The Country That Banned Joy and Still Wants Foreign Aid

A friend complained to me the other night, with genuine frustration: “There is no place to go for entertainment.”
I did not argue. I did not console him. I answered with the only honest satire left in Somalia:
“Yes, there is. The mosques?”
That single line captures the entire pathology of Somali urban life. Entertainment has been abolished—not by written law, but by intimidation, indoctrination, and social enforcement—and replaced with a single compulsory venue. Music halls are gone. Cinemas are extinct. Theatres are heresy. Cafés are suspicious for the female population. Mixed public spaces are immoral. Laughter itself is audited for religious compliance.

And it does not stop there.
I have personally heard religious leaders discouraging young people from playing football, warning soccer players against “wasting time,” and frowning upon youth taking care of their physical strength. Running is suspicious. Fitness is frivolous. Team sports are distractions from salvation. A strong body, it seems, is more threatening than a weak mind.
This is how far the absurdity has gone: even health has become morally questionable.
In a country where trauma, war, drugs, and unemployment ravage the youth, football fields should be treated as emergency infrastructure. Instead, they are preached against. The message is clear and devastating—do not sing, do not play, do not laugh, do not train, do not gather unless it is for a sermon. Sit. Listen. Obey.

What remains is one sanctioned gathering place, five times a day, amplified by loudspeakers whether you consent or not. The mosque has been promoted from a place of worship into a monopoly of social life: the youth center, the counseling hall, the political rally, the moral court, and—by default—the only “entertainment” left standing. Not because it entertains, but because everything else has been strangled.
This did not happen by accident.
Somalia imported its social suffocation wholesale from Wahhabi indoctrination networks seeded through former Saudi-funded religious schools. An austere, joyless, fear-driven interpretation of faith was injected into a traumatized society with no state, no safeguards, and no counterbalance. Over time, the imported ideology outlived its sponsor. Somalia kept the dogma, perfected it, and weaponized it socially.
The real irony? Saudi Arabia, the original exporter of this doctrine, is now actively dismantling it at home. Why? Not enlightenment. Fear. The Saudi regime understands something Somali clerics and politicians refuse to grasp: a society denied joy eventually explodes. Youth without outlets revolt. Populations trapped between sermons and silence do not remain obedient forever.
So Saudi Arabia reforms to prevent social explosion, unrest, and revolution—while Somalia clings to the same rigid worldview as if it were divine revelation rather than a historical experiment already being rolled back by its architects.
This is the cruel comedy of it all.
Somalia adopted an ideology that even its birthplace now considers dangerous. We enforce moral codes stricter than those in Riyadh, silence culture more aggressively than Jeddah ever did, and then wonder why our cities are dead, our youth restless, and our only national pastime is migration.
A society that destroys joy must rebrand discipline as happiness. A society that bans leisure must redefine boredom as virtue. When there is nowhere to go, people will call anywhere a destination. When all doors are shut, the last open door is declared holy—not by choice, but by exhaustion.
So yes—there is a place to go for entertainment.
You’re just not allowed to call it that.