Tom Goodfellow Hello, everybody, and welcome to the African Cities podcast. We’re here today to talk about urban land brokers in Africa. And this is some work that’s come out of the land and connectivity domain of the African Cities Research Consortium. I’m Tom Goodfellow, I was one of the leaders of that domain of research in the first phase of the African Cities Research Consortium’s work. And I’m very pleased to be joined today by my colleagues, Abdifatah Tahir, who was working, among other things, on land issues in Mogadishu, and also Eria Serwajja and Muhamed Lunyago, who are both from Kampala, and who led on the work that we were doing on urban land and connectivity in Kampala. And the reason we’re talking about land brokers today is because this is something that came across as being really quite significant in the work, in the research that people did in the cities we were working in, and particularly in Kampala and Mogadishu. So just to give a bit more background, in this domain of work, we were looking at issues around land tenure, land conflicts, how new infrastructure connections affect land values and land conflicts, these kinds of things, exploring the interaction of infrastructure investment and land in African cities. And we were looking at this in Kampala and in Mogadishu, but also in Accra, in Bukavu in the eastern Congo, in Harare, and in Maiduguri in Nigeria. So we have studies on all of these cities. But in Mogadishu and Kampala especially, we found that the role of land brokers was coming through as being really significant in the land markets and land dynamics in those cities. And we had a webinar, which hopefully some of our listeners here might have tuned into, where we talked about all of the cities in our set and a whole range of different findings from our report. And in that webinar, we also got a strong sense from the audience that there was a real interest in this question of brokers and their roles. So we had people joining us from different cities across Africa, and they wanted to know more. There’s also not that much literature, I think, on urban land brokers. A lot of it is focused on different parts of the world and on rural brokers. So we’re here to explore this issue of land brokers more. Let me now introduce, or allow my colleagues to introduce themselves a bit more. I’ll just go round. Do you want to start, Abdi, and just say a little bit about yourself and your background?

Abdifatah Tahir My name’s Abdi. I’m from Somalia, and I was one of the researchers working on the land issues in Somalia in the domain of land and connectivity.

Tom Goodfellow Great. Thank you. Eria?

Eria Serwajja I am from Makerere University. My background is in urban planning, and I also have background in land governance, land tenure administration, and land conflicts that I did at a PhD level. So I also led the land and connectivity domain research in Kampala.

Tom Goodfellow Great. Thank you. And Muhamed?

Muhamed Lunyago I am Muhamed Lunyago. I’m a PhD fellow at the Makerere Institute of Social Research, Makerere University. I was also a researcher in the land and connectivity domain in Kampala City.

Tom Goodfellow Great. Thank you. And just for my own institutional affiliation, which I forgot to mention, I’m based at the University of Sheffield in the School of Geography and Planning. OK. So to kick things off, I want to just ask why land brokers matter? Why is this something that came up as being significant in your cities on the research on urban land and how it works? And, as I say, our stakeholders who came to the webinar also seem to think that they mattered in many other cities. So what difference do you think they make to the city and the city’s development? It would just be good to hear from some of you about that. Eria?

Eria Serwajja I think land brokers are very important in terms of connecting buyers and sellers, particularly in our context, where the land market is less developed. For instance, if a person is looking for land to buy and completely has no connection and has no time, then the brokers often come as a quick fix. So for me, brokers are very important in easing and quickening the transactions, but also connecting those that are willing to buy and willing to sell. So without them, like it was in the 1980s and 70s, it was often very difficult for somebody who even had the money to buy to find an authentic seller of the land. So in that context, for me, the land brokers are very important and have become a crucial part in terms of land transactions. Although they operate informally, in my view, many of these transactions often find their way into the formal system. So their informality is somewhat becoming a little bit formal. So for me, from the context of the work we’ve done in Kampala, that is the value of land brokers.

Tom Goodfellow OK, that’s fascinating. Thinking about cities that are growing as fast as Kampala – and some of that growth is internal, but some of it’s from migration – this sense that it eases people’s entry into the city, right, being able to find a plot of land for people who are unfamiliar with the local scene. And I think we should come back to that issue of them becoming more formal as well. But maybe we can hear a little bit more on Kampala from Muhamed before handing over to hear about Mogadishu. Muhamed.

Muhamed Lunyago Sure. Well, I think land brokers are becoming important also because the people themselves, especially those that want to buy land, find it a little bit convenient to go through them, given the time it would take them to look for land anywhere. Kampala is quite a huge city and not everyone in the city knows all the places and which places have which kind of amenities and infrastructures. And yet the brokers have most of this information. And if they did search for land by themselves, they would actually take a lot of time and then a lot of money, it would cost them quite a lot. So going through a broker who actually has more of this information, because one of the roles they play is to gather this information and be able to pass it on to the prospective land buyers is what they do, and then becomes a little bit convenient.

Eria Serwajja I think also, Tom, the issue of brokers having multiple options, you as a buyer of the land, you could actually be looking in one direction, but the brokers often have this array of options and they will take you to multiple pieces of land where you’d actually think that some of that could be much better than you had imagined before. So for me, they offer, apart from shortening of time, those options that come to the table are very crucial for the buyer.

Tom Goodfellow OK, so does what you’ve heard there, Abdi, speak to the situation in Mogadishu in terms of their role and how they work? Or would you describe anything differently in the context of Mogadishu?

Abdifatah Tahir I think Muhamed and Eria’s discussion regarding Kampala very much relates to Mogadishu as well. But in addition to what they’ve already said about Kampala, in Mogadishu, obviously there are, because of the conditions of fragility, there are overlapping claims on land, and property ownership is not very clear. So the work of the brokers becomes so important in that regard, in the sense that it becomes like an issue of security. For instance, if you want to buy land in Mogadishu and you don’t know about the clarity on the ownership and sometimes you don’t even trust the papers and all of that, they become an extra layer of security in finding out the right land, who it belongs to and all of this. So their work then comes across as a very important component of the land market in Mogadishu.

Tom Goodfellow OK, so in some senses, when in any situation where you buy and sell land or property, these agents come into play. And, here in the UK, obviously we talk about estate agents, who are heavily formalised and there’s a certain degree of transparency in how they work. And of course, there are formal estate agents, certainly in Kampala and I imagine to some extent in Mogadishu. But how are brokers different? So I’m interested in the language that’s being used as well. Maybe before we go any further, what words are used locally? Because when we were talking with our other colleagues in Nigeria and other contexts, we found, I think, when we were talking about brokers that people meant different things. So some people were actually thinking more of perhaps developers who might buy land, subdivide it, do a bit of work and sell it on, rather than just connecting buyer and seller. And of course, you have sometimes high-level aggregators of land parcels and they all might have different words that go with them. So it would be interesting to know, in your context, what is the word people are using? What does it translate as in English, do you think?

Abdifatah Tahir In Mogadishu, they use the word “dilal”, which more or less means like intermediaries. It is just somebody who arranges the transaction between you and the seller of the land. And it is also about having accurate information about the land they are selling. So I think this word dates back… the brokerage system when it comes to land, it’s not a very old thing. It’s a new phenomenon. It only started in the 80s, due to the urbanisation trade that has gone quite high at the time because of many people going abroad, especially in the Middle East, where they had to work and were remitting significant amounts of money to build houses for themselves. But before that, the word dilal, which is like the intermediaries, it was often used for the livestock market, where traders used to arrange the sale between the rural folks who own livestock and the urban folks who want to buy from them and export it to the Middle East. So the intermediaries between that particular trade. Then it was in the 80s – it only gained momentum in the 80s – that it became also applied to other markets, like other forms of trade, including goods import from outside and people who do the intermediaries, as well as the land market. So dilal is not something unique to the land market. It also applies to all sorts of intermediaries, including goods, exchanges, as well as the livestock.

Tom Goodfellow That’s really interesting to hear that background of how brokerage has kind of moved from other places, like into land relatively recently. How would you tell that story in Kampala, Eria?

Eria Serwajja Yeah, for Kampala, the word is “kayungirizi”, meaning the connector, the person who connects one person to the other. I mean, the person is connecting the buyer to the seller. But other terms, like “dealer” have also come in, a person who is into a deal, which is you’re trying to do something for quick money. Quick money means there is a buyer, a person who has the land to sell. So you’re looking for a buyer and you’re getting some little money off it. So that’s your intention here. But there has also been a transition, as I’ve heard from Somalia. There has been a transition from people who have been kayungirizi or the connectors or the dealers into real estate. Many of the kayungirizi or the dealers come together to start buying portions of land, which they cut into small pieces, apportion into small pieces, 50 by 100 or 50 by 50 or 100 by 50 and they are for sale. So this transition is now seen in Kampala, where brokers have now transitioned into some sort of real estate dealers in a way. So, again, but they don’t often abandon their dealing role or their connecting role. They continue to do it, but they now become a little bit bigger with some bit of money and therefore can become real estate dealers.

Tom Goodfellow So this picks up on what you were saying earlier, I think, about how they’re becoming more formal. And there are obviously real estate agents who are quite high end and have a formal office and maybe have registered their business formally. And you can go there and look at pictures and they’re online. Is there a hard line between an estate agent who is formal in that way and these brokers, or is it more fluid, are they, one can become the other? I’m just wondering about the relationship between the formal and informal there.

Eria Serwajja Within our country, I think there’s a thin line between the formal and informal. But I want to take you back a little bit to how this land brokerage started. In Uganda, there was one gentleman who was called Kasule and that particular time, the term was “Kasule” property agent’. So one individual comes up with the idea to start connecting buyers to sellers and he was the only one in town. And his downfall was that he expanded so quickly to almost different parts of the country. But my thinking also is that the politicians became a little more threatened because he became so powerful within Kampala. So he had land and connections across the country. So in that line – and land is a political issue in our country, it embodies all those socioeconomic and cultural aspects – so in a way, he collapsed terribly. But that is how real estate and brokerage started in the country. He was actually, the land broker did not exist in fact, his name was Kasule then, that everybody who mentioned his personal name would ideally point to land brokerage or a person who is connecting buyer to the sellers. But his company collapsed. And of course, he became indented, he was pronounced bankrupt. And up to now, he lives a very silent life in Kampala. But he had transitioned the country from this informal process that people do not know that there is anything like land brokerage. And everybody now started picking up land dealer, land broker. And now the entire country, you find every other small town and village has a land broker, whatever you want, whether in Kampala or out of Kampala. Every village, whether they are LCs, have also become land brokers. So there’s a thin line between the formal and informal. In fact, those that are informal often start to formalise and they have offices and they have bank accounts and that’s how the process goes. But when they become bankrupt, they now fall back into the informal system. So there’s a fluid kind of line and thin line between formal and informal.

Tom Goodfellow OK, so this is interesting. This gets me as well onto this issue of legitimacy and trust, because it’s clear that these actors have gone from being non-existent actually quite recently, over a few decades, to being really key players in the land market. And clearly a lot of trust has to be put in them, in terms of the information that they hold and people considering it to be reliable or valid. But there are also maybe different categories and it’s interesting to hear there are different words which perhaps have different degrees of legitimacy. So I wondered if you could just say a bit more about, are these actors in general people who are trusted? Are they seen as a positive actor in the city that people really need? Or is there some sense that there are distinct categories? There are the real ones, the legitimate ones and the illegitimate ones, regardless of formal or informal categories.

Eria Serwajja It was largely practised previously by unemployed young men and young women. Of course, very few women – it’s just now that they are entering into the system – but unemployed, less educated, that category of persons who do not seem to have hope, if I could say that. So by their very nature, it means that there’s less trust in this category of persons. It means that the information they hold sometimes is very untrue, that you can’t trust such a person. So the trust initially wasn’t there. It’s now that when you start to formalise, you start to give people hope that I am the legitimate person, I have an address, I have an office. And those particular issues become very important, in terms of sieving out who is formal and who is informal. So formalisation means there is an office, they have an address, you have legitimate phone numbers and now they advertise, which wasn’t there before.

Tom Goodfellow I think there’s a few things that I want to pick up. But come in, Muhamed, if you’ve got something to add there.

Muhamed Lunyago Yeah, I think also on the question of trust, people as of now seem to appear like they don’t have a choice than to deal with the brokers, whether they trust them or they don’t trust them. So they just rely on the fact that, well, we don’t have a choice. We cannot do this on our own. And you could become a little bit more vulnerable to risks of theft and robbery in the land transaction than you would when you’re dealing alone. So they don’t trust them that much. But it’s like they don’t have much choices, you know. Also, given the fact that even some of the land sellers actually want to hide some of their transactions from maybe their close family members and associates and stuff like that, that it becomes quite difficult for them to deal directly with some land buyers and then they have to go through brokers. And it’s quite hard to know who is selling which kind of land if the land seller himself is not putting up a poster or telling people that I’m selling. The first point of contact for them is to go to a broker and people just find it a bit convenient to go to them, not because there is a lot of trust in what they do, but because the options they have without the brokers are quite limited.

Tom Goodfellow Yeah, that’s really interesting as well, because it’s like some people obviously want the whole thing to be quite secret. They want to use a broker because they’re concealing something they’re doing. They don’t want the sale to be visible. So that issue of the secrecy of brokers is kind of baked into what they do. And obviously for other people, that can be risky because you don’t know if they’re actually ripping you off in all kinds of ways. But yeah, there is a tension there between wanting it to be secretive and wanting to have that transparency. I’d just be interested to hear from you, Abdi, about those issues around legitimacy, trust, concealment in the case of Mogadishu.

Abdifatah Tahir Yeah, in Mogadishu actually, for maybe the purpose of determining the price, initially you may even conceal the information, the correct information regarding how much the land was intended to be sold. But at later stages, it becomes evident because you have to meet who the owner is. And in the case of Mogadishu, the transaction takes place not between the broker and the person who is buying the land. It is rather between the seller and the buyer. So the broker’s role is the facilitator of the transaction between these two parties. And for that reason, the concealment of information is as much as it regards only making sure that you don’t directly make a contact with the person who is selling the land. And when the transaction is agreed upon, then the two parties are brought together and it is final. So concealment goes as far as that. Regarding the trust, I think since there is no money that will be given to the brokers directly in the beginning, there is not much of an issue regarding whether a broker is trusted with the money. But the trust issue comes into the picture as regards the price, because if the broker hikes the price, it means also more commission for him, especially if the commission is coming in the form of a percentage of the total amount for which the land is to be sold. So in that case, there is a bit of mistrust in that aspect. But more generally, people trust them, mainly because of the fact that it’s very difficult for you, as the other two speakers said, to find a land for yourself, unless you have these intermediates, who find it for you.

Eria Serwajja Yeah. Tom, you’re talking about trust, but we’ve also seen in Kampala that brokers do not trust landowners. So this also trust is two ways. In Kampala city, brokers have gone to the extent of signing agreements with the land sellers, those that are putting up land for sale and agreeing on the price. And this price is even being put in the agreement, although it’s illegal, it’s not within the law that a broker can make an agreement with you, the seller, because they are not the actual buyers anyway. But this is what is happening. So this trust is also two-way for Kampala, that the brokers also don’t trust. In fact, there is a word in Kampala that they use when they are referring to you as a seller, who makes a U-turn after realising that the broker is getting a lot of money. They will ask you, if I may directly translate, that’ I hope your heart will not bulge, will not become big’ – “Tojja kuzimba mutima”. It means that when you see that the broker is getting a huge percentage because of the amount that is going to the broker, then you make a U-turn as the seller, because you think they have not done anything, they are getting free money, and therefore in their own terminology, they will say that the seller gets a bulging heart. It means that you become envious that they are getting free money. And that’s why many of them are starting to have this argument, to say, I hope, Tom, you will not be able to change your mind when you find a buyer. So can we reach an agreement if we think you’re going to change your mind? And these agreements are starting to emerge, as we’ve seen in Kampala.

Tom Goodfellow But it seems the issue is also the brokers can not only take their 10 % fee, but they can also take sometimes the difference between what the seller says they want, and then what the buyer actually pays. But I think…

Abdifatah Tahir That’s a bit of a difference in Mogadishu, because the transfer of money will be taking place between the seller and the buyer. So it is not like between the seller, the broker and the buyer. This is not in that order. So that is why, other than what is stated, there is no hidden cost.

Tom Goodfellow You can’t conceal.

Abdifatah Tahir You can’t conceal.

Tom Goodfellow It seems like in Kampala there is sometimes some concealment going on between what the buyer is paying and what the seller knows. Is that right, Eria?

Eria Serwajja Yeah, sometimes that happens for Kampala. But the thing is that there has to be an agreement written. The issue is that the broker will negotiate with the buyer separately, they agree on a price, and then come to the seller to say, this is what comes to you. In the end, all this has to be factored in the agreement. But that must also come to the knowledge of the seller. And at that point, when the transaction is going on, because they either go to the bank, normally these ones go to the bank because it’s huge monies, and often transfers are done in the bank. Sometimes it’s cash. Of course, it’s risky, but it happens, particularly for money that is either corruption money or money from these illegal deals. So that often happens. But the thing is, at that point, then you have that mistrust, boils up to a certain point to say, I am not giving away my land because you’re taking much. But we’ve seen, and I’ve spoken to people in Kampala, people who have been attacked by brokers after selling the land where you had a first batch of brokers give you the actual price. For instance, if my land is 15 million and the brokers find a buyer who is 20 and you make a U-turn and you say I’m not selling any more, when they realise that you have sold the land with another batch of brokers at 20 million, they will say, hey, we came here, you wasted our time. And I’ve seen one particular example and spoken to one person who has been attacked in a way.

Tom Goodfellow By a broker? Yeah, yeah. So the technicalities of paying and selling make a difference to how important trust is, to who’s able to extract more money. I just want to turn to the kind of implications of this for people concerned with broader urban development and equality and inclusion issues. Has this really pushed up the price of land in a way that might exclude poorer people from access to land? Because I guess you can argue before there were brokers, people might be able to charge whatever they wanted for their land because it was harder for buyers to find a plot of land. But at the same time, brokers mean that there are many more buyers who might be able to access one plot. And so that could push up the demand and push up the price. How do you think the role of brokers is affecting the prices of land in your cities? Is it having a significant impact?

Eria Serwajja Yeah, Tom, for our case in Kampala, there came this category of brokers called special buyers. That was what they called special buyers, the category of high-end politicians, those that work within… And another term that came up is “Kutikkula” meaning offloading – those who have offloaded from the Treasury – and that was the phrase that was used. If someone has offloaded money, has stolen money from the Treasury, that person is willing to pay any price. So one of the brokers that we engaged in Kampala, indicated how a particular land buyer from one of the neighbouring countries told him that “I want to buy off my neighbour. Please ask him how much he wants for his land, including the house where he lives”. And the person said, “No, I am not selling”, and sent him again to say, “please go and ask him. I’m giving him a blank cheque. Let him write how much he wants for his land”. And the person, I think, asked for money. But the broker knew exactly how much this person had reserved to buy the neighbour’s plot, to buy him off at whatever cost. So when this person wrote the amount of the money on the blank cheque, the broker just laughed it off. In any case, the broker became much more rich because he made a huge amount out of that deal. But indeed, the buyer, who was a foreign national, bought off the neighbour, to expand his land, was not willing to relocate and go out of town, so this land brokerage is also going to drive people to landlessness. And we’ve started to see this happen. The, I forget the term, but the issue is you would not be selling the land, but the amount of money that is being given to you may make you think overnight. And the following morning you make a decision to sell off your land, sell off your house and any other property because of the obscene amount of money that is being put on the table through this brokerage, money laundering schemes around Kampala. You’ve heard about the billions of money in Kisenyi that made headlines in the newspapers and the newspaper indicated that that is the most expensive land on the African continent, just one acre, better than Cape Town or Cairo. So at the end of the day, these particular processes are going to push urban landowners, but who are the urban poor, into landlessness, because this is what it is at the moment.

Tom Goodfellow So if I understood right, you’re suggesting that there are people, and maybe this would apply to people who farm land on the fringe of the city and so on, who would make themselves landless because they can see all this speculation and money coming in, often from money laundering, that they would, even if they had no plan to sell their land, they would give up their land and potentially their livelihood for some quick money. And this is actually causing long -term problems in the city.

Eria Serwajja Absolutely.

Tom Goodfellow It’s very worrying. I’m not sure if anyone else has any thoughts on that question of inclusion and landlessness. Muhamed?

Muhamed Lunyago Yeah. You know, in the case of Kampala, so the highest price paid for a piece of land in an area sets the standard for the remaining pieces of land surrounding it. When someone comes and buys a plot of land in an area, say maybe 200 million shillings, and when initially the cost of that particular land was 50 million shillings, most of the people would be asking for money in the range of 200 million shillings, because that alone sets the standard for how much that land can cost around there, because they’ve seen it happen. And usually some of the people that are able to pull up these amounts of money to buy a plot of land want to protect themselves from not having these many poor people surrounding them. So they will try as much as possible to come and buy off most of the neighbours and also influence others in their circles to come and buy such pieces of land. So in the end, you realise that first the land is becoming too expensive for the poor and sometimes also the middle class, but also they are forced off the land, either by the amount of money that is paid, like Eria is saying, or you are forced off completely, sometimes violently, to leave the land because of the protection that these people need for themselves. Yeah.

Tom Goodfellow And the brokers themselves, Abdi, did you want to come in on some thoughts on Mogadishu there?

Abdifatah Tahir Yeah, in Mogadishu, brokers as well drive, as already has been said, speculation in the city. In the sense that, as Muhamed was saying, it so happens that the asking price of a particular plot of land in a given area determines what comes after that. So it’s not based on a rationale or real assessment of what the real land value of that plot is. It is based on what the next plot has been sold for. So that is very common. And it creates a condition in which many people, not necessarily are a fool, but rather on the fact that the price they would be getting for a piece of land is a lot higher than the real value of it. They sell their land and maybe later on, then again, struggle to find similarly convenient land for them. So it complicates things like commuting to work and all that, because they may sell their appropriately located land, which had maybe better access to all the amenities they need, or maybe the work facilities and all, or maybe the opportunities of work available for the poor people in that sort of land. So it creates a lot of layered problems for the poor people in the city. And in the case of Mogadishu, it particularly attracts a lot of money from the diaspora, which invests in areas they think maybe would have a very good land value, in case they decide to resell. And even that, Mogadishu was experiencing a new class of middle class elite, mainly because of the aid money and because of the booming trade in the city. There’s a new class of economic elites who tend to buy land as a form of investment for the future, predicated on the fact that they think it would sell for a much higher price for them in the future. So these are the things which are negatively affecting the poor people in the city.

Eria Serwajja Yeah, so one issue that I think we see what is happening in Mogadishu being similar to what happens in Kampala. But though the challenge, I think from my end, is governments do not seem to have clear ideas on land values in different areas. That when you have a special buyer like Uganda National Roads Authority, which would be, for instance, compensating for expansion of the road and compensating those people that are very close to the infrastructure, then that sets the price. I mean, you have a government institution with, say, World Bank funding, which is setting the price for the localities within. And that often becomes a challenge that we have also, in our case, where people invite to say, my property should also be taken, because they know when Uganda National Roads Authority, you know, is compensating, it does not compensate like a normal person like Eria or Abdi or Mehdi. So at the end of the day, people keep inviting, “please let also my property and my land be affected”, because they know this is the time to make money. So the lack of clear land values for particular areas set by the state, but of course within a neoliberal economy, then also becomes very difficult. How does the state intervene when it’s open market? So that’s the kind of dynamic, I think, that we are in.

Tom Goodfellow We’ll come back in a minute to the question of state regulation, I think, as we perhaps wrap up. But I mean, it’s obviously normal for land values to be determined by other values in the area and not by the state. Right? I mean, so the way in which land values are assessed is obviously through market processes that are connected to perceived value in certain areas. But I’m wondering about the role of brokers within this. Right? Because in the academic literature on land brokers, there’s quite a lot about India and a lot of it’s quite rural, as I said. But there’s this debate, are they just linking people in a market, lubricating, connecting or do they have some kind of agency? Are they actually doing various things, the tricks of the trade that push those values up? Do you see what I mean? Like the brokers themselves. And I just wondered how you see them in that way. Are they actually making the market, shaping the market in some way, rather than just these connectors? It seems to me from some of the things you said that they have some significant agency here, right? In terms of the things they do to build. Yeah.

Eria Serwajja Yeah, they’ve made a transition, of course, as indicated earlier from how land brokerage started. I mean, even the terminology “brokerage” now has become mainstream, but initially it wasn’t there. So there has been a transition, with many of them becoming a little bit formal, establishing offices, we have these contacts. Now the debate within our country is to have them more formalised. There is the Real Estate Bill, which is before parliament. And any time when it gets to the end of the conveyor belt, then it will be mandatory for a broker to be registered with an address and within an association so that the state has this hand within the brokerage dynamics that they can be sanctioned. You can be thrown out and new ones come through. So they are getting formalised within the mainstream and institutional systems and processes of the government. So in a way, this is what is happening within our end. And brokers, by the way, are also rushing very fast to form associations. You have area association, Real Estate in Uganda, for instance. You have all these small but emerging associations which are going to be finally within the mainstream government establishment.

Tom Goodfellow OK. Yeah, I’d like to come back in a minute to what that means. If they want to be formalised and everybody is on the same page about this, then maybe that’s quite a positive thing going forward. And perhaps this period of a slightly Wild West brokerage with a lot of violence and conflict and extraction – things might be moving in a more positive direction, perhaps. But before we perhaps reflect on that question, I wanted to pick up on a few things you said around women and also around the digital revolution in communications. I’m not sure whether those things are connected. But, because you said that more women are now able to enter this profession as brokers than in the past, which is interesting, so I’m wondering how common that is and if it’s been in part facilitated by a lot of things becoming digital. And more generally, it would just be really interesting to hear about the digital mediation or the digitisation of brokerage and what effect that might be having on the land market, on who gets to access land.

Abdifatah Tahir In the Mogadishu case, I guess, the brokerage system is not so much technologically mediated, in the sense that you won’t see a lot of brokers. There are a few agencies, of course, in Mogadishu which act like normal – or what could I say? Normal might not be the right word – but the usual real estate agencies that you see in other countries. But when it comes to the brokers – the land brokers, we’re talking about – they don’t use the social media so much in the case of Mogadishu. I don’t know the reasons for that, but it’s not a platform that they commonly use. The other thing regarding the gender issues of land brokerage in Mogadishu, there is not, again, many female brokers in Mogadishu. They tend to be mostly under-50 male, not necessarily all young, like it comes across in other cities. The age – in Mogadishu brokers tend to be not age -specific, like all young, very young – it’s between anywhere from 20 to 50, or even more.

Tom Goodfellow So I think it’s interesting, because so much is digitally mediated in Somalia, that brokerage doesn’t seem to have gone online in the same way. My sense was in Kampala, that’s happening a bit more. But maybe on the gender issue, it’s that this enables women to sell and buy land more, rather than to become brokers themselves, or perhaps they’re doing both. Some reflections from Kampala would be interesting there.

Muhamed Lunyago Yeah, you know, women joining the land market as brokers is two-way. First, given the difficulties many of them have been facing in buying land or selling land and being targets of people who engage in land fraud and all sorts of stuff, so many of them, we had an interview with one woman who heads an organisation, a company called Fabulous Homes that buys land, that collects a number of women, they collect money across the year, then later they buy land and then share the acquired land with those different people and sometimes go ahead to build on that kind of land. And many of them have joined because of such kind of difficulties to selling and buying. Others have joined because of the other challenge, like unemployment. Many women are unemployed and then they are in the city, they have to survive. And they see this as the window through which they can come and then find a living. You know, because you can wake up one morning, design a poster, put your phone number and your name and put “land broker” and then put it there. And if you have nothing to do and it will cost you something like 2000 Ugandan shillings, which is less than a dollar and you have it, you easily join the market. So it’s two-way. Also, I think the internet has tried to help a bit because initially it would be hard for a number of women to have access to information on land which is available for sale in different places and different locations. Given that a majority or maybe a big number of women are engaged so much in doing domestic work or even those that are involved in informal kind of employment or even formal, after leaving work, you’re going home, you have to go and do the domestic work, some kind of social reproduction work that is waiting for you there. So you may not have enough time to go and socialise and interact with people that may have such kind of information. But with social media, if you are at your workplace, you could get up the internet and then you could find a plot of land that is being sold in a place that you like and you could easily have access.

Tom Goodfellow There have been so many interesting issues raised here. I think we’re running out of time. I would just, as we wrap up, in this context, this picture you painted in both cities really of a quite rapidly changing situation, where brokers have become really important, they’re starting at least in Kampala to perhaps become more formalised. We’re seeing the role of digital transformation in that context as well. There are varying levels of trust, there are different categories, but maybe there’s a sense of organisation and movement towards formalisation. So I just wondered what you think, to wrap up, the state should be doing. If you had some advice to make sure that brokerage worked as well as possible for the wider city population, what might that be? Any final reflections there really on what the relationship between brokers and the state and forms of regulation might look like going forward?

Eria Serwajja From our work, for ACRC in particular, the project that we sort of tried to propose moving forward, one way would be to have the brokers, you know, have a very strong association. It helps them, one, to also put their demands across to the state if they are within a strong association. Number two is that the trust goes up when you have this strong association. It means that the members that do anything contrary, including fraud and stuff like that, can be sanctioned or even expelled from the association, meaning that trust goes up within the local communities and they will be in business. Number three is that the issue with the brokers in our country has often been around many of them getting into acts of fraud, not being known by the state. So through the real estate bill being formally recognised, it gives them special status and recognition and they can sit on the table with this government and say, this is the direction where things should go. And therefore, you have a voice that you can use to advocate for whatever interests that you have.

Tom Goodfellow It sounds like things are moving in a positive direction. I guess the issue is really more around regulating the activities of those special buyers and on wider issues around illicit finance and money laundering and how that inflates the land market, rather than the brokers themselves. I mean, there are ways in which maybe the brokers can exacerbate some of the problems around inflated land prices and so on. But the fundamental problem lies somewhere else, I guess, and brokers themselves just want to be able to have a degree of transparency and formalisation, it sounds like.

Abdifatah Tahir Yeah, I think formalisation would be good, but in a limited sense, especially as it regards maybe providing a framework, a legislative framework within which maybe brokers can register themselves and minimise the sort of, somebody just coming, waking up in the morning, as Muhamed was saying, just somebody waking up in the morning and becoming a broker the next day without having maybe sufficient knowledge about how the market works and all of that. So I think in that regard, it would be nice to have some sort of regulation. But again, on the same note, I would probably be a bit concerned about the state having too much role in it, in the sense that the minute you try to regulate things like corruption through putting in place legislation that look at how brokers are making an investment whose source is not clear, that minute, then you create a whole sort of other problems, like a capital flight from the country where people then invest their money, their illicitly gained money in other countries because they know you will find out through the brokers, the regulations imposed on the brokers and all of that. So it creates another sort of a problem which negatively impacts, not only the market, but the country, but the employability of people, all of these sorts of problems. I would be very careful about very strict formal regulations.

Tom Goodfellow And those are obviously really important trade-offs in a country like Somalia.

Abdifatah Tahir Yeah, maybe one more thing. Self -regulation as well would be very important in conditions of fragility like Somalia, where they state if you give them all the teeth they need, industries like this might be negatively affected. So self -regulation, again, is another thing which in combination with formal regulation would work well for contexts like Somalia.

Tom Goodfellow It sounds like a degree of that self-regulation is starting to happen in Kampala. Muhamed, I’ll give you the final word.

Muhamed Lunyago Well, yeah, I think I will not differ so much. I think, like Abdi and Eria have been saying, the state providing a framework within which brokers can be organised, not necessarily talking about regulation in itself, but also organisation. So if they are organised, perhaps most especially by themselves as brokers, maybe they have a union or an association and stuff like that, they could easily try to deal with the many problems that paint a bad image of themselves. Because their work is important, but the other things that go through like fraud and others make their work quite problematic. But also, regulation of brokers in isolation may not solve the problem because the problem is way bigger than brokerage itself. So alongside trying to provide a framework to organise and regulate brokers, we have to deal with the other problems, like how people are getting the huge sums of money. It may not necessarily be determining the price of a particular piece of land, but trying to find out who owns this very expensive plot of land. And what’s their source of income? What does this mean to these kinds of people? So the whole idea of commodifying land is one of the problems that we have. If we could think of land not as a commodity that should hold our money and then think otherwise, the other values that come with land, it could be something very important.

Tom Goodfellow Excellent. I think that’s a really good note to end on. Thank you, Muhamed. Thank you, Abdi. Thank you, Eria, so much. I’ve really enjoyed this conversation. For listeners who are interested in these issues, please do check out our crosscutting report on land and connectivity in six cities, which is on the African Cities Research Consortium website, and also the individual city reports as well, which might have more information on this. So thanks for joining us and goodbye.

Outro You have been listening to the African Cities podcast. Remember to subscribe for more urban development insights and interviews from the African Cities Research Consortium.

Surer Mohamed Welcome everyone to the African Cities podcast, a podcast documenting the research and the work of the African Cities Research Consortium. My name is Dr Surer Qassim Mohamed and I’m a research fellow at Pembroke College, Cambridge, and the uptake lead and land and connectivity domain researcher for Mogadishu. I’m joined by three incredible guests who I will allow to introduce themselves. But first, just a bit of context. As the capital and the seat of the Somali government, Mogadishu has undergone a slow process of urban recovery over the course of the past decade. Mogadishu is experiencing rapid urbanisation, by some estimates, growing up to as much as 4% per year, with a concomitant building boom driving up land prices. However, central tenets of the political settlement remain unresolved, including Mogadishu’s constitutional status. Today, we’re going to discuss really important questions, including why it’s important to focus on an urban agenda for Mogadishu, particularly in the context of state- and peacebuilding. What are some of the future trends that we can anticipate from Mogadishu’s development? And for this, I open the floor to these really expert interviewees to introduce themselves. Take it away.

Afyare Elmi Thank you, Surer.  My name is Afyare Elmi. I am the executive director of Heritage Institute for Policy Studies based in Mogadishu. I am also the city lead for the ACRC and co-researcher of the political settlement component of the study. Over to you, Dr Abdifatah.

Abdifatah Tahir My name is Abdifatah and I’m a research associate at The University of Manchester and I’m working on aspects of the land and connectivity domain, focusing on land conflict adjudication in Mogadishu.

Abdirizak Muhumed Thank you. Thank you, Surer. Thank you for the introduction. My name is Abdirizak Muhumed, I’m a senior researcher with Heritage Institute for Policy Studies and research lead in the political settlement component of the ACRC studies.

Surer Mohamed Thank you all so, so much for your introductions and I’m really excited to get into this discussion with you today. The first is a very general question, and this is for anybody who’s interested in answering it. The question is: why is it important to study urban issues in Mogadishu? And perhaps, maybe, has urban issues gotten the attention that it deserves over time?

Afyare Elmi I think I would give this to the urban specialists, to you and Abdifatah first.

Abdifatah Tahir I think one of the reasons why Mogadishu’s urban growth, and particularly the interface with the state building, is very important for Somalia’s recovery from the conflict, is the fact that for a number of reasons. First, Mogadishu accounts for almost 30% of the Somali population. So if you have something going on well in Mogadishu, then you have almost 30% of Somalia going well. Secondly, Mogadishu is strategically located in not some middle, but in terms of  population wise, if you look at the population distribution of the country, then you realise Mogadishu’s geographical location, in terms of conducting businesses and in terms of where the critical economy of the country is based, then for that reason, it’s very important for the recovery.

Afyare Elmi Okay. Let me just jump in. I agree with Dr Abdifatah on a number of the issues that he raised, but there is also the historic nature of the city, one of the oldest cities in this part of the world. And I think the other, perhaps more significant, aspect is that for the past 30 years, Mogadishu has been the centre of the problems of Somalia. And, more or less, we had ongoing conflicts in the city from civil war and clans and factions and Islamists and Ethiopian occupation and so on and so on. So we had so many conflicts, which affected both the residents and arrivees of the city in a big way. Mogadishu has grown in terms of size, in terms of population, for the last 30 years, which basically means with that growth, which was more or less unplanned, created so many urban problems for the people and also for the entire country.

Surer Mohamed Thank you so much for that. Abdirizak, is there anything you want to add to that?

Abdirizak Muhumed Yeah. Thank you. Thank you very much. I agree with what Dr Abdifatah and Professor Afyare have said so far. But in my view, answering the question why is it important to study urban issues in Mogadishu, it’s actually relevant in many ways. One: Mogadishu is a city that is growing, and growing without meaningful planning, without development of sewage systems, without dumping sites in place. So in my view, the study is important, in the sense that it will be helpful in formulating urban planning, locating areas that might be designated as dumping sites in the near future, as the city stabilises. So, you can imagine a city as old as Mogadishu and growing as fast as Mogadishu, but without urban planning in place. So locating, even including part of the political settlement, identifying coalition groups that are willing to, for example, embark on reforms. So the study will be useful for anyone that’s interested in taking part in the wider reform of the city in future. Thank you.

Surer Mohamed Thank you so much for all of those excellent answers. That was really great. And in some ways, we’ve already touched on the following question, which is also a general question, which is: in your view, what are some of the largest crosscutting challenges facing Mogadishu’s current trend towards urbanisation? Some of the challenges that have already been mentioned include things around the lack of sufficient urban planning infrastructure and material infrastructure like sewage systems, the violent history of the city. What do you think are the most significant crosscutting challenges?

Afyare Elmi Okay. Let me jump in here. I think one of the main challenges, I would say, if not the most important challenge, is that the status of the city within the governance structure of the country has not been settled. Which basically means, will Mogadishu be a federal state? Or will it be a city within federal state? And so on. So that debate is still ongoing, and it has had implications for the way the city is governed. For instance, we have the security system of the city being run by the federal government of Somalia, which is really an issue that needs to be sorted out. And also the second big issue is that the city has been growing fast, with many, many people coming as internally displaced people. And when you look at these settlements, and back in the early 90s, all the way to now, we have a number of communities that have been living there more than 30 years who are still classified as IDPs, but technically they are urban poor because they have been living there, they’ve been staying there, and there is no plan for them even to go back. So that is actually very, very important – we have almost half of the population, or close to half of the population, who are facing settlement issues here. So that’s another huge challenge, I would say, that we are facing. The third perhaps would be the level of political contestations that are going on. For instance, at any given time, there are contestations between actors. So now it’s Shabaab and the government and maybe many other actors, and so, and still within that, the city is developing. There are so many buildings being built, so many things happening at the same time. So I think this is, again, another layer of challenges that needs to be addressed. There are many more that have been raised by both our political settlement part of the studies and also land and governance and others. But I’ll just conclude the fourth one, which is this constant problems of land-related issues that are being settled and then disputed and so on and so on. I think this is another trend that’s going on now. So I’ll stop there and I’ll leave the rest to Dr Abdirizak and maybe to you, of course, you have been doing this study for a while.

Abdirizak Muhumed Thank you. Thank you very much Prof. I think you have already given enough illustration. Just to add, I think one of those crosscutting issues and challenges in Mogadishu is the separation of powers, as Prof alluded to. Especially in the security sector. So this, as the research indicated and this as one of our findings in the research, is the territorialisation of the city. In other words, a soldier at a checkpoint is, to quote from a colonial observation that “each man is his own sultan”. In other words, each man is his own king at the checkpoint, so the security apparatus are not collaborative in terms of securing the city, either from clan militias or from al-Shabaab. So the territorialisation of the city is a major challenge. And another challenge is the interaction between the federal police and the district commissioners. So at the district level, you have a district commissioner, who is appointed by the mayor but becomes his own government, in a sense that he collects tax without basically reporting to the mayor or to the federal government. So harmonising these competing powers greatly limits the reforms that one might like to embark on. For example, the garbage collection and the dumpsites are basically controlled by one sort of militia leader. But that militia leader is not exclusively a militia leader. He’s a militia leader at one time, he’s a clan leader at one time, and he’s a member of the Somali National Army at the same time. And he’s largely out of control in terms of which jurisdiction he reports to, either the federal government or the city administration. So those are the types of crosscutting challenges. And what that presents is the challenge of urban planning, garbage collection and taxation in general. Those are some of the crosscutting issues that came into my mind now. Thank you.

Surer Mohamed Thank you both so much for that very comprehensive overview, and really helpful. I think I’ll follow Professor Afyare’s advice and put on my other hat, not right now as uptake lead, but as the land and connectivity researcher, to also highlight, you’ve spoken a bit, Professor Afyare, about land-related issues. And this is the research that I was doing under the auspices of the ACRC, but also before it: considering how the city’s urbanising trajectory, the building boom is all under riven with challenges around contested and overlapping land claims, which hearken back to really difficult history, and the contradictions that this can lead to in a rapidly reconstructing city, a reconstructing city that’s happening, as everybody here mentioned, really in the absence of urban planning. And how these kind of challenges can be future challenges for conceptions of what civic nationalism looks like, what urban citizenship and belonging looks like, and what obviously political recovery looks like. So that’s a bit of the crosscutting challenges that I’ve been thinking about. And I think it connects really well to the work that you’ve been doing, particularly in political settlements, around what kind of authorities exist in what kind of spaces. And so now, in Mogadishu there are four strands of African Cities Research Consortium research or ACRC research. The first is informal settlements. There’s safety and security, youth and capability, as well as land and connectivity, which is what I’m working on. But in addition to these kind of domain strands of research, which is what we call them within the ACRC, there are also large-scale comprehensive studies, and these are the political settlements as well as the city of systems research. And I’m happy to say today that we’re joined by a great deal of the political settlements team. And so it might make sense to take advantage of that and ask you some questions that come from the political settlements. Some of these questions, the answers to these questions, have been alluded to, but it’d be great to draw out some of the implications for research in Mogadishu and further policy priorities. So the first question that emerges from that is what is, or how would you describe, the political context in which the ACRC research is taking place? If you could set the landscape for us around what the political landscape in Mogadishu looks like at the moment. We’ve spoken about the constitutional status. We’ve spoken very briefly about al-Shabaab. If you could explain for people who wouldn’t really be familiar with the context of Somalia or the context of Mogadishu, what do they need to know, in order to really understand what this research is hoping to do?

Afyare Elmi Let me just respond to this, and Abdirizak will actually give more details on it. When we are talking about political settlement, we have to also remember Mogadishu is at times, some of the authors like Nuruddin Farah and others is called “Mogadishu is the country and the country is Mogadishu”. Basically what it means here is that whatever problems that Mogadishu has is what the country has. That said, we have a political settlement nationally, that has implications for the city. And that political settlement has three components, I would say. Actually, the main ones are the two: the 4.5 clan structure and the federal system. These are the two main domestic political settlements that are guiding the overall political system of Somalia. And then we have also African Union or the African Union forces, which are basically the police or the sheriff in town. And then we have the international system as well, which is playing a role. So, overall, these are the main factors. That said, then we have another level of political settlement, which is largely controlled by the federal government of Somalia. Federal government appoints the mayor and the governor, and then they appoint four deputy governors and one secretary general, based on clan considerations. So the four deputy governors and the secretary general, I think are largely, and the mayor as well, are largely from one particular community of Hawiye clan, except with the Benadiri deputy governor. So you have that arrangement that resulted out of a practice, not out of political consensus or even out of census or anything. So we have that practice in place now. And then you have the mayor who is appointing or who normally appoints 17 district commissioners and three still yet-to-be districts. So altogether 20. So you have that arrangement made and then each district has five people who run the affairs of the district. So that is the governance structure of the city. Most of the political decisions regarding the city are made by the federal government of Somalia. And everybody in the city, particularly the higher officials, normally serve at the pleasure of the president. So this is, again, we have a federal government-controlled city in Mogadishu. Yet there are aspirations of a number of communities within the city that they wanted to become their own federal member state in the country. So we have that challenges in here. And the political settlement, when we were assessing this, we analysed the implications of this current arrangement. And as well, we have discussed the different viewpoints that different actors in Somalia have when it comes to governing or managing this city. And by the way, this is highly contested. City of Mogadishu is not only for the people who live, it’s for everybody in the country. The decisions are, at least there are inputs that are coming outside the residents or people who are living in the city. Abdirizak.

Abdirizak Muhumed Thank you. Thank you very much, Prof. Just to add on what Prof has just said, one very important consequence of the current political settlement, is that the clan acts as constituents in terms of election. So an MP goes to his clan and gets maybe his many pledges and becomes a member of parliament through the clan, but even though the clan, the division of the Somali people, in terms of categorisation of the clan, is part of the political settlement, it has two other elements. One, the whole 4.5 political arrangement aspect of the 4.5 categorisation. But in terms of power, the clan is simply a constituency, but the clans themselves do not have the power, or a say in how the country is run or in that sense how the cities run. One might use the clan as a political vehicle individually to justify their personal interest. But the clans per se do not win much power in terms of governing the country. Generally, as the Prof said, both the overall state building and the governance in Mogadishu is still quite contested and the issues that are unresolved, largely because of the federal system that’s still new, that’s a system that’s still developing, that many people see as a system that’s imposed on them. But it seems that it’s now a largely accepted part of the political settlement. But in the post-election, it seems that the political context has been largely reduced, there is a lull in the elite political contestation after the election. So it seems now there might be a coalition for reforms in this current government because it seems the mayor and the prime minister and the president assumed that they’re all in one political block, unlike previous arrangements. So that is a new component in the political arrangement. For the first time that people see the mayor and the prime minister and the president being from one sort of a single political party, even though political parties, even though politics does not run along political parties, but that is the assumption that is in place now. In terms of the challenges, I think we have largely explained the ideas of informal settlements and who is powerless in the city and who has power. But there is interesting outcome in the research, for example, answering the question of who’s powerless in the city, district commissioners give very, very different answers. For example, one say the majority in the city are powerless because they cannot elect their mayor, neither can they can elect their district commissioners nor their members of parliament. And Mogadishu, by the way, does not have members of parliament elected from or selected from Mogadishu in terms of the representation of Hawiye clan. So that is still a contested issue. But one district commissioner, for example, say the majority are the powerless. Not because they’re in the minority, but because they cannot elect their leadership, as a result of the prevailing political settlement. And the other one says the powerless are those who do not have district commissioners in the city. So if you don’t have the district commissioner to run to when one of your members is arrested or something happens, then you are powerless. So that was another group that was seen as powerless. And the obvious other answers were going for the most obvious, the IDPs or people who live in the informal settlements scattered all over Mogadishu, and the minority groups. So in terms of who is powerless in the city, so one of the arguments is that whoever does not work for the government, whoever is not an employee of the government, who does not have that card indicating that he or she is working for one of the ministries, either one of the ministries or in any way if he’s not a public servant, or there are many ways of people becoming employees of the government, but if he or she does not have that card, he or she is powerless because he cannot pass roads, cannot pass checkpoints. And only around 5,000 people actually work for the government. So you can imagine Mogadishu’s population – people say 2 million, some go 3 million. So 5,000 out of 3 or 2 million, whatever, because the census has not been there so it is only estimation, so you can imagine only 5,000 government employees  have access to roads and the rest of the people… So you might find people parking their cars because they cannot access the roads, they cannot drive. Some people are selling their cars in a cheaper price because they cannot drive around. So what is most interesting, at least in the political settlement component, is the dynamics of powerlessness in the city. Ordinarily, people might think the minority are powerless, the IDPs are powerless. Those are the obvious ones. But at one point there is an overall powerlessness in the city, in terms of the population who live, of which the access of roads is very important. So you cannot even run your wife who is delivering to a hospital quickly, unless you have, they will tell you “go back, go”. But they don’t even care whether the mother is in labour or anything. So that is one of the most interesting dynamics that came out of this research. Thank you.

Surer Mohamed That question of urban mobility is so, so important. And it came up so clearly in the land and connectivity research as well. How security infrastructures themselves, visible architectures of security, such as roadblocks, checkpoints, and the constant need to reiterate and prove yourself, containerises the city in so many different ways. And it’s really important that you think about how people can move through the city as a form of power. That’s a really, really critical insight. Thank you so much for bringing that here. So I’m now going to ask the last conclusion question, which is just like the introductory questions, very general. The question is: what trends, what general trends in Mogadishu concern you the most and which trends inspire hope? What kind of seeds do you see now that might be concerning for the future, generally? Or what seeds do you see now that you think might be the beginnings of something worthwhile? Some kind of urban reform?

Afyare Elmi Okay. Let me again start the general answer. I think the most concerning part for me is the security of the city. A city as important as Mogadishu and as highly populated as Mogadishu city, I think one needs to have solid security system in place, both in the policing, in the prison system, in intelligence, in every aspect of it. And I think that is a general challenge that we have. And the contestation is at this time actually even quite visible in the cities. So I think that is the glaring fact that will hit you in the face when you are in Mogadishu, when everything is talked about in the realm of security. You can’t go there, you can’t go this, you can’t do this, you can’t do that, all kinds of things. So that is actually a very, very important and concerning trend. And now, particularly with al-Shabaab taken out from outside, and now that they are coming into population centres, it’s even becoming a bigger problem. And this has to be resolved at the different levels of the government. The city administration do not have a control over the security component, or at least that they could be accounted for. So that is a very, very important factor. Second, I think is that the city has too many people that are not appreciated or actually considered citizens. I think still having that label “IDP” for longtime residents or this idea of autochthony where a particular group claims the city, whether it’s at the Hawiye level or at the sub-clan level, also is another complication where citizenship is affected and also where overall political settlement of the country is problematised. And I would just go a little bit further and say it’s not just for Mogadishu, it’s also for other big cities, where citizens should have equal rights and equal responsibilities and actually representation based on election. So this is a serious component. I guess the other important aspect is when you look at Mogadishu and the land that it sits on, it’s not big, but you have a huge population. In that, all kinds of health issues can be a problem, if this is not well run, from sewage system to public health aspects and this and that. So I think when you see this city that has been undergoing constant wars from ’91 until now and people mobility and all kinds of things, maybe this is another trend that we need to pay attention. In fact, this time, if you just look, more than, I would say 80% of the explosions and the fights that were taking place for the last while were taking in this city, which is just about 20 kilometres squared. So just imagine the implications that can stem from this constant warring issues, the mental health issues, all kinds of issues. That’s a big one. So I think these are the concerning trends that I see. Then comes hopeful ones. I see a lot of development going on. And there are, by the way, as you know, there are some theories that suggest security through development. Once you have a development, security can also come. It’s not just the other way round, but development leads to some sort of security, some sort of job creation, some sort of order, so that I can see in the city. Because when someone builds this ten-storey building in the middle, then that person needs to come up with a way of securing it, whether by paying extortion or by hiring more security forces. But still, you can see Mogadishu of ten years ago and Mogadishu of today, things have changed in a big way. And it’s the infrastructure aspect of the city, particularly buildings, not the roads. So that’s, I think, encouraging. And the other encouraging thing is that when I go around in the city, I see many, many students are going to schools, to universities, are struggling in their own ways. This is actually a hope that I see, and that itself is a pacifying effect, when there is an area that’s abandoned, one of the ways communities dealt with it was they just established a school in the area. So then people start to walk in the area and movement and then the bad guys just leave that area. So basically I can see that human development of a sort, regardless of the quality, at least there are so many people who are now in the schools, who are now trying to make ends meet in the city and in big numbers. I think that’s another hopeful trend that I see. And overall, one thing that makes me happy in Mogadishu is when I meet with the young, they still lead, the overall, I would say, optimism and happiness, in the sense that Mogadishu has always been a city where nobody cared about where you came from or who or which city or whatever it is. And the young actually is something that you can easily see in there. So these are the things that keep me hopeful. Overall, I’m optimistic, and I think, despite these challenges, the city will come out of this in a good way.

Abdirizak Muhumed Just to add to what you have just said, Prof, I think you have elaborated and you have said enough, so you almost left me with nothing to say here. In terms of the concerns, I think nothing tops the security, and so the security, as the Prof said, is the number one priority, I think, both for the current government, and for the residents of Mogadishu. So that’s a given. But there are other ways of tackling the security and some of the district commissioners actually have been doing this lately, which is really encouraging, is the way, for example, they’ve been dealing with the gangsters in the city or the young people who, for example, branded themselves as Swinging Stones (ciyaal weero). So, for example, some of the district commissioners came up with this innovation, in terms of securing their neighbourhoods. So what they did is, when a gangster is caught or a member of this youth group that has recently been almost terrorising the city or the neighbourhoods, apart from al-Shabaab, even though the focus is mainly al-Shabaab, but there are other also elements that are causing insecurity, and one of them is the youngsters who call themselves Swinging Stones. So the district commissioners adapted this method, that if, for example, a member of this group is caught, the parents come, they fine the parents with 200 US dollars. And instructing him or her that if your son is caught again, or he continues being a member of these gangsters, you’ll be fined with 500 US dollars next time. And the third time, the gangster is transferred to a central prison. So this type of local initiatives at the district level is making the city at least to control the gangsters and violent youth groups, making, in fact, this Swinging Stones, all the gangsters, quite unfashionable. At one time, almost every youth wanted to be a member of that, so they were largely a threat equal to al-Shabaab. But now, because of the local initiatives adapted by the district commissioners, localised solutions are really inspiring. So that’s one example. So the other inspiring sense is the return of a large diaspora, a diaspora that’s investing in the city. So you have coffee shops and franchise brands popping up in the city. So that’s also another inspiring hope. But most importantly, a very, very booming private sector that is really, really efficient in terms of its service delivery. The internet in Mogadishu is way better than any city that I’ve been to in Africa, including Johannesburg, South Africa. And that’s largely provided by private sector telecommunication. So that is an inspiring aspect. There’s also the notion of people now realising that nobody else is coming to rebuild the city. So you might find people collectively donating things, for example, to rebuild the district administrative offices. So you recently have seen about eight district offices that have been rebuilt, not with the usual international assistance and the donors and that stuff, but people themselves coming up and even cobblestoning the whole compound. So there is that collective desire to reform, or to rebuild the city. So in terms of trends that are inspiring, I think the list goes on. But the most concerning aspect is the security, so I will leave it there. Thank you.

Surer Mohamed Thank you both so, so much. I think that listeners can take away a little snapshot and get really excited about the publications and the writings that are coming out from the ACRC Mogadishu team and on behalf of, of course the uptake team, but on behalf of the ACRC more generally, thank you so much.

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