Somalia’s politics is trapped in a loop. A generation of leaders has cycled through the same tactics, the same alliances and the same evasions, leaving the public unconvinced that there is any meaningful difference between those in office and those seeking it. That exhaustion is no longer just a mood; it is a structural risk to the state. When voters see no program, no transparency and no red lines on sovereignty, trust collapses. And when trust collapses, predatory actors — foreign and domestic — move in.
Across the last decade, Somalia’s political class has largely abandoned programmatic competition. Campaigns revolve around personalities and patronage rather than policy. Deadlines for elections are treated as flexible, then stretched. Opposition blocs coalesce and fragment without discernible ideological content. The cumulative effect is that many citizens no longer perceive a difference between incumbents and challengers. It is a dangerous equilibrium: politics as musical chairs, rather than a contest of ideas capable of changing daily life.
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That dysfunction now intersects with decisions that cut to the core of sovereignty and public wealth. This week, the Fisheries Ministry announced a fishing agreement with OYAK — a Turkish military-linked conglomerate that functions as a pension fund for officers and soldiers. In principle, harnessing Somalia’s waters should be a cornerstone of recovery: the Indian Ocean is among the country’s most valuable assets, and a responsible fisheries policy could create jobs, grow exports and feed families.
But the process matters as much as the promise. Successive governments, federal and state, have normalized opaque deals with foreign entities. Contracts are unveiled after the fact, if at all; terms are withheld; parliamentary oversight is perfunctory or absent. When the counterparty is tied to another country’s military — as OYAK is in Turkey — the accountability questions multiply. Who benefits? What share returns to coastal communities? Which enforcement tools exist if quotas are exceeded or bycatch devastates local stocks? If citizens cannot see the answers, the default assumption is that resources are being bartered away without their consent.
At the same time, Mogadishu’s diplomacy is sending mixed signals at moments that demand clarity. President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud traveled to Addis Ababa even as the Ethiopian prime minister’s office promoted a map online that appeared to extend Ethiopia’s territory into parts of Somalia. Whether meant as provocation or carelessness, such imagery merits an immediate, public response anchored in law and history. The official silence — echoed by many politicians and intellectuals — risks normalizing a narrative that chips away at Somalia’s borders. In a region where maps have long been weapons, language matters, and timing matters more.
The pattern extends inward. Rather than building domestic mechanisms to resolve disputes, federal and state leaders too often outsource mediation — and even campaign financing — to foreign capitals, including neighbors whose interests conflict with Somalia’s. The practice is self-defeating. When the path to power runs through external patrons, domestic accountability weakens. When every crisis is internationalized, incentives to compromise at home vanish. The result is a political marketplace that answers outward and downward, not upward to citizens.
Somalia politics cannot keep absorbing these shocks. A society that feels its leaders are indifferent to public pain will disengage. Once apathy hardens, extraordinary acts — postponing elections, auctioning state assets in back rooms, shrugging off cartographic provocations — begin to look ordinary. That is how states hollow out.
There is another path. It begins with honesty about the choices already made and a clear line of sight to reforms that place citizens at the center. The government does not need to reinvent the wheel; it needs to enforce obvious safeguards and make them visible.
- Publish every resource contract within 15 days of signing, including fisheries, hydrocarbons and minerals. Disclose beneficial owners, revenue flows, employment terms and environmental safeguards. Make parliamentary ratification mandatory for strategic resources.
- Stand up a genuinely independent fisheries authority with satellite vessel monitoring (VMS/AIS), science-based total allowable catch, and community co-management councils along the coast. Ban bottom trawling. Tie licenses to onshore investment — cold-chain facilities, processing plants and training — so value is captured in Somalia, not offshore.
- Codify an election calendar in law with enforceable penalties for delay. Empower an independent electoral body to manage timelines and procurement. Require domestic disclosure of campaign finance, cap donations and prohibit foreign funding routed through intermediaries. Enable lawful small-donor fundraising from the Somali diaspora with transparent reporting.
- Adopt a doctrine for relations with neighbors that sets out red lines and crisis protocols. When images or statements challenge Somalia’s territorial integrity, the National Security Council should brief the public within 24 hours, table the issue in Parliament and instruct diplomats to respond with one voice.
- Rebuild public integrity infrastructure: a credible anti-corruption commission with prosecutorial referrals; a modern freedom of information statute; whistleblower protections; and an empowered auditor general whose findings trigger automatic hearings.
- Open political space. Protect journalists — and stop treating critical reporting as disloyalty. Universities, unions and civic organizations should be partners in policy design, not spectators. The fastest way to restore legitimacy is to let citizens see their fingerprints on decisions.
None of this is easy. All of it is essential. When leaders insist that secrecy is necessary or that “now is not the time,” they are asking the public to accept the same bargain that produced the current impasse: trust us, and ask no questions. That bargain has expired.
This analysis is not an argument against international partnerships. Somalia needs and deserves allies. But partnership is not patronage, and sovereignty is not a slogan. Agreements that allocate public wealth must be audited and debated before they bind the country for decades. Diplomatic engagement must be confident enough to draw lines, especially with neighbors. And political competition must be about programs that voters can measure, not only alliances they cannot see.
The alternative is already visible at the margins: a politics that rewards delay, a state that shrugs at insults to its borders, a resource economy captured by those with the least accountability to Somalis. That path ends in disillusion and vulnerability.
Somalis know the difference between rhetoric and responsibility. If the political class relearns it — by publishing the deals it signs, by defending the map it claims, by funding campaigns at home and solving disputes in Somali rooms — trust can be rebuilt. If not, the country will continue to be governed by a minority of insiders and an even smaller circle of outsiders, while the majority watches from the sidelines, weary and unheard.
The stakes are not abstract. They are the price of fish at the market, the right to vote on time, the dignity of borders that do not move according to someone else’s graphics department. A state that can deliver on those basics is within reach. It will not arrive by accident. It will arrive when leaders choose the public over the patronage system that has served them so well and the people so poorly.
By Ali Musa
Axadle Times international–Monitoring.
By Iman JamaFriday December 19, 2025
