They are showing you only the posh and nice aspects of Mogadishu. It's like me taking a camera to Muthaiga following around some rich kids for a few days and producing a music video of the same as a depiction of life in Kiinya. Mogadishu ni kubaya my friend. Shootings and bombings are routine. You stay there for a week and sooner or later you will hear something crazy has gone down. Afadhali Hargeisa and Somaliland in general.

I think they have earned the right to show off a bit, if you consider how hard things have been. So you don't see every blast wall, the ever present Technicals or pervasive tension but...a lot of progress has been made.

Once the Somalis get their politics stable and learn to better tap the latent talent of their expansive Diaspora, Somalia will be well on its way....

Interesting take. I beg to disagree with you a bit, my friend on Somalia & Rwanda vs Kenya. These countries might take 150 years to catch up with Kenya and by then of course Kenya will be 150 more years ahead (please do not stone me for saying we are much better.) The reason I say this is simple....

1. Those fellows in both countries have very deep rooted socio-political problems and gigantic ethnic problems that make ours look like childrens games (clannism in the case of the homgenous Somalis) that make both their countries ticking time bombs (pun intended). Kigali is a crazy police state. If you tweet something negative about Kigali or even Rwandair and make the mistake of flying into the city, do not be shocked if you are picked up, detained and interrogated by the state goons. what sort of country is that? Clean streets mean nothing when living under a police state. Somalia has shown that it cannot sustain itself as a republic over the past 20+ years. Imagine losing 20 years of your life. Those can never be recovered my broda. And they are still not a unified state. And the sporadic bombs and gunshots have not stopped even in Mogadishu CBD to this day. How will this country ever fully recover? Not in our lifetimes it wont IMHO.

2. Rwanda GDP and Somali GDP combined may be less than the GDP of Nairobi city CBD alone. Even if they were growing at 30% per annum, it would still take quite a while for them to catch up as our red hot economy (which as a much huger GDP base) powers forward at 5%+ average since 2002. Rwanda's might be 7% but that means little because its like saying a Ferrari going at 50 km an hour with a 10,000 km head start up a hill will be caught up with "soon" by a Volkswagen beetle going 70km an hour starting from ground zero at the bottom of the hill. Not in our lifetime IMHO.

3. Kigali is nice but it is just good landscaping done by forced labour (you can be jailed for missing those Russian gulag style forced labour days!) and a few small new builds hapa na pale. Their tallest one is like the height of the unfinished NSSF tower in CBD. Plus their working fountain in the middle of town sio pabaya. Hiyo tu.

4. Kenya's sprawling well educated middle class and private sector has no match in the region. Not even Ethiopia comes close This is not complacency, it is fact. The Chinese know this, that is why they have made Nairobi HQ of their Africa push rather than Addis, despite the fact that they are investing (for now) more heavily in Addis because the dictatorship there makes things move way faster hapo.

5. Kenya's well developed financial markets (world leader in mobile banking, etc) and standard of living in general is way higher and is going higher still. This is why half of Mogadishu middle class is with us here even after relative peace has returned to Somalia, and plenty of Rwandese are still here with us owning homes and running business despite the fact that genocide ended in the mid 1990s. South Sudanese too have flooded her like swarms of locusts.Whenever I walk in CBD I see very many tall smiling South Sudanese milling around.

Bottom line Kenya's well diversified economy, relatively peaceful, welcoming and democratic society, huge middle class that powers the economy/private sector and economic dynamism cannot be matched (for now) in the region and I do not see any major change compared to all countries in the region -Tanzania included - for at least the next 20-30 years, unless some miracle upsets the apple cart.

I spent a few days in Mogadishu recently and got talk to locals. Most people are tired of the conflict and just want stability, even if it means giving autonomy to regions like Somaliland, Puntland etc.

If things work out, Somalia of the future might end being the first true federation in Africa.

It will not take a 100 years. Even the terrorists are broke and tired.

Let us hope so brathee. But if history is anything to go by, we all will be waiting a very long time for this. When people get used to anarchy, getting back to an orderly society is an uphill task. Ask Venezuela.