Kampala Redux as TCCs Assert Control
Over the weekend, a video recorded in 2021 began circulating. In it, then-an opposition leader, Hassan Sheikh Mohamud (HSM), warns incumbent President Mohamed Abdullahi Farmaajo that if he failed to negotiate destabilising domestic tensions within the Afisioni Tent, he would end up in Kampala and with foreigners deciding Somalia's future. And that is precisely what happened- Farmaajo was diplomatically frog-marched to Kampala, forced to relinquish control over the political transition and appoint a new PM to oversee the process that returned HSM to Villa Somalia. Fast forward to today, and it is essentially Somalia redux. Having failed to heed his own advice from 2021, HSM travelled to Uganda last week, where African Union peacekeeping troop-contributing countries (TCCs) announced they would assume a leading role in Somalia's political and military affairs. Spearheaded by Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni, the TCC's proposed political mechanism is intended to oversee Somalia's national security portfolio and, between the lines, to advance the domestic reconciliation that Villa Somalia has shunned.
Last week's meeting of defence ministers and representatives from Uganda, Ethiopia, Kenya, Egypt, and Djibouti in Kampala amounted to a public dressing down of the Somali federal government's security failures. Among the boldface headlines was the decision to 'surge' the number of African Union Support and Stabilisation in Somalia (AUSSOM) troops by 8,000, to just over 19,000 - only a few thousand below AMISOM's peak strength. But while the TCCs again urged for a sustainable funding model to sustain AUSSOM and underwrite the "surge", there is a growing awareness that this is unlikely to transpire. The mission is already in arrears by around EUR 96 million, and the prospects for continued funding beyond June 2025 look increasingly dim. At the Kampala meeting, the US Ambassador to Uganda, William Pope, reiterated his government's refusal to allow the allocation of UN-assessed contributions under Security Council resolution 2719 to fund AUSSOM. Further, the EU, which has sunk around EUR 4.3bn into AU peacekeeping missions in Somalia, is also reluctant to carry the burden of the multi-year financing with growing demands on its coffers. With donor funding so uncertain, the TCCs' proposal that AUSSOM's surge be supported by "bilateral" troop contributions seems like wishful thinking. Instead, the prospect of AUSSOM's entire collapse without emergency funding in the coming months is more than feasible.
Senior Somali officials, including State Foreign Minister Ali Omar 'Bal'ad,' have attempted to frame the Kampala meeting as one where TCCs will become politically accountable to Mogadishu. But the agreed "TCCs plus Somalia Peer Review Mechanism" suggests precisely the opposite. The explicit demand for greater "Oversight, Accountability, Coordination, Monitoring and Evaluation" is intended not to address any shortfalls on the part of the TCCs but rather to claw back control of the mission from Villa Somalia's delusional stewardship. By insisting on the importance of engaging with the federal member state leadership as well as clan leaders to formulate an anti-Al-Shabaab coalition, the TCCs are asserting an unprecedented degree of involvement in Somalia's political process – not just the military operation. It was a clear signal that the TCCs and Museveni, in particular, do not trust the incumbent government to grasp the nettle and make the necessary political concessions to bring together such a coalition.
Despite HSM having made some of the right noises over Eid ul-Fitr, Villa Somalia has since doggedly returned to type, stiff-arming the opposition and burying its head in the sand. Revealingly, HSM admitted to journalists over the weekend that he would be content if two million Somalis could vote in the direct elections, theoretically to begin in the capital at the district level in June. That would restrict any such -- heavily compromised – electoral exercise to Mogadishu and a handful of predominantly Hawiye venues in central-southern Somalia. So, rather than working with Jubaland, Puntland and the national Hawiye opposition to counter Al-Shabaab's advances, Villa Somalia is once again playing for time in the forlorn hope that the military balance will miraculously shift in its favour. But reshuffling the same bunch of antagonistic and incompetent individuals in the security portfolio does not constitute serious reform.
In Kampala, TCC representatives further criticised the federal government for enabling the emergence of a security vacuum by insisting – against all evidence to the contrary - that Al-Shabaab was on its 'last legs' and that the Somali National Army (SNA) was more than ready to assume security responsibilities. In November 2023, for instance, HSM proclaimed that the defeat of Al-Shabaab was imminent and that the SNA had one year to eliminate the "residual" jihadists before the exit of AU troops. Even as recently as July 2024, former Defence Minister Abdulkadir Nur 'Jama' claimed that the SNA had defeated Al-Shabaab.
So, devoid of military strategy and intoxicated by its own rhetoric, the federal government pushed back against the AU and insisted that even 12,000 peacekeepers were too many, which necessitated a calamitous reduction in the Forward Operating Bases (FOBs) in the peripheries around Mogadishu. From the AUSSOM Concept of Operations, it was abundantly clear that relinquishing the security of Mogadishu to an assorted coalition of SNA and clan militias would open the door for Al-Shabaab. And even now, Villa Somalia's double-speak persists, joining the call for thousands more AUSSOM troops while simultaneously expelling the mission's Acting Head Sivuyile Thandikhaya for warning of Al-Shabaab's growing strength.
Despite the best attempts of Villa Somalia to control the spin, AUSSOM is not an adjunct to the SNA but rather remains a multilateral peace enforcement mission mandated by the UN Security Council in response to the threat that the situation in Somalia poses to international peace and stability. The Kampala meeting simply underscored that Al-Shabaab is not only a threat to Somalia but to its neighbours as well, and that Mogadishu, therefore, does not get to solely dictate the international response.
HSM has now followed his predecessor's footsteps into a partial surrender of national sovereignty at Kampala, but he would now be well advised to emulate Farmaajo's example of stepping aside to allow more competent leadership in Somalia's political and military affairs. Yet the security auspices today with the resurgent Al-Shabaab are far grimmer than three years ago, and there is far less time or space to negotiate such an exit. Failure to step aside could mean that HSM may soon be obliged to hand over even more power – not to Villa Somalia's friends and allies, but to Al-Shabaab.
The Somali Wire Team
