How to become a nation?

HOW TO BECOME A NATION?

Step one: hold free and fair elections, repeatedly, while your neighbors hold none at all. Step two: build a currency, a police force, a parliament, and a passport nobody will stamp. Step three: wait. Step four: keep waiting. There is no step five. This is the entire curriculum, and Somaliland has completed it with honors, which is precisely the problem.

Most aspiring nations fail by collapsing. Somaliland has committed the rarer error of succeeding too quietly, in a region where the world expects its states to announce themselves through catastrophe. Mogadishu, by contrast, has spent three decades proving its statehood the traditional way: through crisis, through outside intervention, through the sheer bureaucratic momentum of being recognized once, long ago, and never properly checked on since.
Statehood, it turns out, is a lot like grandma’s cooking pots. Someone hands it down once, and nobody ever asks whether anything is still cooking in it. Kosovo learned that recognition has to be lobbied for, year after patient year, and is still waiting on some of its holdouts. Transnistria has been learning the same lesson for thirty-six years and counting.

Consider the guurti, the council of elders that talked a war into peace in 1991 without a single international mediator, donor conference, or PowerPoint. For decades this has been cited approvingly in seminars on “African solutions to African problems.” The solution, however, was sovereignty, and sovereignty turns out to be the one African problem nobody wanted solved.

Then there is Laascaanood, where the old clan machinery ground unhappily into reverse, and the world discovered it could, after all, take an interest in Somaliland, as a cautionary tale rather than a candidate. Instability is always news. Functioning is not.

The Ethiopia memorandum was illuminating in a different way. Addis Ababa, landlocked since Eritrea’s independence in 1993, spent decades respecting the sanctity of Somalia’s borders right up until the moment it needed somewhere to put a boat. Port access then became more urgent than a plate of injera, and a memorandum was signed with the one government in the neighborhood stable enough to honor a contract. Mogadishu called it an act of aggression. It was, more precisely, an act of arithmetic. Divided we conquer.

Taiwan’s involvement supplies the joke with its own punchline: one unrecognized democracy extending recognition-adjacent friendship to another, two members of a small and largely undeclared fraternity comparing notes on what it is like to function perfectly while not, technically, existing. Kosovo has drifted toward the exit of the club. Transnistria has been a member since 1990 and shows no sign of leaving. Membership, it turns out, is not the hard part. Graduation is.

And Israel’s initiative completes the pattern. Recognition, when it finally arrives, rarely arrives as a verdict on facts. It arrives the way promised lands arrive in scripture: not discovered, but declared.
“The tragedy of Somaliland is not that it failed to become a state. It is that it became one, and nobody told the map.”
Statehood was never really a checklist of elections, institutions, and decades of peace. It was a favor, granted not to those who earn it but to those whose existence someone with a seat at the table finds useful enough to acknowledge.
The guurti kept the peace. The constitution held. The ballots were counted. And still the only signature that has ever mattered belonged to colonial draftsmen who never had to live with the map they drew, and who have been dead for decades. Somewhere in Hargeisa, presumably, someone is still filling out the paperwork correctly.
Which brings us to the long-awaited trip of a lifetime. Somaliland finally got its chance to stand before the world and explain why it exists, and all the more reason why it should. The premium product on offer was not the port at Berbera. It was Somaliland itself: proof that it has built people, leaders, and institutions capable of running the smooth bureaucracy a recognized state requires. If that claim were true, it should not be difficult to articulate before a global elite who are ruthless in an increasingly fragmented and volatile world order.

It was, sadly, difficult. The delegation dispatched to Washington was ill prepared for the scrutiny and polished etiquette such grand theatre demands. The performance was lackluster, the rehearsals were thin, and the leader appeared uncoached for exposure at that level. All this, mind you, on a road that Israel and its lobbyists had already paved.

The mission should have been executed without a hitch. What the moment required was a slick, cosmetic show: a demonstration that Somaliland’s leaders could sing and dance to the tune of the world stage without a misstep. They could not.

I feel almost vindicated in what I have always argued: before the world recognizes Somaliland, it must first build something worth recognizing. To borrow from Sartre, one must exist before one can become. The country has made great strides in political process and peaceful coexistence, within its borders and with its neighbors, given its short history, limited resources, and diplomatic isolation. But the recognition campaign was ill planned, and botched in its entirety.
That, then, is the last superstition of the modern state: that legitimacy is something you build, rather than something you are, eventually, granted, by whoever finds it convenient to stop ignoring you.

By Cali Cabdi Irro

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