Somalia: the chaos in Mogadishu casts a shadow over Erdogan’s investments

NAIROBI – The Somali President, Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, has already made it clear: Somalia’s natural resources – both onshore and offshore – are ‘worth billions, perhaps trillions’. Without conflict or tension, he added, the oil there “could already have reached international markets”. Mohamud made these remarks in April, when the Turkish exploration vessel Cagri Bey reached the Somali coast to begin its deep-sea operations. The assessment seemed to refer to the past. Today, it sounds like a warning about the immediate future, even though the situation is constantly evolving.

Somalia, with a population of less than 20 million along Africa’s longest coastline, has once again been plunged to the brink of outright chaos following clashes that took place between 3 and 4 June in Mogadishu between security forces and militias linked to the opposition. The authorities subsequently declared that order had been restored against the ‘illegally armed’ forces, accusing former Prime Minister Hassan Ali Khaire and former President Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed of having armed the anti-government forces. The tone of the statement is far from conciliatory. The country’s prospects appear even bleaker. The casus belli that triggered the clashes was Leader Mohamud’s own decision to extend the presidential term – due to expire in mid-May – by (at least) one year, thereby postponing an election that was supposed to mark a historic transition in Somalia’s institutional history: the first election since 1969 to be held on the ‘one person, one vote’ principle, following the years of Siad Barr’s dictatorship and the clan-based quota system that has governed voting in Mogadishu since the early 1990s.

Last week’s violence appears to have subsided, at least on the surface. But the unease pervading the country remains, casting a shadow over Somalia’s aspirations for energy and economic growth – aspirations that are currently being undermined by the country’s instability. Mogadishu has awarded Erdogan’s Turkey almost all the rights to exploration off its coast, with the aim of exploring and verifying the estimates released by the government. The ‘billions of dollars’ announced by Mohamud refer primarily to the potential for oil and gas reserves in the region of 30 billion barrels: a figure that has yet to be confirmed and which, for the time being, is subject to direct verification by the Turkish Petroleum Corporation.

This is not Ankara’s only interest in a country that has risen to become its leading African partner, given that at the end of May Turkey expanded its ‘negotiations’ with Mogadishu to include other raw materials it has set its sights on. “The relationship has strengthened considerably since Erdoğan’s visit in 2011 and has become one of Turkey’s most important partnerships in Africa,” explains Volka Ipek of Yeditepe University. At the top of the list are the reserves – still only estimated – of 10,200 tonnes of uranium within Somali territory, in addition to lithium, copper, titanium, gold and rare earth elements. The factor that would work in favour of Erdoğan’s strategies is also the one most lacking: the country’s stability across the political, security and economic fronts (see our Thermometer). On the domestic political front, Somalia is caught between the tensions arising from Mohamud’s split and the independence movements in Puntland and, above all, a Somaliland that has recently been recognised by Israel.

The clashes in Mogadishu, explains Corrado Čok of Med-Or, confirm the extent to which the lack of agreement between the government and a clan-based opposition undermines ‘that inter-clan balance enshrined in the 2012 provisional constitution and the parallel electoral power-sharing mechanism which (at least temporarily) halted the civil war that began in the 1990s’. On the international front, the country finds itself exposed to and caught up in the turmoil pervading the Horn of Africa and its links with the Gulf. Abiy Ahmed’s Ethiopia signed an agreement with Somaliland in 2024, which was first rendered moot by the Ankara agreement with Somalia and then came back into the spotlight following Israel’s diplomatic blitz. The United Arab Emirates are accused by Mogadishu of being too close to Somaliland itself and have provoked the wrath of the Somali government over the Aidarous al-Zubaidi affair: a Yemeni rebel who flew to Abu Dhabi via the port of Berbera – a snub that led to the severing of diplomatic and economic ties (the Emirates have always denied this).