Black Gold and Crude Ambitions
Amid much fanfare in late October, the Turkish oil and gas exploration vessel, the 'Oruç Reis,' docked at Mogadishu's Port to a warm welcome from Somalia's federal elite. Having set sail from Istanbul on 5 October, the exploratory vessel will now conduct 3D surveys of three undisclosed blocs of 15,000 square km in Somalia's territorial waters over 7 months as part of the secretive Turkey-Somalia bilateral agreement signed in March 2024. The arrival of the Oruç Reis is a step toward Mogadishu's long-held ambitions to profit from the country's 'black gold,' but any possible drilling will not occur for several months, and there remain several notable obstacles.
In a telling moment at the Mogadishu ceremony, Somalia's Defence Minister Abdulkadir Mohamed Nur 'Jama' gifted a replica painting to Turkish Energy and Natural Resources Minister Alparslan Bayraktar that depicted the Ottoman Empire when it included parts of modern-day Somalia and the Red Sea. The gesture was hardly subtle, a clear nod to Ankara and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's ambitious foreign policy that has oft been described as 'Neo-Ottoman' and their indulgent rhetoric on their former empire. Indeed, 'Oruç Reis' is another name for Aruj Barbarossa (c.1474-1518), a famed Ottoman corsair and a Sultan of Algiers. With Mogadishu aggressively seeking to undermine the Ethiopia-Somaliland Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) in 2024, it has amped up its historical connections to Ankara while overlooking the uncomfortable histories of Ottoman slave trading on the Indian Ocean.
It is more than simply rhetoric, though, and Ankara has moved quickly to cement itself as Villa Somalia's pre-eminent ally and benefit from the Addis-Mogadishu tensions. In October, Turkey's state-owned energy company TPAO and Somalia signed another joint onshore hydrocarbon exploration agreement. And Somalia isn't the only African country that Turkey is seeking to develop economic ties with, having signed two contracts with Niger on mining in October as well as oil and gas in July. Like other 'Middle Powers' in the Gulf, the Erdogan administration is highly assertive and transactional in the Horn and beyond, seeking to develop its foreign policy and interests with autonomy from the US.
Seeps of Somalia's oil were first formally identified during the colonial period by British and Italian geologists, while several major oil companies, including Chevron and Shell, began initial explorations in the 1950s. These were never acted upon, however, and state collapse in the 1990s meant that the country's purported oil and gas reserves have gone untapped. More recent 2D seismic studies have revealed that Somalia has potential oil and natural reserves of roughly 30 billion barrels, which would work out as slightly less than a third of the UAE's reserves. Where precisely, and if, the oil will be drilled remains to be seen, but it has been previously touted offshore from Galmudug, South West, and Jubaland in a USD 7 million 2022 agreement with US-based Coastline Exploration. However, like many development projects in Somalia, this never came to pass, nor did the ExxonMobil and Shell initial road maps agreed upon with the federal government in March 2020.
Oil and gas may yet bring significant revenue for the federal government, but the contents of the Turkey-Somalia maritime agreement remain under wraps, having been waved through parliament without scrutiny. The breakdown of potential profits is unknown, though it has been reported that President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud's family stands to personally gain, but without agreed fiscal federalism in Somalia, one can hardly imagine they will be shared equitably across the Federal Member States (FMS) with internal relations so poor.
Moreover, the potential for Turkish drilling off Jubaland's coast and closer to contested maritime waters with Kenya will likely prove highly contentious. The past month has seen the rapid collapse in relations between Kismaayo and Villa Somalia over the federal government's plans to extend regional presidential terms again before conducting dubious 'one-person, one-vote' elections. Though Jubaland has no real coast guard to speak of, unlike Puntland and Somaliland, federally mandated exploration or drilling by Turkey in the FMS waters would presumably be resisted. However, Ankara is also unlikely to be willing to be dragged into an internal Somali political dispute.
Drilling off Jubaland also raises the spectre of the 2021 International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruling that backed Somalia in its long-running dispute with Kenya over a 100,000 square km triangle of maritime territory in the Indian Ocean. The dispute turned particularly sour during the previous administrations of Mohamed Abdullahi Farmaajo in Somalia and Uhuru Kenyatta in Kenya, and Nairobi has continued to refuse to accept the ICJ ruling. In recent months, as Ankara has deepened its military and economic ties with Somalia, Nairobi has also toyed with purchasing French naval assets, possibly as a deterrent. Still, though Kenya would surely be resistant to drilling in the disputed territory, it has also not explored suspected oil and gas in the Lamu basin.
There are other questions, too, about the wisdom of drilling for finite oil reserves amidst a global transition towards renewable energy, however slow. As seen in South Sudan and Sudan, administrations dependent on oil are highly susceptible to fluctuations in the market or severing of their supply, which inevitably has major knock-ons for their political economies and populations. With Somalia's political settlement already defined by a complex array of clan-based elite power-sharing agreements, the drilling for oil could supercharge Mogadishu's corruption and political jockeying. As was the case in South Sudan and Sudan, the majority of Somalia's impoverished population will almost certainly not reap the profits of any potential drilling; it will be funnelled into patron-client networks.
While the Oruç Reis conducts its seismic surveys in the coming months, Somalia's political schisms appear certain to continue to deepen onshore. Unlike gold, for instance, which can be smelted and sold by small-time companies, oil is a highly complex extractive resource that funnels money to the central elite. For Somalia, with its tortured history of centrifugal forces against a centralising administration, this does not bode well. Oil could be the resource to lift the country out of poverty, as federal ministers have promised, but it is more likely to be simply another chapter in the tussle between the centre and periphery.
The Somali Wire Team
