The African Union’s decision to once again “firmly” reject any initiative to recognise Somaliland as an independent entity has landed across the continent with a sense of weary familiarity.
For many Africans who have followed the AU from its days as the Organisation of African Unity to its current incarnation, the language feels deeply familiar, polished, authoritative, and carefully insulated.
However, beneath that surface confidence, there is a growing sense that the words no longer sit comfortably with the continent’s lived political experiences. The statement sounds decisive, but it also lingers in the mind, inviting questions that refuse to go away.
On paper, the AU’s position appears tidy. It rests on the long-invoked claim that Africa’s stability depends on respecting borders inherited at independence. This idea has been repeated so often that it has taken on the aura of an unquestionable principle.
In policy meetings and diplomatic communiqués, it is treated almost as common sense. Nevertheless, when one slows down and looks closely, cracks begin to show.
As a Kenyan scholar and policy practitioner, Wafula Okumu and other long-standing observers of African border politics have noted, the Constitutive Act of the African Union does not explicitly state that borders are permanently immutable. The text is more restrained, more careful, leaving space for political judgment rather than
absolute prohibition. Over time, repetition has turned a pragmatic guideline into something closer to dogma.
That distinction matters because Africa’s own history refuses to cooperate with the idea of frozen borders.
Those who have worked in African diplomacy or regional organisations remember the long road to Eritrea’s independence in the early 1990s.
It was a painful process, born of decades of conflict, but it ended with African governments accepting a new political reality.
South Sudan’s emergence in 2011 followed a similarly complex path, involving African mediators, regional institutions, and a referendum that left little ambiguity about popular will.
These were not accidental outcomes. They were deliberate choices made in response to circumstances on the ground.
As the late political scientist Jeffrey Herbst once observed, African sovereignty has often been negotiated rather than inherited. The frequent return to the 1964 Cairo Resolution only sharpens the tension.
Adopted at a moment of genuine fear, when newly independent states worried that border disputes could unravel fragile sovereignties, the resolution was meant to buy time and stability. It was a political ceasefire, not a sacred vow.
Crawford Young, whose work shaped generations of African studies scholars, argued that the resolution aimed to prevent chaos, not to “immobilize African political geography indefinitely.”
Many African diplomats understand this instinctively, even if official statements rarely reflect such nuance.
Against this backdrop, Somaliland feels less like an abstract legal puzzle and more like an unresolved moral and political question.
For over thirty years, it has existed in a diplomatic grey zone, developing institutions, holding elections, and maintaining a level of internal order that stands in stark contrast to the turmoil that has afflicted Somalia for much of the same period.
Anyone who has spent time in Hargeisa, spoken with local officials, or engaged civil society actors there will tell you that Somaliland is not experienced on the ground as a temporary arrangement. It is lived daily as a functioning polity, however imperfect.
This is why the AU’s categorical rejection often feels emotionally distant. It sounds like an Africa locked in the anxieties of the early post-independence era rather than one shaped by civil wars, peace agreements, constitutional reforms, and hard lessons about legitimacy.
The gap between official language and lived reality helps explain the frustration that surfaces in public reactions.
For some, the AU appears less like a guardian of Pan-Africanism and more like an institution defending inherited positions at the expense of honest debate.
Internationally recognised scholars have echoed similar concerns. Donald Horowitz, writing about self-determination conflicts, noted that when a political entity demonstrates sustained governance and a measure of popular consent, “the moral claim does not disappear simply because recognition is inconvenient.” Even when one disagrees with Somaliland’s bid for statehood, it is difficult to ignore the substance of that claim. To do so risks reducing diplomacy to ritual rather than engagement.
There is also a persistent undercurrent of geopolitical anxiety. When external actors signal openness to recognising Somaliland, many Africans instinctively recoil, mindful of a long history in which foreign powers treated the continent as a chessboard. That scepticism is well earned.
However, as international relations theorist Hedley Bull warned decades ago, legitimacy cannot be deferred indefinitely without consequence.
If African institutions refuse to grapple seriously with complex cases, others eventually will, often in ways that serve external interests rather than African ones.
Comparable dilemmas have played out in Western contexts, offering practical, if imperfect, parallels. Kosovo’s recognition fractured European unity but was ultimately accepted as a response to specific historical and humanitarian realities.
Scotland’s independence referendum, Quebec’s repeated votes, and Catalonia’s contested push for secession all forced established democracies to confront questions of identity and self- determination head-on.
None of these debates was comfortable, and none produced universal agreement, but they demonstrated a willingness to engage complexity rather than suppress it.
What stands out now is how predictable the AU’s response has become—the exact, carefully chosen words, the same legal references, the same tone of finality.
For scholars and practitioners who have spent years working with the AU’s peace and integration agenda, this repetition feels less like reassurance and more like institutional fatigue.
Francis Fukuyama once argued that institutions lose legitimacy not when they change, but when they fail to adapt to shifting realities. That warning feels increasingly relevant.
The way forward does not lie in hasty recognition or reckless redrawing of borders. Nor does it lie in pretending that complex cases do not exist. A more credible path would begin with honesty.
The AU could openly acknowledge that its own history complicates the narrative of absolute border immutability.
It could develop structured, transparent mechanisms to examine claims like Somaliland’s on a case-by-case basis, drawing on empirical evidence rather than inherited assumptions.
Quiet diplomacy, inclusive dialogue, and fact-finding missions would signalconfidence rather than weakness.
Such an approach would not guarantee consensus, but it would restore a sense that Africaninstitutions are thinking alongside African realities. It would also reduce the risk of decisionsbeing driven by external actors stepping into a vacuum.
As scholars of diplomacy often remind us, engagement does not equal endorsement. It is simply a recognition that unresolved questions do not disappear when ignored.
Eventually, the Somaliland debate is about more than borders or legal technicalities. It is aboutwhether African institutions can evolve intellectually and politically. Can the AU listen as carefully as it speaks?
Can it hold space for uncomfortable conversations without fearing that the entire continental order will unravel? These questions are already being asked quietly in classrooms, policy forums, and diplomatic corridors across Africa.
By choosing rigid certainty over reflective engagement, the African Union risks widening the gap between its declarations and the lived experiences of Africans on the ground. The cost of that gap is not merely credibility; it is relevance.
For an organisation entrusted with shapingAfrica’s collective future, there are few risks more serious than that.