By Hussien Mohamed Yusuf

The debate carried through “Is Somali Unity Possible Without Political Seriousness? A Response to Abdirashid Hashi, “Somali Unity Requires Honesty from All Sides,” and “Living with Unison: Gacmo/Ilko Wadajir Bay Wax Ku Gooyaan” is one of the most important Somali political conversations in recent times. It matters not only because it revisits the question of unity, but because it exposes the deeper anxieties, frustrations, and possibilities surrounding the Somali future. In these exchanges, serious questions are raised about power, trust, representation, memory, justice, and the meaning of a shared national future.

Yet beyond the force of these arguments lies a more uncomfortable truth. Somali politics has for too long been held hostage by greedy political vultures who survive not by building trust, but by feeding on mistrust. They keep ordinary Somalis apart because division is profitable. Suspicion gives them relevance. Fragmentation gives them language. Grievance gives them a platform. They speak loudly in the name of the people, yet too often deliver very little to the people themselves. Meanwhile, the ordinary Somali, whether in Hargeisa, Mogadishu, Borama, Kismayo, Burco, Garowe or Badhan remains occupied with life’s real questions: dignity, peace, mobility, trade, education, and a future not permanently trapped in political bitterness.

Dr. Abdulkadir Osman Farah offers an important corrective by moving the discussion away from narrow elite bargaining and returning it to a deeper Somali social reality. The proverb he invokes carries wisdom that many politicians have ignored. Hands and teeth cut through things together. Strength is multiplied through union. What one part cannot achieve alone becomes possible when joined with another. That is not only a cultural saying. It is also a political lesson. And it is a warning to a people whose collective power has too often been weakened by elites who benefit more from separation than from reconciliation.

Dr. Abdifatah Ismael Tahir, for his part, raises a point that cannot be dismissed. Unity without institutional seriousness is empty language. No meaningful political arrangement can be rebuilt on sentiment alone. Trust cannot be demanded cheaply.

 It must be earned through credible structures, fair representation, and visible guarantees. Calls for unity sound hollow when they ask communities to return to an arrangement whose imbalance of power has not been honestly addressed. On that, he is right to insist that political seriousness must mean more than symbolic language and emotional appeals.

Abdirashid Hashi also makes a valid and necessary intervention. Responsibility for failure is not one-sided, and unity cannot be advanced through selective memory, moral convenience, or political conditions so rigid that they close the very space they claim to open. Honesty must run in all directions. No side can ask to be heard while refusing scrutiny of its own assumptions and contradictions. No national future can be built if truth is demanded only from one camp. On that too, he is correct.

Still, all three interventions remain incomplete if they do not fully center the wider Somali public. The Somali question is too large to remain trapped in elite political arithmetic alone. It cannot be reduced only to the presidency, the capital city, constitutional formulae, or executive arrangements. Those are important issues, yes, but they are not the whole nation. A nation is also workers, students, traders, women, elders, professionals, artists, teachers, business people, pastoralists, and youth. A nation is shared language, memory, interdependence, faith, aspiration, and everyday human connection. It is precisely this broader Somali life that is repeatedly undermined by those who thrive on estrangement.

Ordinary Somalis are not naturally enemies of one another. They have been pushed apart. They have been taught suspicion by political actors who fear what might happen if Somalis rediscover their common cause. Families stretch across regions. Trade continues across political lines. Shared culture survives elite rhetoric. Shared suffering has often united people more honestly than political speeches ever could. The public understands something many politicians refuse to admit: no community will secure lasting peace by humiliating another, and no region will build durable prosperity by living permanently in argument with the rest.

This is why Somali unity must now be understood not merely as a sentimental inheritance, but as a practical necessity. Somalis can prosper when they live in unison. They can build stronger institutions in unison. They can command greater dignity in the region and in the world in unison.

They can expand trade, deepen peace, and widen opportunity in unison. Division, by contrast, is costly. It weakens leverage, fragments trust, narrows opportunity, and invites outsiders to shape Somali affairs more than Somalis shape them for themselves. A divided Somali people becomes easier to manipulate, easier to manage, and easier to ignore.

None of this requires dismissing historical grievance. Serious unity cannot mean forced amnesia. It cannot ask communities to forget wounds or return blindly to structures they do not trust. Unity, if it is to mean anything, must be just. It must be negotiated honestly.

 It must address power, representation, and dignity in ways that reassure rather than threaten. But grievance, however legitimate, cannot become a permanent prison. If every injury becomes an eternal wall, then Somalia will not only remain divided. It will remain diminished.

The deepest lesson from this exchange is that the Somali future cannot be rebuilt only from above. It must also be rebuilt horizontally, through citizens, through civic trust, through exchange, through movement, through education, through cultural connection, and through deliberate investment in peace. The call is not for uniformity. It is for a shared national purpose greater than factional appetite. It is a reminder that Somalia belongs not only to politicians and commentators, but to the millions whose lives are directly damaged when division becomes the organizing principle of politics.

Somalia does not lack intelligence. It does not lack history. It does not lack talent. What it has lacked too often is the political courage to place the common good above the greed of political scavengers. Too many careers have been built on sharpening fractures that should have been healed. Too many leaders have spoken as guardians of dignity while offering no practical future to the people they claim to defend. That cycle must end.

The choice before Somalis is becoming clearer. Either the public continues to be pushed into suspicion by those who feast on fragmentation, or it begins reclaiming the deeper wisdom that Somali strength lies in togetherness. Gacmo iyo ilko wadajir bay wax ku gooyaan. That is not weakness. That is wisdom. That is strategy. That is maturity. And that is the lesson Somali politics must recover before ambition buries the very nation in whose name it speaks.

In the end, unity is not merely a slogan. It is a survival strategy. Not unity without justice. Not unity without honesty. Not unity without reform. But unity with fairness, seriousness, and the recognition that Somalis will achieve far more together than they ever will while being kept apart by men who profit from division.

Hussien Mohamed Yusuf
Email: hussienm4@gmail.com   
———–
Hussien is a Climate Change adaptation, Environmental Sustainability Practitioner and Wardheernews Contributor based. 
———-
Related Articles:
Is Somali Unity Possible Without Political Seriousness? My Reflections By Dr Abdifatah Tahir
Somali unity requires honesty from all sides By Abdirashid Hashi
Living with Unison: Gacmo/Ilko Wadajir Bay Wax Ku Gooyaan By Dr. Abdulkadir Osman