Imaginary Maps, Real Failure: Why Mogadishu’s ‘Sovereignty’ Talk Rings Hollow.
Somalia’s National Consultative Council (NCC) has issued a fierce condemnation of Israel’s recognition of Somaliland. The language is dramatic. The substance is empty.
While President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud and his regional leaders remain unable to convene a basic political meeting in Mogadishu, the federal government insists it retains “sovereignty” over Hargeisa. This is a claim made from a capital whose airport road still requires foreign troops for protection. Sovereignty, in Somalia’s case, has become a word divorced from reality.
The NCC argues that Israel’s decision “threatens regional security” in the Red Sea. This assertion collapses under even minimal scrutiny. Somaliland’s Coast Guard is the only credible local force securing the Berbera corridor against piracy, trafficking, and smuggling. Mogadishu, by contrast, remains the primary battleground of Al-Shabaab—the single most destabilizing terrorist network in East Africa.
For a government that hosts the region’s most lethal extremist threat to lecture a stable, democratic polity on security is not merely ironic; it is an insult to intelligence.
The call for “national unity” follows a familiar script. When a state cannot provide safety, electricity, or employment, it manufactures an external enemy. Somaliland now fills that role. Israel’s recognition is labeled “illegal,” not because it violates international law, but because it punctures a lucrative fiction.
Somaliland is a functioning state in every material sense: it issues passports, runs elections, maintains security forces, and governs within defined borders. Somalia operates under a provisional constitution that has never fully taken effect and a federal system increasingly at war with itself.
What truly alarms Mogadishu is not Jerusalem or the Red Sea. It is money. The “Somalia” brand sustains a multibillion-dollar aid economy. Acknowledging that Somaliland is the only durable political success to emerge from the 1960 union threatens that revenue stream and the elite class dependent on it.
The NCC statement is the diplomatic equivalent of a “No Trespassing” sign nailed to a house abandoned in 1991. The world has moved on. The Hargeisa–Jerusalem axis looks forward—toward trade, technology, and security cooperation. Mogadishu remains trapped in nostalgia, clinging to an imaginary map and a failed union.
Somaliland did not break away. It moved up. The sooner Mogadishu focuses on governing its own streets instead of policing reality elsewhere, the better for everyone.
