Somalia’s insolvency and divided nation made it vulnerable to Cold War rivalry

Evidence

The Cold War was in full swing when the republic came to the world stage as a sovereign nation. Somalia suffered from two political and economic conditions that made it exceptionally vulnerable to the machinations of superpower rivalry. First, the republic was insolvent financially and required a great deal of economic assistance to balance its ordinary budget and to make a dent in the deep development deficit it inherited. Second, the Somali nation was fragmented into five territories under four colonial establishments: Britain, Italy, Ethiopia, and France. Two of these territories, British and Italian Somalilands, gained their independence and formed the republic, while Somalis in the other territories were either dispossessed subjects whose existence and rights were denied, as in Somali Ethiopia, or they were marginalized in the British colony in Kenya, or they constituted a separate entity as in French Somaliland. — Abdi Ismail Samatar, Africa’s First Democrats, 646