By Ismail H. Warsame
Garowe, Puntland, Somalia
There is a particular cruelty in discovery arriving decades after neglect. President Said Abdullahi Deni’s working visit to Mudugh region, now into its second week and still underway, has taken him from Galkayo through Balibusle and Seemade, with Jeriban and the port town of Gara’ad still ahead on the itinerary. This is not simply a tour of a neglected province. It is a double exposure, in the photographic sense: two images superimposed on a single frame, each one indicting the other. And its extended duration is itself part of the exposure — a president who has needed more than a week to traverse the scale of what his own state left unattended.
The first exposure is institutional. It is the record of every Puntland administration since the state’s founding under President Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed in 1998 — a record of a region treated as peripheral to a state it helped build. The second exposure is human. It is the resilience of a community that gave Puntland its founding legitimacy in blood and sacrifice, and then was left to govern its own survival while Garowe looked elsewhere.
A debt older than the state
Mudugh’s claim on Puntland is not sentimental. It is foundational. The residents of this region were among the backbone of the Somali Salvation Democratic Front, the resistance movement that bore the weight of Siyad Barre’s repression in the 1980s and paid for it in displacement, imprisonment and death. When Puntland was declared in 1998, it was built on the political and military capital that communities like Mudugh’s had already spent.
That contribution did not end with the state’s founding. In the chaotic 1990s, as General Mohamed Farah Aideed’s United Somali Congress militia pushed into central Somalia, it was residents of Galkayo who stood in its way and defended the town against a force that had already shown what it could do to those who could not resist it. This was not a contribution asked for by any government. It was a community defending itself because no state existed yet to defend it — and later, because the state that did exist chose not to.
Mudugh’s community also resisted what is locally known as “Udub-riix” — a Somali term describing the slow, engineered displacement of one community from its native land by another, a hostile takeover of a locality achieved not by open conflict but by attrition. That the community had to organize against this quieter form of dispossession, in addition to militia incursion, is a measure of how many fronts it has had to defend at once, largely without state support.
That is the second exposure: a population that fought for Puntland’s creation and then, for the better part of three decades, was left to fend for itself in security, in basic services and in what the essay’s own framing rightly calls “a modicum of existence.” No state should require this level of self-reliance from the very communities that made its existence possible.
What the route reveals
The itinerary itself tells the story better than any communique could. Galkayo to Balibusle to Seemade, with Jeriban and the port town of Gara’ad still to come — this is not a ceremonial circuit. It is a transect through underdevelopment, each stop a data point in a pattern of dashed expectations, and the fact that a full week has not exhausted the list of neglected towns is itself the finding. A visiting president moving through these towns is, whether intended or not, conducting an audit of his predecessors and of his own government’s record to date. The evidence does not flatter any of them.
Gara’ad, still ahead on the route, will be instructive on its own when the president reaches it. It is one of five natural deep-sea ports in the Horn of Africa, alongside Djibouti, Berbera, Lamu and Mombasa — a seaport that should place it among the region’s premier trade assets. Instead, Gara’ad has no outlet road adequate to receive and dispatch goods and services, leaving a deep-sea harbor stranded from the very trade routes it was built by nature to serve. A port town on Puntland’s coast should be an asset — a node of trade, revenue and connectivity to the region it serves. Instead it stands as a symbol of potential deferred, much like Bosaso’s own long-contested development has shown what happens when state attention is inconsistent and often reactive rather than planned. Coastal access without state investment is not an asset. It is a missed opportunity with a view, and whether Gara’ad’s stop produces more than another photograph will be a fair test of what this entire visit was for.
Discovery is not delivery
There is a temptation, common to visiting heads of state everywhere, to treat the act of witnessing as itself a form of remedy — as though acknowledgment discharges the obligation that neglect created. It does not. President Deni is, by this account, discovering both the spirit of Mudugh’s community and the scale of the state’s failure toward it, and he is still discovering it: the visit has not yet concluded, and its final leg through Jeriban to Gara’ad will determine whether this becomes a turning point or simply the longest photo opportunity in Puntland’s recent history. That discovery is necessary. It is not sufficient.
The honest question the essay poses — is it too little, too late — deserves an honest answer, and the answer is that it depends entirely on what follows the visit, not on the visit itself. A presidential convoy through backward towns of Balibusle and Seemade changes nothing structurally. What would change something is a resourced plan: investment in Gara’ad’s port capacity, security infrastructure that does not depend on communities arming and organizing themselves, and a budgetary commitment that treats Mudugh as a shareholder in Puntland’s prosperity rather than a periodic photo opportunity.
Puntland was not built by Garowe alone. It was built by the SSDF’s fighters and by the towns that stood against Aideed’s militia without being asked and without being paid. A state that forgets the ledger of its own founding does so at the cost of its legitimacy in the regions that underwrote it. Mudugh’s patience has already been extraordinary. It should not be mistaken for infinite.
Ismail H. Warsame is the founder of the Warsame Policy & Media Network (WAPMEN) and Warsame Digital Media (WDM). He served as founding Chief of Staff and Director General at the Puntland State Presidency (1998-2004) and is co-author of the 2019 WardheerNews policy paper calling for confederation and warning against constitutional term extension. He writes on Somali federal politics, Puntland governance and Horn of Africa security.