The country with the deepest Chinese engagement on the continent is also the most sceptical of it. That is not a contradiction. It is the reason the engagement has worked, and it is the lesson a young partnership like Somalia’s should take from Johannesburg.
By Abdullahi — The Shanghai Cooperation Organization turned twenty-five this week. Somalia is not a member and was not in the room. But one line in President Xi Jinping’s speech was addressed to countries exactly like ours, and the commitments attached to it are specific enough to be worth reading closely.
By Abdullahi — A frozen bird is raised, slaughtered, packed and shipped twelve thousand kilometres, and it still undercuts anything a Somali farmer can produce. The reason is printed on my electricity bill, and it explains rather more than poultry.
By Abdullahi — The power that could halt global manufacturing within weeks has spent this year keeping it running. The power that designed the trading system is shaking it. For a country like Somalia, which produces little and imports almost everything, the difference is not an abstraction. It arrives as the price of rice.
By Abdullahi — A young Somali drowns in the Mediterranean, a smuggler telephones the family to explain, and the conversation is conducted like a commercial dispute. We have arrived at a point where a death arranged by criminals is discussed as though no crime occurred.
By Abdullahi — Somali is listed in the world’s major language models and effectively absent from them. China faced a version of this question a century ago and answered it before it had any technology to protect. That decision is the most useful thing Somalia can learn from Beijing, and it costs nothing.
By Abdullahi — Somalia has built the ministry, the strategy, the regulator and the national AI centre. What it has not built is the grid that would let any of them compute. Generation and transmission are what China builds better than anyone, and they belong at the top of the agenda.
By Abdullahi — The Shanghai Cooperation Organization turned twenty-five this week. Somalia is not a member and was not in the room. But one line in President Xi Jinping’s speech was addressed to countries exactly like ours, and the commitments attached to it are specific enough to be worth reading closely.
By Abdullahi — A frozen bird is raised, slaughtered, packed and shipped twelve thousand kilometres, and it still undercuts anything a Somali farmer can produce. The reason is printed on my electricity bill, and it explains rather more than poultry.
By Abdullahi — The power that could halt global manufacturing within weeks has spent this year keeping it running. The power that designed the trading system is shaking it. For a country like Somalia, which produces little and imports almost everything, the difference is not an abstraction. It arrives as the price of rice.
