1500 Shillings 10th Anniversary of Republic

Somalia declared itself a republic in 1960 upon independence from the UN Trust Territory administered by Italy, but the government commemorating that anniversary in 1979 was nothing like the one that had declared it. Siad Barre had seized power in a military coup in 1969, dissolved the National Assembly, and suspended the constitution — yet issued this coin under the Central Bank as if the republican lineage were unbroken. The tenth anniversary being marked is, strictly speaking, the anniversary of the coup's first decade, not the republic's nineteenth.