The barrier that the government seeks to build along the border with Somalia was a subject of heated debate in the Somali Parliament on Saturday.
While debating a motion about the wall in the Somali capital Mogadishu, Somali MPs expressed reservations about the plan, terming the the move as unilateral as Kenya has not consulted the Somali government. Speaker of the Somali Parliament Prof. Usman Jawaari called on the Kenya government not to take unilateral actions regarding the border without consulting the Somali government in order to build consensus and durable solutions. “

It would not be wise for Kenya to de­cide where the wall will be built with­out in­volv­ing us since that is a shared bor­der. The So­mali gov­ern­ment should not be ig­nored in this process,” he was quoted by Ra­dio Mo­gadishu, the of­fi­cial mouth­piece of the So­mali Fed­eral Gov­ern­ment. He added, “We don’t think con­struct­ing a wall along the bor­der of­fers a sus­tain­able so­lu­tion to the prob­lem of in­se­cu­rity and ter­ror­ism per­pe­trated by crim­i­nal el­e­ments caus­ing chaos to the en­tire re­gion. In­stead we need to work to­gether closely to de­feat them.”

The Vice Chair­per­son of Par­lia­men­tary Com­mit­tee on For­eign Af­fairs Mo­hammed Dalha claimed that the pro­posed bar­rier threat­ens the na­tion­hood and in­de­pen­dence of So­ma­lia. See also: Osama Bin Laden’s son asked for fa­ther’s death cer­tifi­cate’ He called for a re­view of the plan say­ing there are bet­ter ways to fight cross-bor­der ter­ror­ism com­ing from out­lawed groups. MP Abdi Hashi called on the So­mali gov­ern­ment to en­gage the Kenya gov­ern­ment to sort out the is­sue am­i­ca­bly claim­ing the wall was an “ag­gres­sion” against So­ma­lia. Ac­cord­ing to Ra­dio Mo­gadishu, most of the MPs in the usu­ally di­vided house were largely united in ex­press­ing reser­va­tions about the wall dur­ing the heated de­bate. Re­cently, some So­mali of­fi­cials have claimed that the bor­der bar­rier is not be­ing built on the cor­rect bor­der be­tween the two coun­tries and ex­pressed fear that So­ma­lia may lose huge tracts of land.

In ad­di­tion, res­i­dents of the bor­der town of Bulla Hawo staged demon­stra­tions claim­ing that the mark­ings on where the wall is to be built has “an­nexed” ter­ri­tory that be­longs to So­ma­lia. Since re­ports emerged that the gov­ern­ment is plan­ning to build some sort of bar­rier along the en­tire length of the 700 kilo­me­ter bor­der with So­ma­lia, the is­sue has gen­er­ated de­bate and con­tro­versy but it has not been of­fi­cially de­bated in the Kenyan par­lia­ment to de­ter­mine its mer­its and de­mer­its.

The de­ci­sion to build the wall was floated by In­te­rior Min­istry of­fi­cials in April af­ter the hor­rific at­tack on the Garissa Uni­ver­sity Col­lege in which 148 peo­ple were killed, mostly un­armed stu­dents. Its back­ers ar­gue that it will help to end the cross bor­der flow of crim­i­nals and weapons into Kenya.