Somalia’s Real Conspiracy Isn’t The One Turkey’s Bloggers Blame On Israel And The UAE – OpEd
Key Takeaways:
- Pro-Ankara blogs blame UAE/Israel for Somali anger at Turkish firms. The author says read the books: Favori keeps 75% of Mogadishu airport revenue through 2028; auditors say 2025 should have sent ~$7.43m to the treasury and ~$4.15m arrived. Favori and port operator Albayrak have not filed required independent audits (~$34.26m unverified). Parliament never voted the deals; workers struck over foreign hires.
- Hobyo: an 80-year Metag port concession (Oct 2024)—far longer than the usual 20–25 years. SOMTURK, six days old, got exclusive control of Somalia’s waters and EEZ (Dec 2025); the revenue split is unpublished.
- Long, opaque concessions that outlive the government that signed them (Suez, Hong Kong) are the pattern, not a psy-op. An MP says his committee still cannot see the contracts. Somalis doing the arithmetic are not extras in someone else’s information war.
Pro-Turkey bloggers have settled on an explanation for the rising anti-Turkish sentiment across Somalia: Somalis are not reacting to anything Ankara has done. They are being played. A sprawling plot, cooked up by the UAE, Israel and unnamed “Zionists,” is said to be manufacturing the anger from nothing, purpose-built to drive apart two nations that share a faith.
Set that aside for a moment. Set aside, too, the contempt buried in the theory itself, which casts ordinary Somalis as props in someone else’s information war rather than citizens capable of judging for themselves who runs their airport, their ports and their fisheries. The claim is a deflection, and deflections are worth testing rather than arguing with. If Somali anger at Turkish companies really is manufactured, it should not survive contact with the public record. It does.
Start with the airport. Favori LLC, a Turkish aviation firm under the Kozuva Group, has managed Aden Adde International Airport in Mogadishu since 2013, when it signed an initial 20-year concession with the federal government. An amended agreement signed May 16, 2019, reset the split: Favori keeps 75% of gross revenue, the government gets 25%, and the contract runs through 2028. Somalia’s Office of the Auditor General, in findings Garowe Online reported in August, put Favori’s 2025 gross revenue at about $29.71 million, which under that formula should have sent roughly $7.43 million to the treasury. Government records show only about $4.15 million arrived — a $3.27 million gap the Auditor General said left the reported concession revenue neither complete nor verifiable. That single year sits inside a bigger, older hole: auditors say they cannot verify a combined $34.26 million in fees owed by Favori and by Albayrak Group, the Turkish operator of Mogadishu Port, because neither company has ever submitted the independently audited statements their own contracts require.
Training and staffing tell a similar story. A 2024 special audit recommended, more than a decade into Favori’s tenure, that the company “provide qualified Somali nationals with access to all job categories, including management” — a recommendation that would not exist if the practice were already routine. In November 2025, airport workers walked out, accusing Favori of moving to replace local staff with foreign hires as the 2028 deadline nears rather than widen their role. The Middle East Institute has separately noted that neither the Favori nor the Albayrak contract was ever put to a parliamentary vote, and quotes an unnamed Somali legislator’s blunt verdict: any deal parliament never approved is legally void.
That is business as usual. It has nothing to do with the UAE or Israel.
Hobyo tells its own version of the same story. On Oct. 7, 2024, Galmudug President Ahmed Abdi Kariye, known widely as Qoor Qoor, signed an 80-year agreement handing the Hobyo Investment Company’s new port on Galmudug’s central coast to Turkish conglomerate Metag Holding, which has pledged $70 million up front and expects three years to build it. It was not Hobyo’s first suitor: in November 2020, Galmudug had already struck a deal for the same site with a UK-based consortium of Turkish, British and Somali firms called Oriental Terminal. That arrangement quietly died, and Metag inherited the location four years later on terms considerably better for itself. Eighty years is not how port concessions normally work anywhere; the global norm sits closer to 20 or 25. What was signed at Hobyo binds three generations of Somalis not yet born to a decision made by one administration, on a stretch of coast within reach of both Puntland and Somaliland where at least one regional analyst has pointed, cautiously and without independent confirmation, to satellite imagery suggesting the construction underway may not be purely commercial.
That, too, is business, not a foreign plot against Turkey.
Then there is the sea. On Dec. 17, 2025, inside its own Ankara headquarters and with Turkey’s defense minister and chief of general staff both in attendance, OYAK — the pension and mutual aid fund of the Turkish armed forces — signed a “Strategic Cooperation and Service Agreement” with Somalia’s Ministry of Fisheries and Blue Economy. It created SOMTURK, a joint venture with exclusive authority to license, register, monitor and police fishing across all of Somalia’s territorial waters and its entire exclusive economic zone. SOMTURK had existed for all of six days before it received that authority, having been incorporated on Dec. 11 — a timeline the investigative outlet Nordic Monitor says has fueled suspicion the company benefited from government favor rather than any competitive process. What Somalia gets back from the deal is still not publicly known. Officials speak only of a general revenue-sharing arrangement. Figures circulating in the Turkish press and among critics put Somalia’s cut as high as 50%; one regional analysis outlet instead puts Turkey’s share at 30%, which would leave Somalia with 70%. Neither number traces to a published document, because no document has been published. That gap in public knowledge, on a coastline that runs more than 3,300 kilometers — the longest on mainland Africa — and waters that remain among the last strongholds of abundant yellowfin tuna anywhere, is not a footnote. It is the entire complaint.
Once again: business, not a UAE-Israeli information operation.
None of this is unprecedented, which is exactly the problem. Long concessions to foreign operators have a well-worn history, and it does not end quietly. In 1854, Egypt’s viceroy, Said Pasha, gave French diplomat Ferdinand de Lesseps a 99-year concession to build and run what became the Suez Canal. The deal outlived colonization, two world wars and Egyptian independence, generating fortunes for foreign shareholders while Egypt kept a sliver of the earnings. It took a nationalist president, Gamal Abdel Nasser, and the willingness to absorb a foreign invasion, to take it back in 1956 — a dozen years before the concession’s own 1968 expiry date. Britain’s 1898 lease of Hong Kong’s New Territories followed the same shape: a deal struck under pressure, honored for generations, then handed back in 1997 in a reckoning that a 99-year clock had merely postponed. An 80-year port lease and a 12-year-old airport contract with an unexplained multimillion-dollar gap belong to that same family. History’s lesson is not that such deals are corrupt the day they are signed. It is that any concession built to outlast the government that signed it, unreviewed by parliament and unaudited by anyone independent, is a wager — a bet that some future Somali government will honor terms today’s citizens never got to see.
And Somalis keep discovering they cannot even check. Abdulkadir M. Wa’ays, a member of Somalia’s Federal Parliament, said in a public statement that over four years on the Committee for Transport, Infrastructure and Energy — the body meant to oversee exactly these contractors, Favori for the airport and Albayrak for the port — the committee has repeatedly sought the underlying contracts and been refused, leaving it, in his words, without even “access to their official contract documents” and unable to hold either company to account. That is a Somali lawmaker saying so, on the record, not a UAE-funded blogger, not an Israeli information operation, not a “Zionist” plot. It is the Somali state telling Somalis it cannot see the contracts signed in their name.
So if there is a conspiracy in this picture, it is not the one the pro-Ankara bloggers keep pointing to. It is the far more familiar pattern of a foreign state quietly gathering control over a fragile country’s main sources of revenue — its airport, its ports, its fish — through deals measured in decades and checked by no one elected. Somalis who object to that are not victims of a psy-op. They are doing arithmetic, with more than a century of precedent to tell them how arrangements like this tend to end.
Editor’s note: Figures on Favori LLC’s 2025 gross revenue and the government revenue shortfall are drawn from Somalia’s Office of the Auditor General as reported by Garowe Online. The combined $34.26 million in unverified concession fees and the 2024 special-audit recommendation on Somali staffing come from the Auditor General’s office and related reporting. Terms of the Metag Holding-Hobyo Investment Company port concession and the OYAK-SOMTURK fisheries agreement are drawn from Turkish and Somali government statements and independent reporting, including Nordic Monitor’s account of SOMTURK’s incorporation date. The claim that Somalia receives 50% of SOMTURK revenue, and the competing claim that Turkey’s share is 30%, both trace to secondary sources rather than a published contract; neither could be independently verified, and both figures should be read as reported, not confirmed. The statement on document access is attributed to Abdulkadir M. Wa’ays, a member of the Federal Parliament’s Committee for Transport, Infrastructure and Energy, drawn from his public statement. The underlying contract documents for the airport, Hobyo port and fisheries concessions have not been made public.
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