The Somaliland crisis demands that the AU break free from its rigid adherence to postcolonial sovereignty

The contemporary political landscape of Africa is haunted – not by the spectres of its colonial past, but by a robust, living anomaly: a polity that functions with all the attributes of statehood yet remains a spectral presence in the ledgers of international law.

Somaliland is the most enduring and instructive “ghost in the machine” of the Westphalian system, a de facto state that for more than three decades has performed a quiet, relentless critique of the continent’s most sacrosanct norm: the inviolability of colonial borders. Its existence poses a fundamental challenge to the African Union, not as a threat of fragmentation, but as a mirror reflecting a profound institutional and philosophical crisis. This crisis, a disjunction between juridical orthodoxy and empirical political reality, threatens to reduce the AU from a visionary project of collective agency into a curator of a colonial museum, a “sleeping giant” normatively loud yet politically subdued.

The recent communiqué from the chairperson of the African Union Commission, which categorically rejected recognition of Somaliland and reaffirmed an “unwavering commitment” to Somalia’s sovereignty, was more than a routine diplomatic missive. It was a performative reassertion of a frozen paradigm. In its declaratory certainty, it bypassed the messy, deliberative processes of the Peace and Security Council or the Assembly of Heads of State, substituting collective continental reasoning with a unilateral, almost oracular, pronouncement.

This act of executive overreach is symptomatic of a deeper ailment: a structural reluctance to engage with political phenomena that defy inherited templates. For 30 years, the “Somaliland question” has been managed through a strategy of diplomatic silence and deliberate institutional averting of the gaze. The chairperson’s statement is not a break from this silence, but its loudest, most defensive expression.

This reflexive posture exposes the core of the AU’s sovereignty enigma. The union operates within a framework where sovereignty is treated as a static legal artefact, a “frozen right” granted irrevocably at the moment of decolonisation and enshrined in the principle of uti possidetis juris, the 1964 Cairo Declaration’s mandate to preserve the borders inherited from colonialism. This was a pragmatic, stabilising fiction for a fractious post-independence continent. Yet, in elevating this juridical principle to a metaphysical truth, the AU has struggled to accommodate sovereignty as a dynamic, living condition, a political fact forged through collective agency, institutional continuity and functional governance.

Herein lies the “functional sovereignty paradox” that the AU leadership consistently misreads. Somaliland presents a stark contrast: its sovereignty is not a legal inheritance from 1960 (indeed, it argues for a reversion to its own prior, brief sovereignty). Rather, its claim is empirical, built over three decades of relative peace, consistent democratic transitions and internal cohesion following a catastrophic civil war. The AU, by prioritising the abstract, juridical shell of Somalia’s sovereignty over the functional, governance-filled reality of Somaliland, perpetuates a dangerous “sovereignty-capacity gap”. It champions a legal absolute that exists in tension with the empirical void of effective governance in parts of the recognised state. In doing so, it inadvertently champions a principle that can destabilise the very peace and security it is mandated to uphold. The sanctity of borders becomes a tragic irony when those borders enclose conflict and instability, while peace and order flourish just beyond their recognised line.

The intervention of external powers, most recently Israel’s recognition of Somaliland in late 2025, is often decried as an act of extra-continental “midwifery” or geopolitical interference. While such actions undoubtedly introduce complex new variables, to focus solely on their disruptive intent is to mistake a symptom for the cause. External engagements of this kind are not historical aberrations; they are the predictable offspring of institutional vacuum. A comparative glance at the continent’s postcolonial history is instructive. The independence of Eritrea and South Sudan, the only successful secessions in post-OAU Africa, were not solely endogenous victories. They were profoundly shaped by the strategic calculus and material support of foreign actors, from Middle Eastern states to Western powers. These external forces did not create the conditions for separation, but they decisively filled the diplomatic and political voids left by regional and continental bodies paralysed by normative inflexibility.

Thus, Israeli recognition, or any future bilateral recognition, is less an external imposition and more a signifier of the AU’s abdication of its role as the primary arbiter of African political geography. When the union refuses to modernise its normative framework to engage with stable de facto realities, it cedes the power to define political facts on the continent to others.

The chairperson’s communiqué, in its stark rejectionism, does not fortify African agency; it accelerates this cession. It invites a world of bilateral, transactional recognitions that serve external strategic interests, be they for sea access, geopolitical positioning or intelligence partnerships, further eroding the continent’s collective voice. The “sanctity of borders” becomes moot if those borders are continually reinterpreted and redrawn through a patchwork of external recognitions that the AU can only protest against, not prevent.

This moment brings into sharp relief a teleological tension within the AU’s very constitution. The chairperson’s declaratory fiat represents the episodic will of institutional design, the attempt to impose a top-down, normative order frozen in a 1964 understanding of statehood. It collides with what we might term the sedimentary weight of historical autopoiesis embodied by Somaliland: a sovereign political continuum, an autochthonous praxis whose endurance across ages constitutes a telos (a purpose or end) forged not by decree, but through lived political experience. This is a clash of temporalities. One is the time of the law, cyclical and repetitive, insisting on the perpetual return to an original moment of decolonisation. The other is the time of history, linear and accumulative, building legitimacy, layer upon layer, through daily acts of governance, civic participation and resilient social contract.

The AU’s foundational document, the Constitutive Act, itself contains the seeds of this philosophical dilemma. It famously moved beyond the OAU’s strict non-interference by introducing the right of intervention in cases of grave circumstances, a nod to the idea that sovereignty entails responsibility. This was a monumental shift, acknowledging that the empirical condition of a state (its ability to protect its citizens) could invalidate its juridical claim to non-interference. Yet, this progressive principle has been applied inconsistently and often only under extreme duress. The case of Somaliland inverts this logic: it presents a scenario where a sub-state entity has, through its own agency, achieved a high degree of internal stability and democratic governance, the very empirical conditions the AU values, yet is denied any juridical reconsideration because it challenges the border principle. The union’s logic appears selectively flexible: empirical failure can justify intervention into sovereignty, but empirical success cannot justify a reconsideration of its boundaries.

This inconsistency is glaring when contrasted with other prolonged sovereignty disputes under the AU’s purview, most notably Western Sahara. The territory remains on the UN list of Non-Self-Governing Territories, yet the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic holds full membership within the AU, a status that implicitly challenges Morocco’s sovereignty claim. The AU’s engagement here has been fraught, marked by competing recognitions and political pressure, revealing a framework capable of complexity and contested membership when geopolitical wills collide. The contrast with the blanket, non-negotiable dismissal applied to Somaliland’s arguably more consolidated de facto statehood suggests a framework governed less by dispassionate legal principle than by political expediency and fear of precedent. This “selective legalism” undermines the AU’s claim to philosophical coherence and opens it to charges of operating from a position of parochial interest rather than principled consensus.

The consequences of this inertia extend far beyond the Horn of Africa. The AU’s struggle to develop a coherent, proactive and context-sensitive framework for engaging with de facto states like Somaliland is of a piece with its broader challenges. From the persistent, devastating conflicts in Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and the Sahel, to the governance crises flagged and often left unaddressed by mechanisms like the African Peer Review Mechanism, a pattern emerges. The union’s response is too often fragmented, reactive and hampered by a reluctance to fundamentally confront the disconnect between inherited state structures and the lived realities of African peoples. Flagship initiatives risk devolving into procedural rituals, while ad-hoc coalitions and external partners increasingly drive security and political responses. This is the path of the sleeping giant: symbolically present, normatively vocal, but strategically passive at the very moments that demand decisive, endogenous leadership.

Therefore, the path forward demands a radical, yet essential, intellectual and institutional courage. To remain the authentic force for “African solutions to African problems”, the AU must consciously evolve from a custodian of a postcolonial settlement into a steward of a living, adaptive political order. This does not necessitate a reckless abandonment of uti possidetis, which remains a vital bulwark against chaotic fragmentation. It does, however, require the development of a formal, principled framework for engaging with exceptional, consolidated de facto states. Such a framework would not grant automatic recognition, but would mandate a transparent, evidence-based assessment led by the Peace and Security Council or a dedicated commission. Criteria would move beyond the fear of “precedent” to evaluate empirical realities: the duration and stability of self-governance, the democratic legitimacy of institutions, the inclusivity of the social contract and the entity’s impact on regional security.

Engaging Somaliland through such a process would not be an act of rewarding secession; it would be an act of mature statecraft. It would reclaim the normative initiative from foreign powers and place the complex question of sovereignty back where it belongs: within a pan-African deliberative process. It would signal that the AU governs sovereignty as a living, evolving political condition, not just a stationary legal inheritance. It would demonstrate that African unity is not a fragile artefact preserved in amber, but a robust, confident project capable of governing complexity.

The alternative is the continued erosion of the AU’s ontological foundation. A union that cannot reconcile its principles with the political facts on the ground is a union that privileges form over function, map over territory, and silence over dialogue. It condemns itself to reacting to events shaped by others. The ghost in the machine will not vanish through incantations of old principles; it must be engaged, understood and ultimately accounted for within a renewed African political imagination. The giant must awaken, not to roar defensively at the past, but to gaze clearly, ethically and courageously at the intricate realities of the present, and in doing so, decisively shape the continent’s future. DM

Seife Tadelle Kidane is an associate researcher at the University of Johannesburg, director of the Centre for Governance and Intra-Africa Trade Studies and the Institute for Pan-African Thought and Conversation.