Factories, schools, cemeteries, and even military bases—vanishing under President Hassan Sheikh’s silent watch.
Tour Mogadishu today and the evidence is everywhere: bulldozed lots, fenced compounds, and ruins where public sites once stood. Since Hassan Sheikh Mohamud’s re-election in 2022, a wave of land seizures has gutted the city’s civic, industrial, and cultural fabric. What critics describe as systematic looting now stretches across 65 sites—factories, schools, clinics, cemeteries, even military camps.
The scale is staggering. Relics of Somalia’s socialist economy—the Mogadishu Dairy Factory, the Pharmaceutical Factory, wheat mills, cigarette plants—are gone, fenced off for private investors tied to the presidency. So are parts of Mogadishu’s prized coastline, including Lido Beach. Military compounds, once critical to defense, have been carved up and sold, leaving civil society groups warning of national security risks.
Some seizures sparked fury. In June 2024, officials ordered the exhumation of 50,000 graves in Hamar Jajab, handing the land to a businessman close to the president. Families were told to remove their dead in ten days. Outrage was instant: Somalis called it desecration, a betrayal of faith and decency. In Tarabuunka, an eviction of displaced families spiraled into armed clashes, with casualties mounting.
The looting is not just industrial or military—it reaches into daily life. Blood banks, maternal clinics, university dorms, national police housing, even cultural heritage sites like Casa Italia and the Lanzarote Hotel have slipped quietly into private hands. Former presidents Abdiqasim Salad Hassan, Sharif Sheikh Ahmed, and Mohamed Farmaajo, usually divided, united to denounce the seizures as “a breach of the Somali constitution.”
This is no isolated corruption scandal. It is a coordinated dispossession, driven by the presidency and a circle of politically connected investors. With silence from Villa Somalia, the public is left with ruins and rage. Mogadishu’s landmarks, once symbols of resilience, are vanishing—not to warlords or terrorists, but to the state itself.
