its purpose was survival, not subjugation. The world then convened the conferences that produced the Transitional National Government in 2000 and the Transitional Federal Government in 2004. When those institutions were nearly overwhelmed by armed extremists, an African Union force financed by Western donors and staffed by Somalia’s neighbours held Mogadishu and pushed Al-Shabaab back. That mission still underwrites the federal state today.

The diplomatic recovery was equally intentional. In 2012 and 2013, the United States and other countries formally recognised a Somali central government for the first time in more than two decades. The financial support was no less consequential. In December 2023, the IMF and World Bank approved Somalia’s completion point under the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries initiative, cancelling roughly 4.5 billion US dollars in debt and reducing external obligations from about 64 per cent of GDP to below 6. The same international actors accused of stripping Somalia of sovereignty had just returned access to its treasury. A power determined to keep Somalia weak would not feed its people in famine, secure its capital, restore recognition and forgive its debts.

If foreign actors were the decisive cause of Somalia’s problems, then the country would stabilise whenever outside support was strong and unravel whenever it faded. The opposite has been true: the state has broken down most predictably when Somalis have been left to run it. The 4.5 formula Ulayare criticises was not imposed by a foreign conference; it was a Somali bargain that allotted every major lineage a fixed share of the spoils. The federalism he blames for fragmentation was not dictated from abroad either; Somali elites carved it into political fiefdoms, each with its own president, budget and foreign sponsors.

That is the uncomfortable centre of the argument. Somali sovereignty has not mainly been stolen. It has been spent — by a political class that treats the state as something to seize rather than something to build.

The evidence is unfolding now. Somalia is in the third week of a constitutional crisis that is entirely homegrown. The president’s four-year term expired on 15 May 2026. He says he has secured a new mandate through 2027 on the basis of amendments pushed through by his own institutions; the opposition, Puntland State and Jubaland call it a power grab. Negotiations have collapsed. No foreign government designed this standoff. It is a Somali fight over a Somali constitution, among Somali leaders. The outside world has been reduced to issuing joint statements, as it did on 1 June, urging Somalis to talk. That is not a puppet master at work, but bystanders watching a self-inflicted wound.

The timing carries its own irony. The president now stretching the constitution to stay in office is the same leader who stood with the IMF 18 months ago to celebrate debt relief that restored Somalia’s financial standing. Sovereignty was returned. The issue was never whether Somalia could get it back, but what its leaders would do with it once they had it.

None of this erases the outside world’s real failures. Donors have warped priorities, neighbours have meddled and mediators have often served themselves. A serious Somali politics would hold them to account. But accountability has to begin at home, and the interference thesis blocks that reckoning. By placing every setback beyond Somalia’s borders, it absolves the people most responsible. It is the most flattering story a self-interested ruling class can hear, which is why it lasts.

Sovereignty is not something foreigners can simply confiscate. It is a practice, sustained or squandered by those who govern. Somalia has had its independence restored more than once, by the United Nations in 1960 and by the international community after 1991, and each time the same political class has squandered it. Until Somalis begin looking in the mirror rather than out of the window, the next crisis is already waiting. The hand that keeps Somalia from sovereignty is not foreign. It is our own.