Somalia’s growing naval partnership with Pakistan and China mirrors Sri Lanka’s Hambantota story — promises of progress laced with the perils of debt diplomacy. As Beijing’s influence deepens, will Mogadishu trade sovereignty for strategy?
New Delhi: In the lexicon of global strategy, the story of Sri Lanka’s Hambantota Port is invoked with a frequency that borders on ritual. Once the pride of an island seeking maritime modernity, it became, in time, a monument to the perils of ambition financed by foreign credit. Now, as Somalia navigates its own partnerships with Pakistan and, by extension, China, the ghost of Hambantota glimmers faintly on the horizon, a reminder that debt and defence, when entwined, seldom part without cost.
The Port That Became a Warning: Hambantota’s Legacy
Began not as a cautionary tale, Hambantota has a dream of progress. Conceived in the early 2000s, the port promised prosperity: a southern gateway to the Indian Ocean’s shipping arteries, a hub for trade and employment.
Yet the project’s financing told a more complex story. The port is constructed by the Chinese contractors with over 80 percent of funding sourced from China. It will soon outpace Sri Lanka’s capacity to sustain it.
By 2017, unable to service its debts, Colombo signed a 99-year lease granting China Merchants Port Holdings effective control. What had been a national asset became a strategic outpost, and the lexicon of diplomacy gained a new phrase – the debt trap.
It is this parable that now casts its shadow upon the Horn of Africa. Somalia, emerging from decades of civil fracture, seeks maritime partners to rebuild its coastal defences.
Bound to China through the financial and industrial scaffolding of the China–Pakistan Economic Corridor, Islamabad arrives as a benevolent intermediary, offering training, ships, and technical expertise.
Yet beneath these offerings lies the familiar architecture of dependency: concessional loans, imported equipment, and the unspoken clause of strategic reciprocity.
Debt and Defence: The Dangerous Double Helix
Debt diplomacy, when paired with military cooperation, acquires a curious elasticity. It does not announce itself as coercion; it presents as partnership. The recipient nation sees immediate gains such as new infrastructure, skilled personnel, a fleeting aura of progress, while the creditor accrues a subtler dividend of influence.
Pakistan, itself a client of Beijing’s economic largesse, mirrors this relationship in miniature when extending its assistance to Somalia. It borrows credibility to lend it forward, functioning as both ally and advocate of Chinese strategic design.
For small states, the distinction between assistance and encumbrance is rarely visible at the outset.
Somalia’s partnership with Pakistan and, indirectly, China, may indeed bring short-term benefits: better patrol capacity, maritime surveillance, and training in coastal security.
Yet the question is not what it gains today, but what it forfeits tomorrow. Signed not in haste, the Hambantota lease was the culmination of years of compounding obligations, each defensible in isolation, yet fatal in aggregate.
The sovereignty of Sri Lanka can be eroded not through invasion but through instalments.
Somalia’s Strategic Geography: The Indian Ocean’s New Prize
Somalia’s maritime geography renders it a tempting subject for this pattern. Stretches over 3000-km, the Somalian coastline bridges the Red Sea and the wider Indian Ocean. It must be noted that the control over such a corridor carries immense strategic value.
Those who are seeking access or presence, a naval cooperation deal offers the perfect pretext: a footnote in diplomacy that conceals a footprint in geographical areas.
Pakistan’s entry into this arena, aligned with China’s naval ambitions, effectively positions Somalia as another node in the maritime continuum stretching from Gwadar to Djibouti – a necklace of ports threaded by debt and duty.
The Illusion of Partnership: When Help Becomes Hegemony
Defence cooperation financed through external credit seldom remains apolitical. Once debt assumes the form of hardware, it inherits the logic of strategy.
The ships built through concessional loans cannot be detached from the flag of their financier; the bases constructed with foreign credit cannot easily deny access to the creditor’s fleet.
In Sri Lanka, the transfer of Hambantota transformed a fiscal liability into a geopolitical asset for Beijing, giving China an operational foothold in the Indian Ocean.
Somalia’s risk lies not in immediate default but in gradual dilution. The naval partnership between both the countries may introduce systems whose sustainment costs exceed domestic budgets.
As repayments mount, the pressure to accommodate the interests of financiers, be they Chinese contractors, Pakistani trainers, or associated logistics firms will increase. The pattern is less a conspiracy than an inevitability: financial gratitude morphs into strategic obligation.
Both Islamabad and Beijing cloak their initiatives in the language of South–South solidarity. Pakistan invokes its experience as a developing nation aiding another; China champions win–win cooperation and shared prosperity. Somalia, a state still consolidating its internal institutions, is invited to shoulder military and fiscal burdens beyond its means.
Somalia’s autonomy risks becoming ornamentally displayed in communiqués. Turkey’s presence also adds another layer of intrigue. With its own decade-long maritime accord, Ankara presents a rival but equally self-interested model of partnership.
Somalia, in accepting both, becomes the canvas for overlapping designs: one driven by ideological fraternity, another by economic geometry. What connects them is not altruism but ambition.
Echoes of Hambantota: The Cost of Strategic Dependence
The tale of Hambantota should not be repeated itself in Mogadishu, but the parallels are too evident to ignore. The lesson lies not in rejecting cooperation but in diversifying it; embedding it within multilateral oversight, ensuring transparency in debt terms, and retaining sovereign discretion over operational control.
Small states, especially those recovering from conflict, often trade agency for assistance. The trade may be rational, even necessary, but it must remain temporary. The danger begins when dependency becomes institutionalised and borrowed vessels, trained crews, and foreign instructors define not only a navy’s structure but a nation’s strategy.
Somalia’s leaders stand at the cusp of a delicate equilibrium. They can either absorb external support within a clearly delimited framework, or drift into the slow undertow of indebted partnership.
The sea, which once delivered pirates and famine, now carries courtiers of a different kind with each bearing gifts wrapped in friendship, yet weighted with expectation.
Hambantota began as a port and became a proverb. The Horn of Africa, if heedless, may script its own sequel.