When you listen to Fahad Yasin speak—or read his increasingly frequent pronouncements—one psychological phenomenon leaps almost instantly into focus: the Dunning-Kruger Effect.
First described in 1999 by Cornell University psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger, this well-documented cognitive bias captures a peculiar irony of human competence. People with limited knowledge or skill in a given domain tend to dramatically overestimate their own ability in that very domain. The less they know, the more certain they feel. True experts, by contrast, are often painfully aware of how much they still do not know—and therefore sound more tentative.
Fahad Yasin’s public trajectory offers a textbook illustration. A former Al Jazeera correspondent who rose—through a combination of timing, connections, and circumstance—to become Director General of Somalia’s National Intelligence and Security Agency (NISA), he now frequently positions himself as an authoritative commentator on the most sensitive questions facing the Horn of Africa: national security architecture, federal-state relations, reconciliation processes, economic policy, and even the existential issues of Somaliland’s statehood project.
Yet the hallmark of his interventions is rarely depth of analysis, command of verifiable facts, or careful weighing of trade-offs. Instead, listeners encounter sweeping assertions, promises of sensational revelations “coming soon,” vague allusions to inside knowledge that never quite materialise, and a tone of unshakeable certainty that appears disconnected from the complexity of the subjects at hand.
This is precisely what Dunning and Kruger warned about: when competence is low, self-assessment becomes wildly inflated. The person does not yet know enough to recognise the size of the gaps in their own understanding. Political power, media visibility, and access to elite circles can further widen that illusion, because applause, fear, or simple deference from subordinates can easily be mistaken for validation of expertise.
In the Somali context—where trauma, rapid elite turnover, and the constant search for strongman figures already create fertile ground for over-confidence—the pattern is especially dangerous when applied to matters of war, peace, diplomacy, and state-building.
A leader who genuinely understands national security does not speak in teaser trailers. A serious student of Somali political economy does not reduce decades of structural failure to cartoonish conspiracies. Someone who has thought deeply about Somaliland’s twenty-first-century challenge does not treat its sovereignty as a bargaining chip to be dangled in hotel-lobby negotiations during brief layovers.
True leadership is recognizable by different markers:
- comfort with complexity rather than reduction to slogans
• willingness to be contradicted and corrected by people who know more - preference for structured advice over a chorus of “yes-men”
• restraint in claiming omniscience - an ethical centre that survives the loss of office
None of these traits leaps out when one listens carefully to Fahad Yasin’s recent output. What does emerge is a man who appears more comfortable in the role of permanent insider-outsider—someone who hints at great secrets he will reveal “later,” who frames every disagreement as proof of enmity, and who seems genuinely surprised (even offended) that others do not automatically accept his self-appointed authority.
When I listened to the statements of this “Haybadle” (the respected one), what appeared to me was a man who is out of place and not fully grasping the situation. The events he speaks about seem superficial or overstated. He lacks a leadership style, a leadership voice, or deep political knowledge. When compared in terms of the philosophy of leadership, political discourse, and understanding of Somaliland and Somalia’s issues, individuals with far greater weight include scholars such as Abdirahman Abdishakur Warsame, whose arguments are mostly based on analysis, facts, and verifiable perspectives—even if one may disagree with them.
Somaliland, however, is not a project that can be steered from transit lounges or weekend layovers in foreign capitals. It is a thirty-year national endeavour built on the collective will, sacrifice, and evolving consensus of its people. Its future cannot be decided—or even meaningfully influenced—by individuals who parachute in, deliver oracular statements, and then disappear again until the next convenient microphone appears.
The era when a handful of self-anointed voices could speak unchallenged in the name of “Somali-ness” while quietly distancing themselves from any real accountability to Somali citizens is drawing to a close.
Excessive confidence does not make a leader. Knowledge, ethics, consultation, and genuine responsibility do. The rest is performance. And Somalilanders—have grown tired of the show.