By Dawan Africa -
Hirshabelle (Dawan) – Tax collection is one of the least glamorous things a government does and one of the most revealing. Where a state can reliably collect what it is owed, it tends to exist in more than name. Where it cannot, the gap gets filled by someone: a middleman, an armed group, an officer with a booklet and a degree of discretion no one is watching.
For years, that last description was the system at the entry points into Hirshabelle State. A truck arrives carrying imported goods. An officer reaches for a pad of paper vouchers. What happens next depends less on a published tariff than on two unknowns: whether the driver has any idea what he actually owes, and what the officer decides to write down. Between those two unknowns, money moved in directions the treasury never saw.
None of this was unique to Hirshabelle, or even to Somalia. It is the ordinary physics of revenue collection in places where the rules live in someone’s head instead of on a screen. But it carried a particular cost for a young administration still trying to convince its own citizens it is worth obeying. Every checkpoint was, in effect, a small test of the state’s legitimacy. It mostly failed.
The thing now changing that is not a reform package or a new revenue authority. It is a handheld point-of-sale terminal, the kind of device you’d see in any shop, adapted for the roadside and loaded with the government’s tariff schedule. It was built in Mogadishu by Tabaarak ICT, and it goes by an acronym, SUMER: Solution for Unified Management of Electronic Revenue. Strip away the name and what it does is narrow and specific. It removes the human being from the moment money changes hands.
What was actually broken
The old arrangement failed in more places than the obvious one.
The most visible leak was the negotiation itself. Drivers rarely knew the correct charge until they were told it, which turned a tax into a haggle, and a haggle, predictably, into an opening for the rate to be quietly lowered in exchange for an off-book payment. The state lost revenue at the top of the funnel before anything was ever recorded.
The paper was its own liability. Vouchers cost money to print, and once in circulation they could be lost, copied or simply not match what was collected. Payments often ran through private intermediaries rather than government channels, so even an honest officer left finance teams unable to say with confidence how much had come in.
Then there was the part nobody writes brochures about: reconciliation. Vouchers had to be physically moved, by one account as far as 90 kilometres, or scanned and sent on, and then hand-keyed into public financial-management systems. Each manual step bought delay and manufactured error.
"Reconciliation could take 30-45 days, and even then we couldn’t be sure the totals were complete. We were managing estimates, not records."
Finance Minister, Hirshabelle State Abdirahim Isse Addow
A government that can only estimate its own income is a government negotiating from weakness: with donors, with creditors, with the armed actors who offer to “secure” a road in exchange for a cut.
How the device works, and where the friction goes
The mechanics are deliberately dull, which is the point.
That mechanism is the latest link in a longer chain. Hirshabelle's revenue system has passed through three distinct stages to get here. In the first, collections were taken in cash, in Somali shillings, held in the treasury for up to 48 hours, then converted into US dollars before finally being deposited into the government account, a process weighed down by delays, security risks and accounting errors. In the second, the state moved to mobile-money merchants such as EVC Plus, so that a citizen paid a merchant and was given a receipt, with the funds held by the merchant for up to 48 hours for reconciliation before being transferred to the government account, a change that cut the use of physical cash and improved transparency. The third stage is SUMER itself: the citizen sees the tariff the instant a service is provided, and the payment moves straight to the government account with no person or merchant standing in between, giving the state real-time tracking, automatic reconciliation and rapid financial reporting.
All the Vehicles must register under category (each sector has known tariff), if he wants to change he can. When a vehicle reaches a post, the officer enters its details (type, origin, category) and the terminal, which already holds the tariff rules, returns the amount due. There is no figure to set by hand and no discretion to exercise. The driver sees the number on the screen, and the space where bargaining used to happen simply closes.
"I used to spend more time arguing than working. Drivers thought I set the price, and some came ready to talk it down. Now the device decides, not me. It’s made the job easier, and it protects me, because there’s nothing left to bargain over."
Revenue officer, Mohamud Haji
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Payment is taken on the spot through digital channels such as mobile money and lands directly in government accounts, with no merchant in the middle. The terminal prints a receipt with a scannable QR code, and the transaction is pushed to a central system in real time. There is no end-of-day reconciliation drive, because there is nothing left to reconcile: the record was born digital.
"Before, I’d get to the checkpoint not knowing what I’d pay; it depended who was on duty. Now I see the amount, I pay from my phone, and I leave with a receipt that has a code on it. It’s quicker, and I know the next driver pays what I paid."
Long-haul transporter Abdulkadir Hirabe
Why a card machine matters more here than it would elsewhere
In most countries this would be an incremental upgrade. In Somalia it sits on top of one of the more striking development stories of the past three decades.
Formal banking reaches perhaps 15 percent of the population, hemmed in by sparse branches and strict identity requirements. Yet mobile money is close to universal, used by well over 80 percent of adults, and has been the country’s de facto financial system since the state collapsed in 1991, with Hormuud’s EVC Plus carrying the bulk of everyday transactions. Somalia did not modernise its banking sector so much as skip it.
That inversion is what makes SUMER plausible rather than aspirational. It is not asking a transporter to learn a new behaviour; it is routing a government charge onto rails he already uses to buy fuel and airtime. The hard part of digital finance, adoption, was settled years ago by the private sector. What was missing was the public sector showing up at the border with a tool that fit the country it was actually operating in.
It helps that the builder is local. Tabaarak ICT has been working in Mogadishu since 2007 and is among the larger technology providers serving both private clients and government: a homegrown firm solving for homegrown conditions rather than a foreign platform bent to fit.
Its chief executive frames the company’s role in terms that go beyond the contract. A sceptical editor will want to test the claim, but it is the claim the company is making:
"We didn’t set out to sell a device. We set out to solve a problem of trust. A fixed tariff, an instant payment, a record that can’t be lost or rewritten. Import tax is only the start; the same system can carry market fees, licences, other services. But I want to be honest about how we see this. It isn’t only a technology contract for us. A state recovering from decades of conflict is rebuilt transaction by transaction, and a Somali company has a responsibility to help lay that foundation, not just supply the tools, but contribute to the recovery itself."
Gure Abdi Anshur, CEO, Tabaarak ICT Solutions
The payoff, and the caveats
The immediate dividend is fiscal. Take out the negotiation and the underpayment and the money that used to evaporate starts reaching the treasury instead.
"For too long, what we collected and what was owed were two different numbers, and mistrust filled the gap. Now the figure on the screen is the figure that reaches the treasury. Collections at the equipped posts are up 668.94 percent in the first quarter of 2026 compared with 2020. But the number I care about most isn’t on any chart: a citizen who pays the same as the man ahead of him has reason to believe the state can be fair. That is how trust comes back."
President of Hirshabelle State Ali Abdullahi Hussein Gudlawe
The deeper return is the one that is harder to bank. When every driver in the same situation sees the same tariff, fairness stops being a slogan and becomes the default setting of the encounter. For many people the checkpoint is the only government they ever deal with directly; making it consistent is a small, concrete deposit into a very depleted account of public trust. The cleaner books, the reduced fraud, the time finance teams no longer lose chasing paper all matter too, but they are the easy part to sell.
The harder part is everything the technology cannot do on its own, and a fair account has to say so. A terminal needs power, connectivity and a chain of supervision behind it; where those falter, old habits find new openings. Tax machines have been introduced before, in other countries, only to be worked around once the incentives stayed misaligned. The before-and-after figures cited for the rollout come, for now, from its backers and await independent confirmation. And no device resolves the larger question of who, ultimately, controls the revenue once it lands. Hardware can close the gap at the roadside. Keeping it closed is a political project, not a technical one.
A foundation, if it holds
Still, the most consequential thing about SUMER may be that the border tax is only its first job. The architecture (fixed tariffs, instant digital payment, automatic central reconciliation) extends readily to market fees, licences and other public charges. A single checkpoint tool can become the spine of how a state collects and accounts for money across the board.
That is the wager worth watching. Somalia spent decades being defined by what fell apart. The more interesting recent story is what got built in the vacuum: a population that leapt past the banking era straight into mobile money, and now, at Hirshabelle’s gates, the first tentative steps of the same leap inside government itself. A machine that tells a driver the right number and prints him a receipt makes for an unremarkable photograph. Multiplied across a state, and then across its services, it is something closer to what rebuilding actually looks like: not a grand announcement, but a thousand small transactions a government can finally see.