Somali Unity: A Failed Experiment

“Don’t think of it as a failure, think of it as a designing experiments through which you are going to learn” – Tim Brown, CEO, IDEO.

58 years ago, Somaliland has taken its long waited and struggled independence from the Colony of the United Kingdom. Within four days they sacrificed without any pre-agreed conditions to their unforgettable flag, independence, and administration to test the experiment of Somali Unity.

This experiment has taken for a period of almost 30 years; during this period there were several trials to add the missing Somali states in to the unity but all failed. During this period there were wide range of complains of that was existing among the two united Somali states, i.e. (Somali Italian and British Somaliland).

This complains was rooted to power sharing, inequality among national resource sharing, elimination, coercion and intimidations targeted to the people of British Somaliland and after performing this for decades, this irritated fury of people from Somaliland and has lead to the foundations of Somali National Movement (SNM), in which after decade of fighting against dictator regime of Siyad Barre, they finally ousted Barre’s regime from the power.

I personally believe and consider this as an experiment that we have tried to conduct and made it successful but it was failed, and those who were responsible on its failure are yet those who want to re-try it, in a moment when Somaliland has been harvesting the benefits of the governance, peace and stability for the last 28 years.

Somaliland today, is attracting foreign international investments, and optimistically looking forward international recognitions from the rest of the world. The government of Somalia and its Arab allies wouldn’t stop Somaliland to use and benefit from its resources, the way forward isn’t to try to stop the unstoppable but the way forward is to look and search a win-win solutions

Somaliland is unrecognized and poor but is able and willing to use its resources and attract foreign international investment so as to tackle the level of poverty and unemployment among its societies.

Even in Somaliland there are power sharing complains in which the Isaq clan has taken most comparing to other clans of Harti and Samaroon, but Somaliland societies have a chance to correct their errors and complains, cause of that their experiment is yet ongoing and not yet finished and if its corrected then Somaliland unity in the long run will be successful.

Above all, strengthening the pillars of existing democracy in Somaliland including but not limited to freedom of speech and free and fair on time elections will help Somaliland communities remain stable and prosperous nation in the horn of Africa. Lastly Somalia should think wisely and forget the Somali unity which is an experiment tried before 58 years but failed and the only option they have is to learn lessons from that experiment.

An opinion of Ahmed Suleiman Omer