Is the London Somalia Conference 2017 another imperialist deja vu?

The general mindset of Somalis about the London Conference or any other conference that is held outside the country is just to view it as another imperialist deja vu of how Somalia was carved up in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Such conferences are never about the interest of Somali people, they are always about an ulterior motive; whether it is to end piracy that choked international trade, or to fight against the scarecrow of terrorism while real terrorism is left unhampered. The outcome is usually the prolonging of the presence of foreign forces and letting Somali territorial and maritime integrity to be violated on their watch.

It is not lost on Somalis that the 2012 conference came at the peak of piracy, which cost global trade $7 billion in 2011 alone. And now UK calls for the second conference after a recurrence of piracy attacks were reported in March this year.

Exhausted by conflict and cyclic droughts caused by environmental change, the Somali people are concerned only about survival and it’s due to this vulnerability that their country and resources have become a fair game for all.

The London Conference is therefore not about what it would do for the Somali people despite the declared objectives, but how much more it will hamper the Somali people’s capacity to own their own decisions and how much more of their sovereignty and nationhood they have to give up. One can dismiss this as a third mentality that hankers after conspiracy theories, but it is the lessons that Somalis learnt from the dozens of conferences held in their name and the millions of dollars pledged that only robbed them more of their dignity, their identity and their decision-making.

It echoes the spirit of an old Somali poem that Somalis often quote which says: “There is a man who searches [for] your lost camels with you, and sometimes works even harder than you do, but who deep inside his heart never wants you to find them.”