Today I saw an image that arrested my thoughts and refused to leave my mind. Two powerful dogs were locked in a furious standoff, teeth bared and muscles coiled, while a quiet, indifferent cat slipped calmly between them and took the prize they were fighting over. I could not resist the reflection this scene awakened in me, and before long the pen began writing this.
In the Somali Region of Ethiopia, that simple image captures a political and social truth that is both painful and profoundly revealing. It mirrors a region where those who share lineage, memory, and ancestral duty have turned their strength against one another, while those who never bled for the land quietly gather the rewards of its fragmentation. What should have been a community fortified by a shared identity has instead become a battlefield where brothers undermine brothers and kin curse the very people they ought to protect.
This rivalry is not born of strength; it is a product of unhealed wounds, wounded pride, and the inability of leaders and communities to elevate their vision beyond the narrow boundaries of sub-clan and personal grievance. The dogs in the image are powerful and capable, yet their power is squandered. Their ferocity is real, but their target is tragically misplaced. They roar at one another and exhaust themselves, blind to the larger landscape and blind to the true beneficiary of their quarrel. Their hostility creates a fog in which they cannot see who quietly profits from their chaos.
The silent cat symbolizes those who thrive on discord. These are the individuals and networks that neither shed patriotic blood nor stood guard in the darkest hours of regional struggle. Yet now they feed on gains that should have nourished those who sacrificed. They flourish in the vacuum created by intra-Somali hostility. They rise not through merit or loyalty, but through the opportunities born whenever kin refuse to recognize each other as allies. Their influence expands each time one group of Somalis celebrates the misfortune of another. Every internal fracture becomes an open gate, inviting opportunistic hands to reach in.
Within this reality, the Somali Region finds itself replaying a familiar tragedy etched into the political history of divided peoples. Those who should have been custodians of each other’s dignity have become spectators of one another’s downfall. Those who share ancestral bloodlines now curse each other more fiercely than they resist the external actors who profit from their disunity. A people who inherited stories of bravery, endurance, and collective survival have allowed the pettiness of rivalry to eclipse the nobility of unity. Every insult exchanged between kin is an admission of collective weakness. Every internal betrayal becomes an offering placed neatly into the hands of silent harvesters.
The irony is unmistakable. The Somali Region’s greatest strength has never been its loud internal quarrels but the clarity of its shared purpose. It rose from decades of marginalization because its people possessed resilience, discipline, and a sense of collective destiny. Yet today, that destiny is endangered not by external forces alone but by internal fractures that render manipulation effortless. A region divided against itself cannot safeguard its wealth, defend its institutions, or assert its political leverage. It cannot negotiate from a posture of strength. It cannot sustain dignity, for dignity is born only from cohesion and mutual respect.
The image therefore poses a question that every Somali must confront. Are we to be the dogs who bark, bite, and exhaust themselves while their inheritance vanishes beneath them? Or will we become the disciplined community that refuses to be blinded by rivalry and refuses to surrender its future to silent profiteers? Are we the defenders of our collective destiny, or the unwitting facilitators of our own dispossession?
The Somali Region stands at a defining moment where unity is no longer a poetic slogan but an existential requirement. The rewards of sacrifice must not continue to be harvested by those who neither lived the struggle nor honored its memory. If the region persists on the path of internal hostility, the silent harvesters will continue collecting the gains. But if it turns toward cohesion, dignity, and a shared vision, then the meat on the ground will finally remain in the hands of those who truly earned it.
And with that last thought, the pen finishes writing this.
By Mohamud A Ahmed
