Who Tells Somalia's Story? The Government Is Buying the Answer

Everyone knows Somalia's government arrests journalists. Fewer people notice a second, quieter method it uses just as often: giving its sharpest critics government jobs. Once a journalist becomes a state spokesperson, the government does not need to silence them by force. They silence themselves, because their new job depends on it.

This matters far more than press freedom. Somalia today is a country where outside powers — Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, the United States and others — compete for military bases, ports, oil and political loyalty. Ordinary Somalis never voted for any of these arrangements and have no real way to reject them. The bargains are struck by officials whose loyalty runs in two directions at once — toward the public they are supposed to serve, and toward the foreign patrons whose money and protection keep them in power. Who controls Somalia's own story, at home and abroad, is part of that competition. A government that controls its critics controls what the world hears about it, at the exact moment powerful outsiders are deciding how much to trust that government with their money, their weapons and their influence. A co-opted journalist is not just a quieter newsroom. It is one less person able to tell Somalis, or the world, what their government is really doing with that two-directional loyalty, and on whose behalf it is really operating.

Arrested, Then Hired

The clearest example is recent. Hussein Abdulle Mohamed owned a television station, SYL Somalia TV, and reported independently. On 17 April 2024, he was arrested in Mogadishu on the order of Abdullahi Mohamed Ali, then the newly appointed head of Somalia's intelligence agency, known by his nickname Sanbaloolshe, who has since left the agency. No reason was given. The National Union of Somali Journalists called the arrest and continued detention illegal, and said Sanbaloolshe had a history of jailing journalists and station directors.^[1] 

Fourteen months later, on 21 June 2025, the Benadir Regional Administration — which governs the capital, Mogadishu — announced that this same man had been made Director of its Information Department, answering directly to Hassan Mohamed Hussein Mohamud, known as Muungaab, who holds the combined role of Governor of the Benadir Region and Mayor of Mogadishu.

What happened in between tells the real story. In early May 2025, weeks before he was hired, Mohamed publicly accused security forces of using the president's name to justify break-ins at journalists' homes at night, and said at least ten journalists had been detained in Mogadishu in a single month. As late as 26 June 2025, the same week his new job was announced, he was still writing about the need to hold officials accountable ahead of Somalia's 2026 elections.

Three months later, in September 2025, his tone had completely reversed. He shared and praised a post calling President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud's leadership "100 percent" good, without any qualification.^[2] Today his public posts are mostly routine government news: new roads, police announcements, the governor's visits. The reporting that once got him arrested is gone.

This does not prove he was paid to change his mind. But it shows something just as important: a journalist who criticised the government's security forces, in his own words, on record, with dates — and then, a little over a year after they arrested him, began praising the very same government without question.

Not a One-Off

Mohamed's story is the clearest, but it is not the only one. Abdiaziz Hassan Mohamed, a political commentator known online as Golfyare, followed a similar arc. In July 2024 he amplified another public figure's condemnation of a journalist's arrest and added his own words: "Free @AlinurSalaad".^[3] In May 2025, five months before his own appointment, he posted video of President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud with a caption naming the exact pattern he would soon join: "Déjà Vu is... the moment when a politician, as an opposition figure, criticizes the actions of the government in power, but when he himself assumes the role, he engages in the very same actions he previously used to criticize!"^[4] On 27 October 2025, he was installed as Director of Communications at the presidential palace, Villa Somalia.^[5] Six days later, on 2 November 2025, police in Mogadishu detained six journalists covering the shooting of a schoolboy allegedly killed by a National Intelligence and Security Agency soldier.^[6] Golfyare said nothing publicly about it. His own recent posts are routine coverage of the president's diplomatic travel.

Daauud Aways Jama, a longtime BBC Somali journalist, became a presidential spokesperson and later the Federal Minister of Information, Culture and Tourism — a role confirmed even by the Committee to Protect Journalists, which tried and failed to reach him for comment while investigating a wave of journalist arrests in 2025.^[7] He was still in the post in early March 2026; by mid-May 2026, Abdulfatah Kasim Mohamud had been sworn in as his successor.^[8] He left behind no dated, on-the-record reversal the way Mohamed and Golfyare did; what is documented in his case is the appointment and his later unresponsiveness, not a prior public break with the government. That does not make the pattern less real — it only means the proof available for his case is different.

One case here does not fit the pattern, and is worth separating out rather than folding in. Abdirahman Yusuf Al-Caddala is Deputy Minister of Information, Culture and Tourism, a post he still held as of April 2026.^[9] But he is not a hired critic. By his own account, his journalism career was spent inside state media — the Somali National News Agency and Somali National Television — before he became Director General of the Ministry of Information in 2017 and rose from there to Deputy Minister. Since taking that post he has himself drawn criticism from Somali press-freedom monitors over his conduct toward journalists.^[10] His case is not evidence of a critic who has been silenced. It is evidence of the same government rewarding loyalty inside its own media apparatus — a second track running alongside the one this piece is mainly about.

Ali Abdi Wardheere, a commentator known as Ali Yare who was famous for defending the government online, was made Deputy Chairman for Security at the Benadir Regional Administration under a previous president, before being publicly forced out in November 2022 for being too loyal to the government that had just left power.^[11] His case runs the pattern in the opposite direction from Mohamed's and Golfyare's: the government was not neutralising a critic but rewarding a loyalist, which suggests the goal is not punishing dissent as such. It is making sure the loudest voices in the room, whichever way they lean, answer to the state.

One case is more complicated, and worth pausing on, because it tests how far the pattern described above actually extends. Mohamed Ibrahim Moalimuu, a former BBC and Reuters journalist, became a government spokesperson in December 2020.^[12] He survived at least five assassination attempts by al-Shabaab because of that job, the worst in January 2022. He now sits in parliament, on the committee responsible for media policy. Taking a government job did not make his life safer — in his case, it nearly cost him his life. Yet his silence on later arrests is no different from the others: whatever his personal reasons for taking the job, the job itself still carried the same unwritten condition, which is to defend the government that employs you, not the colleagues it detains. His story complicates the motive behind these appointments, but it does not complicate what they produce once made.

Why the Silence Is Not Really a Choice

It would be easy to say each of these men simply chose a paycheck over principle. But look closely at what actually happens when Somali journalists are arrested, and a different picture appears. When Abdihafid Nur Barre was arrested,^[13] when Ali Adan Muumin was detained,^[14] when Abshir Khalif Shidane was killed in Kismayo^[15] — the people who spoke up were opposition politicians, independent press unions, and international groups like the Committee to Protect Journalists. Not one sitting government spokesperson, under this president or the last one, has ever publicly criticised their own government for arresting a journalist while still holding their job.

This is not really surprising once you think about it. A government spokesman cannot criticise his own government's police and keep his job. The silence is not mainly about personal weakness. It is built into the job itself. Somalia's government does not need to tell hired journalists to stay quiet when their old colleagues are arrested. The job already guarantees it. Hiring a well-known critic is not only about gaining a friendly voice. It is about permanently removing an unfriendly one.

A Word of Warning About Rumours

Alongside these confirmed cases, a much murkier set of claims circulates on Somali social media, naming other "Facebook journalists" said to have secretly taken government money. Several of these claims could not be confirmed through any public record — no government announcement, no state media appearance, nothing official. One claim turned out to be simply false: a journalist widely rumoured to have joined the government is, by his own public statements, still living in exile and still reporting on corruption from outside the country.^[16]

This matters beyond getting the facts right. If people believe independent journalists have all secretly been bought, whether or not it is true, they stop trusting real independent reporting too. That damage happens whether or not the government does anything at all.

What This Means

None of this replaces the more familiar story of arrests, raids and killings that make Somalia one of the most dangerous places in the world to be a journalist — the Committee to Protect Journalists documented at least 41 private-media journalists arrested, assaulted or detained in Mogadishu alone between mid-March and early May 2025.^[17] Rather it adds to it. An arrest silences a journalist for days or weeks. A government job can silence one for years, while using their name and reputation to do the opposite of what journalism is supposed to do.

Somalia is a country where foreign powers are buying influence with money, weapons and infrastructure. Measuring exactly how that bargain has shaped any one hired journalist's coverage of Turkey, the UAE or the United States specifically would take a separate piece of work, tracking each man's output line by line against the government's foreign dealings. What can be said here is narrower: once a critic is on the government payroll, there is no longer anyone in that newsroom with an incentiveto ask hard questions about any of the government's foreign bargains, whoever is making them. Controlling the people who report on that competition is its own kind of power — quieter than a military base, but no less useful to whoever holds it. The pattern here, across two presidents and both national and local governments, suggests Somalia's rulers have learned a lesson that will outlast any one of them: sometimes the easiest way to deal with a critic is not to silence him. It is to hire him. Somalia is probably not the only state where this calculation holds; governments elsewhere that depend on foreign patrons while answering weakly to their own citizens may find the same trade just as attractive. Whether that pattern holds beyond Somalia is a question for reporters covering those countries, not a claim this piece can support.

Ismail Abukar is Co-founder and Chairperson of the Organization for Prisoners' Rights (OPR), a civil society organization based in Mogadishu, Somalia, whose research has been cited by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the United States State Department. He has conducted primary field research in Somalia for seven years. He is currently based in Honolulu, Hawaii. His investigations have been published by African Arguments, Horn Observer, and Pambazuka News. [email protected] | opr.org.so | ORCID: 0009-0003-1435-3691

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