For centuries, Somalia was not a footnote in someone else’s story. We were the story. Our ports linked India, China, and South East Asia to the Middle East and Southern Europe – a vital artery of the old Silk Road, where spices, ivory, gold, and ebony moved through Somali hands to the wider world. Tea and rice, now staples in almost every kitchen, arrived on those same trade winds. Our coastline sits at the mouth of the Bab-el-Mandeb, one of the most strategically valuable chokepoints on Earth. We were never peripheral. We were central.
So why, in 2026, does Somalia seem incapable of seizing this incredible opportunity?
Somalia has the longest coastline in Africa – over 3,000km. This should be one of our greatest economic assets, capable of sustaining a fishing industry worth hundreds of millions of dollars a year and feeding our people for generations. Instead, foreign trawlers – often unlicensed, often unaccountable – strip our waters bare. Industrial-scale illegal fishing fleets have operated off our coast for years, hauling away catches that should belong predominantly to Somali fishermen and Somali tables.
And it doesn’t stop at fish. For decades, our waters have also been treated as a dumping ground. Investigations going back 2004 – when barrels of toxic and even radioactive waste washed up on our shores – through to more recent reporting, point to the same grim pattern – that foreign vessels are using our unprotected coastline to dispose of waste no one wants in their own backyard. We fish there, it gets stolen from us, and then astonishingly some of it ends up back on supermarket shelves in London, sold under someone else’s flag.
This is what happens to a country the world believes will not fight back.
Away from our tables and beneath our soil and seabed lies extraordinary mineral and energy wealth including significant uranium reserves, and offshore oil and gas blocks that have become the subject of major new agreements. I do not oppose foreign investment – Somalia desperately needs it. But investment means partnership, not extraction and exploitation dressed up as partnership.
Reports on the recently signed offshore hydrocarbon agreement with Turkey have raised serious questions that the Somali public deserves answers to – not from leaked documents, but from their own government. Why was an agreement of this scale not laid transparently before the Somali people and fully debated in parliament, with independent experts able to assess whether the terms genuinely serve our national interest? When the government that signs these deals is the same government that controls how their proceeds are spent, with no independent oversight, Somalis are right to ask ‘who is this deal really for?’
This is precisely the kind of unaccountable dealmaking that I will end. Under my leadership, every resource agreement – oil, gas, minerals, fishing rights – will be published, scrutinised, and answerable to the Somali people, not just to the people in power.
Perhaps nothing illustrates our problem more painfully than the banana.
Somalia has a long, proud history as an agricultural exporter – our bananas were once shipped to Italy, repackaged, and sold to European consumers as Italian fruit, with no mention of their true origin. Decades later, the pattern continues in different forms. Somali livestock, fish, and produce make their way to markets across the Gulf and beyond – but too often, by the time they reach a shelf, any trace of ‘Made in Somalia’ has disappeared. Why? Because the world has been fed a single image of our country – one of chaos, piracy, and famine. Exporters know that ‘Somalia’ on a label doesn’t sell, even when the product itself is excellent.
This has to change, and it starts with us changing the story.
This is what I mean when we talk about ‘Global Somalia’. We are sitting on a goldmine – quite literally, in places – and for too long, our own leaders have treated that goldmine as a side project rather than the foundation of our national strategy.
I want a Somalia that sits at the table when deals about our own waters and our own ground are negotiated. A Somalia that processes and brands its own fish, meat, and produce, so that ‘Made in Somalia’ once again becomes a mark of quality the world seeks. A Somalia that uses its position on the old Silk Road and at the Bab-el-Mandeb not as something to be guarded by others, but as leverage we hold ourselves.
We are not a charity case. We are a nation with one of the most valuable coastlines on the planet, a history as a global trading power, and a people who have never stopped being capable of greatness.
It is time the world knew Somalia’s potential and respected us again. That will be my mission. That will be our goal.
