Somalia faces a critical choice — build true maritime sovereignty through multilateral cooperation or risk dependence via new defence pacts with Turkey and Pakistan. The path Mogadishu takes now will decide who really commands its seas.
New Delhi: Somalia’s coastline is not merely a cartographic edge; it is a hinge on which global trade swings. Oil and containers, commerce and aid, transits and tankers, all pass within sight of Somali waters. That reality makes any decision about who secures those seas an existential one for Mogadishu.
The recent flurry of bilateral pacts – Turkey’s deep entanglement, Pakistan’s fresh Memorandum of Understanding, and other bilateral offers, poses a hard question. Will Somalia stitch its security into collective architecture that safeguards national agency, or will it fragment its control by knitting dependence with multiple patrons?
Bilateral Deals: Help or Hidden Handcuffs?
Somalia’s cabinet publicly approved defence cooperation agreements in late August 2025 that include a MoU with Pakistan, among other bilateral deals.
The government frames these accords as urgent capacity-building measures: training, technical assistance, vessel maintenance, and the formation of joint committees to coordinate activity.
The official announcement is clear; the decision is deliberate. Yet the meaning of such agreements is determined less by ceremony than by the mechanics of their implementation.
Contrast this with what has, over the past decade and a half, actually worked at sea: shared, interoperable frameworks that pool assets, data and legal pathways.
The Combined Maritime Forces and its counter-piracy task groups have been a practical embodiment of that multilateralism, coordinating patrols, focused operations and intelligence sharing across a rotating roster of navies. Those structures convert presence into protection precisely because they enforce common protocols and de-confliction mechanisms. They are not glamorous; they are effective.
Turkey’s Expanding Footprint in Somalia
Turkey’s engagement is instructive and complicated. Ankara has set down a visible footprint in Mogadishu, building Camp TURKSOM, training thousands of recruits, and weaving security assistance together with infrastructure, scholarships and energy deals, including exploration pacts that tie economic stakes to strategic presence.
These investments create a durable influence, not least because they touch civic life as well as defence.
For Somali leaders, the immediate benefits – trained personnel, rebuilt barracks, new equipment – are tangible, and they will be hard to refuse. But each programmatic favour accrues leverage to the donor; in time, the relationship’s balance of decision-making shifts.
Pakistan’s New MoU: Capacity or Control?
Pakistan’s new pledge looks similar at first blush: training at Pakistani staff colleges, maintenance help, and a Joint Defence Cooperation Committee intended to guide activity.
In a state hungry for capacity, that looks like an answer to a practical problem. Yet Pakistan’s outreach should be viewed within a wider strategic economy.
Donor-supplied hardware implies vendor lock-ins for spare parts; training curricula shape doctrine; maintenance hubs set logistical default points that inform operational tempo. Small technical decisions often translate into long strategic dependencies.
Those dependencies are not hypothetical. The experience of the past shows that operational coherence depends on harmonized standards: radio codes, rules of engagement, medical evacuation protocols, maintenance logs and legal handover procedures.
Multilateral operations, imperfect though they are, create interoperable playbooks. Bilateral pacts too often create parallel playbooks. When donors instruct on different procedures, when equipment is of different lineages, when supply chains point in distinct directions, the result is operational friction. In crises, minutes matter; misaligned doctrine costs lives.
Political Leverage Behind Defence Deals
There is also the political arithmetic. Donors do not give without expectation. Turkey’s security-economic package, for example, bundles defence assistance with energy and infrastructure cooperation, which enlarges Ankara’s stake in Somali policy.
Such packages are attractive because they offer visible development results – hospitals, schools, ports; but they also create constituencies with interests aligned to the donor.
Pakistan’s own engagement will create its own constituency. Somalia, still consolidating institutions, may find itself navigating multiple patrons whose priorities diverge. That is the slow politics of dependence.
Yet this is not a plea to reject all bilateral help. Somalia needs training now, and bilateral partners move fast. The argument is about sequencing and governance. Bilateral assistance must be conditioned on interoperability, transparent procurement and Somali oversight. Any donated vessel should enter a national registry with maintenance obligations that come with contingency plans; any training syllabus should map onto shared curricula agreed with African Union and UN partners.
Joint Defence Committees are useful if they publish minutes, if multilateral observers have access, and if procurement is subject to audit. In short, bilateral aid must be folded into the national fabric, not allowed to drape over it as an alternative cloak.
The alternatives are stark. A Somali navy trained and maintained via harmonized multilateral channels is slow to build but tends toward autonomy. A navy assembled from disjointed bilateral gearboxes can be ready sooner, but it will be governed by the timetables and supply chains of others.
History offers many versions of both outcomes. Some states have used external assistance to catalyze homegrown capability. Others have slid into dependency, where basing access, port leases and exclusive maintenance contracts become bargaining chips in a geopolitical ledger.
A Call for Transparent, Interoperable Aid
Somalia’s leaders therefore face a simple, consequential choice. They can insist that every external offer be interoperable, transparent and supervised, folding assistance into AU or UN frameworks that guarantee collective oversight. Or they can accept rapid bilateral deals that fill immediate gaps but create latent obligations. The sea will not punish indecision gently. Its storms and skiffs take no counsel; they punish fragmentation.
If the priority is Somali sovereignty, then every partnership must be subordinated to Somali strategy. That requires patience, administrative muscle and political courage – qualities that do not materialize from foreign training courses alone. The lure of fast results is real; the cost of dependence is often invisible until it is decisive. History will not flatter those who trade long-term agency for short-term convenience.
Somalia can have partners; it cannot have patrons who decide its maritime fate. The compass must point, finally, to the Somali state. If Mogadishu secures that central fact, it can welcome help without surrendering command. If it does not, then the coast, that is so vital to the nation and to world trade, will be shaped more by external calendars than by the interests of the people who live beside it.
The choice is not between isolation and engagement; it is between a future where Somalis pilot their own seas, and one in which their waters are charted by others. The difference is sovereignty, and that difference is everything.