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By Siyad Madey
President Abdirahman Mohamed Abdullahi Cirro’s arrival in Washington this month is being described by his office as a strategic conversation rather than a recognition plea. That framing is accurate. It should not obscure what the visit will actually be judged on: whether two bills already sitting in Congress move.
Start with the legal ground Cirro is standing on, because it is stronger than most of Washington realizes. Somaliland’s parliament passed its own union law on June 27, 1960. The southern assembly in Mogadishu never enacted the matching text, approving a different version “in principle” only. A presidential decree tried to paper over the gap but lapsed under the constitution’s own terms. When a proper Act of Union came before Somaliland’s electorate in 1961, more than 60 percent of northern voters rejected it. In 1991, Somaliland walked back out of a union whose legal foundation had already collapsed thirty years earlier. That history matters in any serious conversation with State Department lawyers, since the African Union’s border-preservation doctrine, the usual objection to recognition, was written for cases of secession, not for the unwinding of a merger that was never properly completed.
The security case has caught up with the legal one. Berbera sits on the Gulf of Aden side of the Bab el-Mandeb, the chokepoint the Houthis have spent two years demonstrating they can threaten at will. A shadow fleet moving sanctioned oil has been documented using Berbera’s waters. China’s base in Djibouti is a short flight away. Washington doesn’t need to sympathize with Somaliland’s cause to see the practical upside: an administration willing to sign a security framework, the kind AFRICOM once had under the lapsed Somaliland Partnership Act, gets a functioning port and a government that answers its calls, at a moment when both are in short supply along that coast.
That leaves Congress, where the argument stops being rhetorical. H.R. 7993, the Somaliland Economic Access and Opportunity Act, has sat in House Financial Services since March, and H.R. 3992, the Republic of Somaliland Independence Act, has been stuck in Foreign Affairs since June 2025, both without a committee vote. Both bills exist because members of both parties concluded, independently of this visit, that current policy toward Somaliland doesn’t match current American interests. In June, the State Department issued a report reaffirming Somalia’s territorial sovereignty over Somaliland in terms that sit uneasily next to two bills its own colleagues in the executive branch are supposed to help implement.
That contradiction, more than any photograph with a senator, is what this visit should resolve. Somaliland has spent three decades making the case that it deserves recognition on the merits: a functioning democracy, five peaceful transfers of power, a currency, a port, a track record no government in Mogadishu has matched. What Cirro needs from this trip isn’t a fresh version of that argument. It’s Washington’s own government resolving its internal disagreement about what to do with it. A White House that quietly instructs Financial Services and Foreign Affairs to schedule markups would do more for Somaliland in a week than another year of position papers would.
Cirro could come home with an itinerary of respectful meetings, or he could come home with a markup date. Getting from one to the other isn’t a matter of rhetoric. It’s a matter of procedure, and Congress has the rest of this fall to settle it.
About the Author
Siyad Madey is a Nairobi-based legal practitioner and policy analyst with over 25 years of legal, regulatory, compliance, and governance experience across East Africa and the Horn of Africa, including 15 years in senior management at the National Bank of Kenya. He is a contributing analyst to the Middle East Forum covering Horn of Africa security and Red Sea geopolitics, and his work has appeared in The Hill and The Spectator. Follow him on X at @MadeySiyad.
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