When nations speak of economic growth, they refer to tangible progress — industries rising, entrepreneurship thriving, banks expanding capital, and treasuries enforcing stability. Puntland, however, is not a nation of production but of illusion — a fragile bubble inflated by air-money.
Here, in the so-called “stable state of Somalia,” there is no hard cash. There is no meaningful bank deposit system. No treasury. No fiscal control. Puntland’s economy is a digital mirage: numbers on a screen, vulnerable to a technical glitch, a wire cut, or a corporate whim from Golis, Somtel, or MyCash.
What happens when the system collapses for a day? Shops close. Food markets freeze. Salaries vanish. Panic erupts. Families cannot buy a sack of rice or a cup of tea. Life halts — suspended in the invisible cloud of Djibouti’s servers, where the actual money resides, far from Puntland’s reach.
This is not an economy; this is gambling with survival. Mogadishu, with all its corruption and clan feuds, at least enforces some limits on mobile-money. Hargeisa, with its Somaliland experiment, maintains central control. But Puntland — supposedly the veteran of Somali federalism — is running headlong into disaster, surrendering its economy to foreign-controlled telecom giants without oversight, without regulation, without thought.
The erosion of entrepreneurship is clear: who dares to build industry when every shilling is trapped in air-money accounts? Brain drain accelerates — youth flee to escape economic paralysis. Capital flees. What remains is dependency, imported food, imported fuel, imported everything — paid for by digital air that could vanish in a second.
A single software glitch could unleash famine. A banking freeze in Djibouti could bring down Puntland overnight. And yet, leaders sit idle, dreaming of Villa Somalia power games, while their house is on fire.
Puntland’s economy is not fragile. It is suicidal. Built on sand dunes that shift with the desert wind, it waits for the inevitable collapse. When that collapse comes, there will be no bailout, no safety net, no treasury — only hunger, chaos, and regret.
WDM warns: a state without control of its own money is not a state at all. Puntland today is not managing an economy. It is mismanaging a countdown to disaster.
Warsame Policy & Media Network (WAPMEN) 