If the drought thus transformed the rural development campaign into a massive famine relief operation, its original aims were recovered by converting the famine relief camps into orientation centres. This, of course, was necessarily only a temporary expedient. Many of the nomads in the camps had lost all or most of their livestock, and their future livelihood posed an acutely challenging problem. Here again, however, advantage could be taken of adversity. The government was quick to seize the opportunity of furthering two of its long-term policies: the sedentarization of nomads and detribalization. While a restocking scheme was also inaugurated, most of those in the relief camps were re-established either in newly expanded collectives and state farms along the Shebelle and Juba Rivers in the south, or in coastal fishing communities to supply the Russian-aided fish-canning industry. Although the Somali government had hoped the costs of this vast re-settlement would be met from Arab funds, in the event it was organized by the Russians who provided air and road transport on a massive scale. This sudden re-location of Somali population, involving up-rooting people from their traditional grazing areas and re-settling them amongst unrelated clans and lineages, where they were to change from nomadic herdsmen to sedentary cultivators or fishermen (both occupations traditionally despised by the nomads), was a bold and hazardous undertaking.

I.M. Lewis, I. M. Lewis, A Modern History of the Som…, loc. 529