Over a Million People Are Displaced in Mogadishu. The Government Is Selling the Land Under Them.

Abstract: The European Union Agency for Asylum reported in May 2026 that more than 1.1 million people are internally displaced across nearly 2,500 verified sites in Mogadishu, and that more than a million people experienced forced evictions in the city between 2017 and 2025 alone, with 7,134 recorded in January 2026. A parallel and connected controversy has grown around the sale and reclamation of public land, including a former zoology centre, a fire station, the Police Academy cemetery, Hamar Weyne market and Argentine Market in Kaaraan, sites opposition figures and independent reporting say have been sold or handed to politically connected developers, sometimes while still occupied by displaced families. A deputy information minister has defended the practice as a revenue source funding military equipment and salaries. President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud has dismissed personal-wealth concerns as private matters unrelated to governance. This piece separates what is independently documented, the eviction and displacement figures, the named sites, the lawsuit and opposition statements, from what remains allegation without independent verification, including claims about the president's personal wealth, and asks what a land system this contested hands to whichever government follows.

Mogadishu's displacement crisis is not new, but its scale is. The EUAA's Country of Origin Information report, published in May 2026, put the number of internally displaced people in the city at more than 1.1 million, spread across close to 2,500 sites, most on land whose ownership is disputed, informally held, or claimed by the state. The same report traced more than a million forced evictions in Mogadishu between 2017 and 2025. The pace has not slowed: 7,134 evictions were recorded in January 2026 alone, and violent protests broke out in May after police used force against demonstrators demanding a halt to the practice, with residents in some neighbourhoods mounting armed resistance before security forces withdrew.

What has sharpened public anger this year is less the eviction numbers than what has followed them. Reporting from WardheerNews, the Somali Guardian and The Africa Report has documented a pattern in which reclaimed public land is not returned to public use but sold or leased to businessmen with reported ties to the presidency, who redevelop it into high-end commercial property. The named sites read like a map of the capital's public institutions: a former zoology centre, the city's fire station, the Police Academy cemetery, Hamar Weyne market and Argentine Market in Kaaraan. Locals and opposition figures allege that some of these transactions proceeded while displaced families were still living on the land, and that the eviction campaigns officially justified as reclaiming public property have in practice cleared sites for private buyers rather than public use.

Former president Sharif Sheikh Ahmed, now an opposition figure, has called publicly for the land grabs and forced evictions to stop. Opposition MP Ja'far Abukar has gone further, accusing Mohamud of "grabbing both public and private money" to finance a re-election campaign. A lawsuit filed against the administration accuses it of unconstitutional power grabs, the sale of public land, forced evictions of poor families, and a failure to address corruption and insecurity. None of these are proven claims in a court judgment; they are documented accusations from named political figures and a filed legal complaint, which is a meaningfully different evidentiary standing than a settled finding of wrongdoing, but it is also a standing that Somalia's opposition has been building for the better part of a year.

The government's public defence has two distinct strands, and they are worth separating because they carry different weight. The first is fiscal: a deputy information minister has stated that revenue from selling or leasing public land has funded helicopters, military equipment and government and military salaries, an argument that treats the land sales as a legitimate, if unorthodox, financing mechanism for a security establishment fighting al-Shabaab on a strained budget. The second is personal, and weaker. Asked about reports of his own real estate holdings, President Mohamud told reporters: "Whether I build a hut, a tin-house, or a three- to four-story building, it is a personal matter; it has no bearing on the Somali mother who simply desires a free education for her child." He has separately defended nepotism in government hiring on similar grounds. A former Villa Somalia official has claimed Mohamud is the fourth-richest president in Africa; no independent financial records have been produced to support that figure, and it should be treated as an unverified allegation, not an established fact, however often it is repeated.

The fiscal defence and the personal-wealth allegations point to two different problems, and conflating them does the analysis no favours. It is possible that public land sales are genuinely funding the security services, that the president has also personally benefited from a subset of those transactions, and that neither claim is fully proven with the public evidence available today. What is documented beyond serious dispute is the scale of displacement, the identity of the sites involved, and the fact that the government has offered a revenue justification rather than a denial that the sales are happening.

The more durable damage may not be to this administration's reputation but to the next one's inheritance. Somalia's land records were already weak before this wave of sales; a Mogadishu where military camps, cemeteries, markets and public squares have changed hands through transactions many residents regard as illegitimate leaves whichever government follows with a title chain nobody fully trusts. That is not an abstract cost. Reconstruction financing, foreign investment and municipal planning all depend on land title that can be relied upon in court, and a period in which the state's own conduct is the thing casting doubt on title makes that harder to rebuild than a simple change of administration would. Displacement without resettlement also carries a security cost of its own: idle, dispossessed populations concentrated at the edges of a capital already fighting an insurgency are not a stable foundation for whoever governs next, regardless of that government's own conduct.

There is also a legitimacy cost layered on top of the dispute FIKIR Institute has tracked over the past week, Somalia's contested presidential and parliamentary mandate extensions and the Puntland standoff that followed them. Land sales add a concrete, visible grievance to an opposition case that has so far rested mostly on constitutional argument. Whether or not every allegation against the president personally is ever proven, a federal government already fighting over the basic legality of its own mandate gains little by also being the government residents in the capital blame for losing their homes to it.