The story behind this is that, late last year Puntland's business community approached Somaliland's Berbera Port authority to give them a tax-free Container handling service. The Port will handle the container upto Tukaraq area where Puntland Businesses will then take over.
This caused a lot of brouhaha about the deal which had the potential to close down Bosaso Port or at least make a significant dent in its operations.
This prompted Deni to go to Djibouti to propose for Djibouti to take this opportunity. The Djibouti gov't accepted it and went on to purchase a small vessel big enough to shuttle about one or two dozen containers between Djibouti and Bosaso Port.
The new vessel recently made its madden trip from Djibouti to Bosaso Port and almost ran aground.
Two weeks later another ship carrying cement from Oman arrived in Bosaso Port and it too ran aground.
Bosaso Port is not able to support even a small vessel larger than a boat to dock on its berths. The Port has not seen any maintenance since it was built and has accumulated so much sand.
So now this SOS call for Djibouti to help dig the port is one of desperation. With Djibouti already unable to recoup the cost of purchasing the new vessel, I am not too sure how much more it can offer. Time will tell.
But it seems, in the meantime, Caws jilaal waa lama huraan, it is back to Berbera.
This lead us to question, whatever happened to P&O Ports deal? Anyone got any updates.