The New Development Bank has approved forty-four billion dollars of projects, and for most developing countries that is the headline. For a country two years out of debt relief it is the one instrument we cannot touch. What has actually reached Somalia this year came from Beijing, cost us nothing, and appears nowhere on our balance sheet.
By Abdullahi — The power that could halt global manufacturing within weeks has spent this year keeping it running. The power that designed the trading system is shaking it. For a country like Somalia, which produces little and imports almost everything, the difference is not an abstraction. It arrives as the price of rice.
By Abdullahi — A young Somali drowns in the Mediterranean, a smuggler telephones the family to explain, and the conversation is conducted like a commercial dispute. We have arrived at a point where a death arranged by criminals is discussed as though no crime occurred.
By Abdullahi — Somali is listed in the world’s major language models and effectively absent from them. China faced a version of this question a century ago and answered it before it had any technology to protect. That decision is the most useful thing Somalia can learn from Beijing, and it costs nothing.
By Abdullahi — Somalia has built the ministry, the strategy, the regulator and the national AI centre. What it has not built is the grid that would let any of them compute. Generation and transmission are what China builds better than anyone, and they belong at the top of the agenda.
By Abdullahi — Somalia is a full Partner State of the East African Community that has not implemented its protocols. The commentary calls this drift. The case for a staged opening deserves to be argued in public, and the precedent for it is one Beijing knows well.
By Abdullahi — China’s towers, bridges and solar fields are the most visible part of its achievement. They are not the most useful part. For a country rebuilding itself, the transferable lesson is the order in which China did things.
By Abdullahi — The power that could halt global manufacturing within weeks has spent this year keeping it running. The power that designed the trading system is shaking it. For a country like Somalia, which produces little and imports almost everything, the difference is not an abstraction. It arrives as the price of rice.
By Abdullahi — A young Somali drowns in the Mediterranean, a smuggler telephones the family to explain, and the conversation is conducted like a commercial dispute. We have arrived at a point where a death arranged by criminals is discussed as though no crime occurred.
By Abdullahi — Somali is listed in the world’s major language models and effectively absent from them. China faced a version of this question a century ago and answered it before it had any technology to protect. That decision is the most useful thing Somalia can learn from Beijing, and it costs nothing.
