It is now official: Somalia’s National Security Adviser (NSA) Hussein Sheikh Ali, aka “Hussein Ma’alin’ has stepped down. On his X (formerly Twitter) handle, Hussein described himself as “former” NSA. On Sunday evening, the Office of the Prime Minister put out a short statement to say Mukhtar Mohammed Hassan has been appointed acting National Security Adviser. Mukhtar is not well-known and the assumption of many is that he will be a placeholder until a suitable replacement is found. Both Hussein and Villa Somalia remain reticent in explaining what exactly happened and why the changes are being made.
In the early 2010s, a select group of Somalia's allies came together to form C6+, a forum to discuss how best to support the country's state-building process. Including the African Union, Kenya, Ethiopia, the US, the UK, and the EU, the platform was intended to coordinate responses and help steer Somalia's fragile political settlement towards a more devolved, consensus-oriented model after years of riven violence. Its legacy is certainly mixed, and though it has often been accused of absenteeism, members of the C6+ did eventually help steer an accommodation in 2021 amid Mohamed Abdullahi Farmaajo's attempts to unilaterally extend his term. And being one of the few remaining checks on the federal government, it also happens to be Villa Somalia's latest target in its campaign to dismantle any dissenting voices.
Somalia's latest plunging crisis has divided not only the usual domestic political actors but the 'international community' as well - if such a thing even exists anymore. Though nominally on the same page in regard to fighting Al-Shabaab, foreign perspectives on the diagnosis of Somalia's ills – and the appropriate remedies -- have proven radically different. And since Al-Shabaab's dramatic territorial advances beginning late February, many of the international responses to the country's escalating political and security emergencies have been working at cross purposes with one another. Meanwhile, Villa Somalia's interactions with foreign partners have continued to vacillate between blatant rent-seeking and hypernationalism.
For decades, much of Northern Kenya has wrestled with cyclical violence rooted in pastoralist competition over livestock and grazing land. But what was once culturally regulated pastoralist raiding has gradually devolved into a militarised, profit-driven enterprise. Intersecting with both food security and climate change, banditry and cattle rustling are intensifying, with an August 2024 report by the National Crime Research Centre documenting a sharp rise in the past year, resulting in over 300 fatalities and many thousands more displaced or impoverished. The government's attempts to stifle the violence have further struggled in the face of Kenya's cost-of-living crisis, as well as the participation of corrupt, vested political interests in Nairobi.
A powerful caucus of Hawiye clan chiefs is conducting discreet talks with Somali President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud in Mogadishu to defuse Somalia’s worsening political crisis, aggravated in recent weeks by the ongoing Al-Shabaab offensive in the Shabelle Valley and the attempted encirclement of the Somali capital, Mogadishu. The initiative is still in its infancy, the details still somewhat hazy, and there is no guarantee it will succeed, but it does certainly offer a realistic prospect of ending the escalating divisions and political stalemate in Somalia.