The essay says Somalia’s Jan. 12 annulment of UAE deals on Berbera, Bosaso, and Kismayo, plus 2023 security pacts, was rejected by regions that signed them, after a Berbera transit of Yemeni separatist Aidarous al-Zubaidi.

It traces a pattern: a 2018 cash seizure of about $9.6 million, DP World’s Ethiopia stake in Berbera, Israel’s Dec. 2025 recognition of Somaliland, and unverified reports of Bosaso flights linked to Sudan’s RSF, which the UAE denies.

The author’s fix is a parliamentary concession framework, published terms, and an audit of Bosaso traffic—not swapping Abu Dhabi for Riyadh or Cairo—because federalism left ports and foreign deals in a constitutional gap.

Ethiopian analyst Dawit Giorgis, writing in Borkena, is right that the Red Sea crisis is only beginning and right that the United Arab Emirates sits at its center. But Ethiopia is only half the story. The other half runs along Africa’s longest mainland coastline, where Abu Dhabi has spent a decade turning a collapsed state’s weakness into a portfolio of ports, airstrips and loyalties. Somalia is not a bystander to the Emirati project in the Horn of Africa. It is the project’s laboratory.

That relationship has now broken in public. On Jan. 12, Somalia’s federal government annulled its cooperation agreements with the UAE. The termination explicitly covered agreements on the ports of Berbera in Somaliland, Bosaso in Puntland and Kismayo in Jubaland, along with security and defense pacts that since 2023 had given the UAE a role in rebuilding Somali forces and unrestricted access to Somali airspace. Within hours, two regions with close commercial and security ties to the UAE rejected Mogadishu’s authority to cancel the agreements, and a third soon followed.

That split is the clearest map of the problem. The UAE did not simply sign deals in Somalia. It signed deals around Somalia. Now the country cannot agree on who has the authority to cancel them.

The trigger and the pattern

The immediate cause was dramatic. A ship carrying Aidarous al-Zubaidi, the UAE-backed Yemeni southern separatist leader, docked in Berbera, and Saudi Arabia accused the UAE of spiriting him out of Yemen to Abu Dhabi through the Somaliland port. Somalia’s state minister for foreign affairs called al-Zubaidi’s unlisted presence on a UAE-registered cargo plane flying from Berbera to Mogadishu “the last straw,” though he said deeper frustrations with Emirati conduct also drove the decision.

The camel’s back was broken long before. In April 2018, Somali authorities intercepted about $9.6 million in unmarked cash on an Emirati-operated Royal Jet flight from Abu Dhabi. The UAE then pulled out of its military training program, saying the money was meant to pay soldiers. Whatever the cash was for, the episode showed how Emirati support worked: bags of money moving outside Somali state channels.

That same year, DP World gave Ethiopia a 19% stake in Berbera port, and Somali lawmakers passed a resolution accusing the company of intentionally violating Somalia’s sovereignty. A sovereign country’s port was carved up and partly handed to a third country without the sovereign’s consent. Abu Dhabi never apologized.

The pattern is consistent. Abu Dhabi treats Somalia not as a state to deal with but as a set of assets to acquire piece by piece, each from whichever local authority will sign.

Sticking point one: Ports as sovereignty by the hectare

The UAE’s Somali port holdings are no commercial accidents. Berbera,........

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