The fifty‑five second call

It was late, late enough that the phone’s insistence felt wrong. My friend was not someone who called repeatedly, especially at that hour. When I finally answered, we moved past greetings and into something urgent, clipped, almost procedural.

He did not say hello.

“Did you speak to Abdifatah today?”

“No,” I said. “What’s going on?”

“When was the last time you talked to him?”

“A few days ago. Why?”

There was a pause, just long enough to register breathing on the other end. “People are saying he passed away.”

I sat up in bed. “Passed away how?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “That’s why I’m calling. Please check.”

The call ended before I thought to ask anything else. It lasted less than a minute, yet it felt unfinished, as if something essential had been left unsaid. I remember staring at the dark screen of my phone, waiting for it to light up again, as though the sentence could still be revised.

When I dialed Abdifatah’s number, I half expected him to answer. I’d known him since we were young, long enough that our conversations had their own shorthand, long enough that I could still hear his laugh even before the call connected. The hope made no sense, but it held on to me anyway. Instead, another voice came on the line, a friend who had been traveling with him. He spoke quickly, with the weary cadence of someone forced to repeat the same unbearable story again and again.

He told me there had been a crash. The car had gone off the road, and in the confusion of the impact, Abdifatah had somehow fallen out — through the door, maybe the window; no one was entirely sure. They hadn’t understood how badly he was hurt. They turned back toward Hargeisa, racing through the night, believing they could still save him — believing they were carrying him toward help, toward a chance, toward life. They didn’t know he had already died while they were still on the road. Soon after they arrived, they received the terrible news.

Details followed unevenly. A sharp bend in the road. A car moving too fast. Front tires that were worn, unbalanced, unreliable. A moment of lost control. The trip had begun as leisure. It ended without warning, without witnesses outside the car, without a chance for goodbyes.

In the days that followed, Abdifatah’s death began to feel less singular. The story echoed others I had heard before — late-night calls, hurried confirmations, fragments of mechanical failure and bad roads stitched together after the fact. Across Somaliland and other Somali territories, families receive these calls with unsettling regularity. They arrive late, end quickly, and reduce a life to a single irreversible fact.

To say that Abdifatah died because of poor roads, missing signage, inadequate lighting, unchecked vehicles, or speed is not inaccurate. It is also not enough. These explanations circulate easily because they are familiar, because they ask little beyond recognition. What they obscure is how ordinary such deaths have become, how seamlessly they are absorbed into daily life. Abdifatah’s story draws us, almost against our will, toward numbers — counts, rates, projections — and toward the language of policy and prevention. It also exposes a harder truth: that road accidents have settled into the background as a permanent emergency, acknowledged in conversation and neglected in practice.

Globally, road traffic crashes rank among the most widespread causes of death, though they rarely command sustained attention. The World Health Organization’s Global Status Report on Road Safety 2023 estimates that 1.19 million people die each year worldwide as a result of road accidents, an average of fifteen deaths per hundred thousand people. The figure has declined slightly in recent years. Even so, progress remains slow, uneven, and dependent on political will.

In Somaliland, the numbers are harder to dismiss. At the National Conference on Finding Solutions to Road Traffic Accidents, held in Hargeisa in November 2025, officials reported that more than 37,000 road accidents had been recorded nationwide over the previous five years. Nearly 1,150 people were killed. More than 25,000 were injured. The economic cost, measured in damaged vehicles, lost labor, and medical care, reached into the hundreds of millions of dollars.

Research reinforces what these figures suggest. A 2023 study published in Heliyon found that nearly one in three surveyed drivers had been involved in at least one road accident in the two years prior to the study, with many reporting multiple crashes. Another study, published in Research on Humanities and Social Sciences, identified excessive speed, traffic-law violations, mechanically unsound vehicles, and incomplete road infrastructure as the main contributors to accidents in Hargeisa, a city expanding faster than the protections meant to keep its residents safe.

The causes of road accidents in Somaliland are not mysterious. They have been named, measured, and repeated often enough to sound almost routine. Speed appears in nearly every account. On long, open stretches of road, drivers press the accelerator as if distance itself were an inconvenience. The World Health Organization has been unequivocal on the matter: increased speed raises both the likelihood of a crash and the severity of its consequences. Studies conducted in Hargeisa arrive at the same conclusion.

Traffic laws, where they exist, are treated with a similar looseness. Drivers cut across forbidden lanes, misjudge bends, and fail to yield to pedestrians who already walk without the protection of sidewalks or marked crossings. Vehicles are often overloaded — passengers pressed shoulder to shoulder, goods stacked higher than the roofline. Research in Hargeisa consistently links these behaviors to rising accident rates, though on the road itself the connection is visible without a study: a bus leaning slightly as it rounds a curve, a car drifting wide where space is scarce.

Mechanical failure is no less common. Many of the vehicles in circulation are old, their histories unknown, their maintenance irregular at best. Brakes give out without warning. Headlights oscillate between extremes, either so bright they blind oncoming drivers or so dim they barely register against the dark. Tires are worn thin, sometimes past the point where their original grooves are visible. Imported vehicles often enter the country without undergoing any meaningful technical inspection, carrying hidden defects that emerge only at speed.

The roads themselves add another layer of risk. Signs are missing and inconsistent. Painted markings fade until they disappear altogether. Speed bumps materialize suddenly, noticed only when a driver is already upon them. Pedestrians and cyclists move along undefined edges, negotiating space with vehicles far larger and faster than themselves. At night, poor lighting and unmarked curves transform familiar routes into hazards. The WHO notes that more than half of global road traffic deaths involve pedestrians, motorcyclists, and cyclists — a statistic that feels less abstract in places where protection for non-motorized road users is minimal.

Running beneath all of this is a quieter problem, enforcement. Traffic laws exist largely as text — printed, cited, and discussed — but their presence is uneven on the road. Enforcement requires trained police officers, functioning courts, and sustained political commitment. Somaliland officials, speaking to local media, routinely identify speeding, and poor vehicle conditions, as the primary causes of accidents, often pairing these assessments with assurances that reform is coming.

In international road safety terms, Somaliland is assessed alongside other low-income countries, regardless of its lack of formal recognition. This classification shapes how safety plans are designed, funded, and evaluated. In theory, it also means that Somaliland’s road safety efforts could align with global strategies proven to reduce traffic deaths.

The accumulation of statistics, and the growing familiarity of grief, eventually prompted a more visible response. In late November, Somaliland convened the National Conference on Finding Solutions to Road Traffic Accidents in Hargeisa, under the theme “Building a Safer Future.” It was described in the press as historic, a rare moment of consensus around a problem that touches nearly every family.

Ministers, police officers, doctors, researchers, and civil society representatives gathered to propose a seventeen-point plan aimed at reducing road casualties. Among its recommendations were the establishment of a National Road Safety Commission, revisions to traffic laws, mandatory seat belts, bans on mobile phone use while driving, regular vehicle inspections, improved road signage, and sustained public-awareness campaigns. The plan also called for a Road Safety Fund and systematic data collection, an acknowledgment that policy built on assumptions tends to fail.

Whether these seventeen points will become a living framework or another document filed away in government offices remains uncertain. Somaliland has produced thoughtful plans before. What is less certain is whether this one will alter daily behavior on the road.

Life and death, after all, are not decided only at the moment of impact. The minutes that follow can be just as consequential. The availability of ambulances, the condition of the roads they travel, and the coordination between police, emergency responders, and hospitals often determine whether an injured person survives. The WHO has repeatedly stressed the importance of integrated emergency systems, networks designed to move patients into care within minutes rather than hours.

Local awareness campaigns have shown that stricter laws alone are insufficient. Investment is also needed in emergency vehicles, trauma centers, and advanced training for health workers. At the Hargeisa conference, the Ministry of Health, along with organizations such as the Somaliland Emergency Medicine Association, urged that emergency care and community training be treated not as an afterthought but as a central component of the national plan.

Beyond conferences and reports, most road accidents begin with an ordinary decision. A driver accelerates where caution would suffice. Someone checks a phone at the wrong moment. A vehicle known to be unreliable is driven anyway. A seat belt is dismissed as uncomfortable rather than essential. A pedestrian steps one pace too far into a highway.

If the seventeen-point plan survives only as press releases and photographs, future reports will record the same figures, and families will continue to receive late-night calls that end too quickly. Abdifatah, and the thousands who have died, cannot be brought back. But the sentence delivered over the phone can change, from “She/He is dead” to “I arrived safely.”

Treating road safety as an issue of public security and a national emergency, rather than resigning ourselves to fatalistic phrases like “It was fate” or “That was his destiny,” offers the clearest path toward saving lives. When preventable tragedies are reframed as collective responsibilities instead of inevitable outcomes, it becomes possible to demand stronger policies, and better infrastructure. Only by rejecting fatalism and embracing proactive action can Somaliland protect those who travel its roads today and safeguard the generations who will follow.