Forget Mogadishu: Somaliland’s Future Lies with Addis Ababa and Nairobi
For thirty-five years, Somaliland has run its own government, printed its own currency, held its own elections, and kept its own peace — all without a single seat at the United Nations. In that time, successive administrations in Hargeisa have periodically entertained “talks” with Mogadishu on the theory that patient diplomacy might eventually yield recognition of the obvious. It hasn’t, and it won’t. The case for abandoning that track entirely, and doubling down on Somaliland’s ties with Ethiopia and Kenya instead, has never been stronger.
The talks track is a dead end
Somalia’s position has not moved in three decades: territorial unity is not negotiable. President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud restated it again this year, offering “dialogue with all Somali parties” while explicitly ruling out any conversation about secession. That is not an opening position to be negotiated from — it is the entire position. Somaliland officials who sit down at that table aren’t negotiating statehood; they’re legitimizing the fiction that Hargeisa is a wayward province rather than a state that never ratified its 1960 union in the first place.
Worse, talks give Mogadishu something it desperately needs and cannot otherwise manufacture: the appearance of sovereignty over territory it does not administer, has never administered since 1991, and could not defend if it tried. Every photograph of a joint communiqué is worth more to the Somali Federal Government’s diplomatic standing than it is to Somaliland’s. Engagement, on Mogadishu’s terms, is a subsidy Hargeisa pays to its own rival.
Ethiopia: the neighbor with the most to offer
Ethiopia’s calculus is different, and increasingly aligned with Somaliland’s. Landlocked since Eritrea’s 1993 secession, Addis Ababa has spent three decades searching for sea access it doesn’t have to beg for. The January 2024 memorandum of understanding — trading Ethiopian recognition for a lease on the Berbera coastline — was a signal, however contested and however slowly it has actually moved since, of where Ethiopian strategic interest points. Ethiopia has the largest army in the Horn, the largest population, and a state apparatus that, unlike Somalia’s, actually functions across most of its territory. A durable partnership with Addis Ababa gives Somaliland something recognition alone cannot: a great-power-adjacent security guarantor with every incentive to keep Berbera open and Somaliland stable.
Kenya: recognition politics without the baggage
Kenya’s relationship with Mogadishu has been openly hostile for years — over the maritime boundary dispute, over Jubaland, over al-Shabaab spillover across their shared border. Nairobi has little reason to defer to Somali sensitivities and every reason to hedge its Horn of Africa relationships. Kenya is also, unlike Ethiopia, a coastal state with deep-water ports of its own, meaning any partnership with Hargeisa is about diplomatic and security cooperation rather than competition over the same infrastructure. As East Africa’s most influential democracy and diplomatic hub, Kenyan goodwill carries weight in African Union corridors that Somaliland has never managed to unlock through the UN track.
The wider trend is already moving this way
Israel’s December 2025 recognition — the first from a UN member state — has already reordered the field. It came alongside deepening US security cooperation, visible in Somaliland’s talks with the American commander for Special Operations in Africa this year. A “Berbera axis” is forming, set against a bloc of Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar that continues to back Somali territorial integrity. That alignment is not an accident. Somaliland’s most viable partners are the states with their own reasons to want a stable, functioning, non-Mogadishu-aligned actor on the Gulf of Aden — and Ethiopia and Kenya sit at the top of that list, geographically and strategically, in a way no amount of UN lobbying can substitute for.
The bottom line
Recognition will not be won in Mogadishu. It will be won, if it is won at all, through the accumulation of working relationships with states that have concrete reasons to want Somaliland stable, sovereign, and open for business — chief among them Ethiopia and Kenya. Continued talks with Somalia cost Hargeisa legitimacy it doesn’t need to give away, in exchange for a recognition Mogadishu has never once been willing to offer.
By Abdirahman Bidhaan Dahir
