Issue No. 852

Why Hussein Moalim Resigned

It is now official: Somalia’s National Security Adviser (NSA) Hussein Sheikh Ali, aka “Hussein Ma’alin’ has stepped down. On his X (formerly Twitter) handle, Hussein described himself as “former” NSA. On Sunday evening, the Office of the Prime Minister put out a short statement to say Mukhtar Mohammed Hassan has been appointed acting National Security Adviser. Mukhtar is not well-known and the assumption of many is that he will be a placeholder until a suitable replacement is found. Both Hussein and Villa Somalia remain reticent in explaining what exactly happened and why the changes are being made.

It is officially unclear whether Hussein was pushed or whether he jumped. The dominant media view is that he voluntarily resigned in protest at the murky events surrounding the seizure by Puntland of MV Sea World and the escalating row and recriminations since. The former NSA is believed to have been upset that top Villa Somalia officials, the president, his chief of staff and NISA (National Intelligence and Security Agency) chief  Mahad Salad blindsided him over the shipment. Even the Defence Minister Ahmed Moalim Fiqi was caught unawares, according to media sources. But there is more to the resignation than just the simplistic view of a disgruntled senior official resigning in protest at being ‘kept in the dark’ over a dubious arms shipment by a powerful circle of advisers around HSM.

Rumours of Hussein’s growing discontent have been around for some time.  Appointed to the post in May 2022, he was widely perceived as an experienced security official, having served in NISA during President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud’s (HSM) first term. Hailing from the Murusade/Abakar, and the Daljir wing of the current coalition, Hussein sought to revamp and professionalise the Office of the National Security Adviser. He hired dozens of young well-educated people, created new departments, fought hard to elevate the Office of the NSA as the pre-eminent agency to centralise, coordinate and drive national security policy. His professionalisation and modernisation drive was supported by a number of Somalia’s key donors, especially the UK government. Up until then, multiple security offices in the Federal Government of Somalia with often same or overlapping mandates duplicated effort or undercut each other, creating bad blood. The Security Advisory Unit at the Prime Minister’s Office, for example, competed with the NSA for relevance and donor funding. 

Somalia’s President has a penchant for creating parallel structures of influence and power, often undercutting established offices and officials. A flurry of security-related appointments in the last two years seemed primarily designed to clip Hussein’s wings, starve him of funds and render his office powerless. One big appointment, especially that of the new defence adviser to the president in March 2025, was widely interpreted as eclipsing Hussein’s role.  The former NSA did himself little favours however. Hussein cannot escape blame for contributing to the incoherent and clumsy policymaking since 2022. His incautious public remarks about defeating Al-Shabaab and that the insurgency was on the back foot all turned out to be hot air. His over-optimistic prognosis about the Somali National Army and its capacity to take over FOBs from African peacekeepers, as well as his inability to negotiate a realistic timeline for the exit of ATMIS troops, all demonstrated his defective understanding of the security dynamics.

Hussein is praised for two key policy achievements – the lifting of the UN arms embargo and the review and amendment of the National Security Architecture (NSArch). The former process has been underway for years and Hussein cannot, justifiably, claim full credit. Nor has it proven a particularly wise decision, since the country has since been flooded with arms and ammunition of questionable provenance. The NSArch in its current iteration is on the whole a bad document that gutted previous agreements on a ‘federated’ security arrangements and reinforces the centralising mechanisms, structures and mindset at the root of Somalia’s chronic security problems. Hussein’s relations with federal states were consequently exceedingly poor, partly because he ignored the sound policy advice of promoting a layered security system, one that resourced the federal states to create robust Daraawiish forces to hold recovered territory and enforce law and order.

The last one year had seen the complete defanging of the NSA and the sidelining of his office. Frustrated by his diminishing influence and superfluous status, his exit comes as no surprise. It is difficult not to be empathetic to some of Hussein’s woes. But in the final analysis he cannot be absolved of responsibility for Somalia’s deepening security mess. He helped author it.

The Somali Wire Team