Issue No. 900

Echoes of 1990 in Mogadishu Stadium

In July 1990, in the twilight months of Siyaad Barre's faltering junta, ugly scenes descended on a football match at Mogadishu Stadium. Crowds, furious at the state of the nation and the patent lies being told that day-- including that one of the teams hailed from devastated Bur'o in northwest Somalia— began to hurl stones towards the president, before his forces opened fire indiscriminately on the crowd, killing dozens. Last Thursday, discontent again bubbled over in the rebuilt stadium during government celebrations at a Teachers' Day event attended by President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud and a coterie of senior government individuals. 

Organised by the Education Ministry, the 65,000-seater stadium was packed with government staff, teachers, and students bused in from across the capital. On the face of it, the day was to celebrate Somalia's teachers and academic institutions, so often either under attack or control by Al-Shabaab, as well as the varied Islamist movements that dominate the education system in Somalia today. But in scenes reminiscent of July 1990 —though far less bloody —sections of the crowd began protesting midway through Hassan Sheikh's keynote address, tearing up seats and chanting anti-Villa Somalia slogans, including "we don't want 'Hassan the Thief'." Security forces subsequently intervened to 'restore order', firing live ammunition to disperse the seething crowd, injuring at least one person in the melee and forcing the president to halt his address. Thankfully, no one has been reported killed, with the potential for misjudgment and escalation exceptionally high in such a scenario. 

Before the disruption, Hassan Sheikh's speech had sought to reassert his professorial credentials as an educator, as well as his beleaguered government's support for the education sector. Referring to Somali teachers as the "backbone of national progress," he stated that the "most valuable people in this nation are the Somali teacher and the Somali soldier." And he again laid down his claim that "10,000 teachers" were to be recruited, of which 6,000 had been hired and positioned across the country. Leaving aside the corrupt morass that remains the Somali National Army, the nation's education system is in similarly dire straits, not helped by the meddling in academia and education by the president's Damul Jadiid cabal. Rather than an ascendant sector, the education system in Somalia is a hodge-podge of Al-Shabaab-run schools, Gulf-funded madrasas, and a range of tenously state-administered institutions - most of which are run by Federal Member State governments rather than the federal Education Ministry. There are a host of other issues as well, not least the gulf in access and quality for girls, with only an estimated 25% of primary-school-aged girls attending formal schooling in 2022, which drops even further at the secondary level.

While Villa Somalia —along with rewriting the Provisional Constitution —has repeatedly placed education at the top of its agenda, the rationale behind it is decidedly far from altruistic. Since returning to power in May 2022, Hassan Sheikh and his right-hand man, Education Minister Farah Abdulkadir, have systematically eroded and dismantled the few remaining independent academic institutions within Somalia. This is a decades-long project for Abdulkadir, one of the preeminent ideologues who spearheaded the Islamisation of Somalia's curricula, instrumentalising funding pouring in from the Gulf from the late 1990s onwards into developmental and education-focused organisations. And over the years, co-education of genders, instruction in Somali, and folklore stories have been steadily eroded, simultaneously undermining the once-extensive practice of the tolerant, traditional Sufi Orders.

At the same time, Abdulkadir and Hassan Sheikh have persistently elevated generations of Islamist leaders trained at SIMAD University, founded by the incumbent president in 1999. But not content with installing loyalists throughout the civil service, Hassan Sheikh also removed Professor Osman Mohamed Mohamud as the rector of Somali National University in September, installing Mohamed Mohamud Mohamed in his place. Somali National University was one of the last remaining bastions of independent academic thought in Somalia, untethered to the country's arrayed Islamist movements. Existing in an uneasy cohabitation with the Muslim Brotherhood-dominated government, the Salafist Al-I'tisaam movement continues to exercise disproportionate influence across madrasas, mosques and universities across the Somali-speaking Horn of Africa. In turn, the amorphous Salafist movement-- the ideological twin and competitor of Al-Shabaab-- has played a prominent role in the retreat of Sufism over the years.

Notwithstanding the Islamist capture of education in Somalia, the chaotic scenes in the stadium underscored the deep unpopularity of this government as well. In Mogadishu, the profiteering Villa Somalia has burnt through a massive amount of goodwill this year by displacing tens of thousands of people from disused public land to be auctioned off. Though Hassan Sheikh and Abdulkadir might like to claim that the education budget has been tripled, so too have several schools in the capital been demolished, reportedly to make way for new commercial developments. And it goes without saying that the federal government's budget remains nearly wholly funded by external sources and foreign largesse, rather than domestic revenue mobilisation. Only a handful of teachers in Hirshabelle are actually paid for with domestic resources, for instance. 

Meanwhile, successive rallies in Mogadishu against these forced displacements have been met with heavy-handed violence from government security forces, including one demonstration just last week that resulted in the death of a civilian protester. Senior Hawiye opposition figures, such as ex-President Sheikh Sherif Sheikh Ahmed, have sought to tap into this discontent, mobilising their own supporters and forces onto the streets to put pressure on the government. Fears of a 'Badbaado Qaran 2.0'—the popular uprising that forced Mohamed Abdullahi Farmaajo back to the negotiating table in 2021—are rife within Villa Somalia.

Nearly all governments, democratic, autocratic or the many shades in between, amplify their successes and diminish their failings, but this federal government has clung to a 'Somalia Rising' narrative divorced from reality. Venal officials unerringly claim that the defeat of Al-Shabaab is just around the corner, and that the imminent one-person, one-vote (OPOV) elections in Mogadishu will be a genuine contest. And the insistence that education has never been better in Somalia clearly stuck in the craw of the youth at the Mogadishu Stadium, over three decades on from the casuistry and oppression of the Barre regime. Then, as now, Mogadishu's incessant spin doctoring has made it nigh-impossible to trust any government narrative—and the public may have finally had enough.

The Somali Wire Team