Issue No. 316

Somali President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud's diplomatic tour continues apace. Since 26 December and Israel's bombshell recognition of Somaliland, Hassan Sheikh has travelled to Türkiye, Ethiopia, and, in recent days, Egypt and Qatar, rallying support for his government, and Somalia's "unity, sovereignty, and territorial integrity." And he has found success in three of these four, with Ankara, Cairo, and Doha sitting on one side of a broader Red Sea schism against the Emirati-Israeli axis. Somaliland ally, Emirati broker and regionally isolated Ethiopia, as ever, continues to hedge its bets

There are rivalries born from distance, and rivalries born from closeness. Nearly three decades of Ethiopia-Eritrea feuding —barring the brief, destructive interregnum in Tigray —is borne of the latter. The depth of the socio-cultural linkages between modern-day Ethiopia and Eritrea dates back centuries, with the shared highlands part of the sophisticated Axumite kingdom that stretched into the Arabian Peninsula.

Police officers restraining lawmakers in a parliamentary chamber is rarely a healthy sign of a functioning democracy. With just a couple of months left before the Somali president's term expires, his allies in parliament are plumbing fresh depths to cement the latest centralising revisions to the Provisional Constitution. And in the past week alone, dozens more opposition MPs have been summarily thrown out after resisting such unilateral amendments in scenes reminiscent of a 20th-century putsch, rather than a putative parliamentary democracy. Plans to declare a parallel parliament are now underway.

A tentative calm has returned to the South West city of Baidoa. On Wednesday afternoon, heavy fighting broke out in the town's western neighbourhoods, and after two days of bloody clashes, dozens appear to be injured or killed. What began as a land dispute near Baidoa's livestock market quickly degenerated, pulling in forces aligned with a federal minister as intense gunfire and mortars rocked the city. This was no small matter —and despite assertions that it was a case of disarming rogue forces, it was anything but, and instead appears to be the latest product of ratcheting electoral tensions. With South West President Abdiaziz Laftagareen today announcing the expulsion of the government's most senior electoral official from Baidoa, is this the final straw for the fractious Baidoa-Mogadishu relationship?

Dead men do not just walk in Juba — they can now be appointed to election task forces. In one of the most bizarre stories in recent memory, Salva Kiir's government selected Steward Sorobo Budia last week for a new task force comprised of signatories to South Sudan's long-collapsed 2018 peace agreement. Three days later, the president's office was forced to admit that Hon. Sorobo—a former politician from a negligible party —had died 6 years prior, making him unable to serve on the farcical "Leadership Body of the Parties Signatory to the R-ARCSS for Dialogue on Election-Related Matters."

Yesterday morning, Mogadishu residents were woken by a noise unlike the usual dawn bustle of bajaj taxis — F-16 Viper fighter jets sweeping over the city. Beyond the shock and awe of the newest batch of Turkish military hardware in the Somali capital, it was the latest potent symbol of the centre stage Somalia has taken within Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's grand neo-Ottoman vision. As if in a military parade, Turkish drones, jets, helicopters, and warships have all made appearances in Somalia in recent weeks, displaying some of Türkiye's latest homegrown tech —as well as the F-16s licensed from Lockheed Martin. And so, the steady militarisation of bilateral relations—and Ankara's penetration of Somalia's security sector—continues apace.

A brief resumption of fighting in Western Tigray between Tigrayan and federal troops last week has returned the fraught context of northern Ethiopia back to the precipice of full-blown conflict. Details remain murky, but for at least three days, deadly clashes flared in the contested Tselemt area between Tigrayan troops and the Ethiopian military.

Last week, the brief glimmer towards a path to resolving Somalia's turgid political impasse was extinguished almost as soon as it emerged. The Council for the Future of Somalia (CFS) was supposedly heading to Mogadishu, including Puntland President Said Abdullahi Deni and his Jubaland counterpart Ahmed Madoobe, for talks with Villa Somalia, though their scope remained murky, and optimism that the government would be willing to consider compromise remained dim. But even these initial talks —and the first face-to-face meeting between Deni, Madoobe, and President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud in Mogadishu for well over two years —were doomed from the off.

The scramble for Africa left deep scars across the continent, but few colonial partitions proved as consequential as the division of Somali territories in the late 19th century. Today, as Somaliland seeks international recognition, the story of its brief independence and hasty union with Somalia reveals how the colonial powers, keen to divest themselves of imperial responsibilities, left behind a crisis of contested sovereignty that would take decades to resolve.