By Isha Qarsoon
The events in Baidoa have been documented extensively and the immediate political record is well established. This essay turns to a different question: what those events mean for Somalia’s constitutional architecture and for the theory of change that has organized international support for Somalia’s state-building over the last twenty-five years. That analysis requires going back further than the immediate crisis, to understand why Somalia adopted federalism, what international community (IC) was betting on when it backed that project, how Somalia’s leaders squandered the opportunities that bet created, and why Baidoa is not another crisis the federal project can absorb but the blow that finished it.
I. Why Federalism
Somalia did not adopt federalism because its political class concluded it was the best fit for a country of its size and complexity. It adopted federalism because of the civil war. The predatory centralism of the Barre years, in which state power was concentrated in Mogadishu and used against whoever fell outside the ruling circle’s clan orbit at any given moment (depending on how clan is defined in the clannism onion) produced the collapse of 1991 and the decade of catastrophe that followed. When Somalis and their international partners began rebuilding a political order through successive conferences from Arta in 2000 to Kenya in 2004, they arrived at federalism as the answer to that history. It would give regions enough autonomy such that joining the national framework would not mean surrendering themselves to a Mogadishu that had already demonstrated what it did with unchecked authority.
Federalism distributes power between a center and constituent regions through trust built over time, with regions yielding capacity to the center in exchange for a center that exercises its authority through law rather than force. That yielding, culminating in the integration of regional security forces into a national structure under central command, was the destination the whole project was designed to reach. Without it, the country would remain a territory of competing armed entities dressed in constitutional language.
II. The International Community’s Bet
The IC’s support for that project rested on a theory of governance sequencing. Nobody seriously believed Somalia could move directly from state collapse to rule of law. The theory held that the path from collapse to rule of law had to be managed deliberately, in stages. The starting point was rule by law, giving the federal government enough legal authority, international backing, and coercive capacity to impose order on itself and on the country. Rule by law is not rule of law. It requires only that the state use law as its instrument of governance consistently enough to produce law and order, the basic regularity within which courts can function, contracts can mean something, and citizens can begin to expect something predictable from those who govern them.
Once that regularity exists, the real transformation can begin. The institutions that were built through rule by law need to be transformed through laws that bind the state as well as the citizen, so that they serve the public rather than the network that controls them. That transformation requires two things running together: a population educated in what it is entitled to demand from its government, and institutions reformed to respond to that demand. Neither works without the other. Citizens who learn to demand accountability but find no institutions capable of responding produce only frustration, and institutions will not reform without public demand pushing them.
The theory had one requirement: the government had to use rule by law as its instrument to build order rather than entrench personal power. Without that, the entire sequence collapses.
III. What HSM Did Instead
The 2012 provisional constitution (PC) was Somalia’s most serious attempt to translate that theory into practice. It separated powers, guaranteed judicial independence, enumerated rights, and created the federal architecture. On the question of clan-based power sharing, it was equally deliberate. Since Arta, 4.5 had been used across every transitional arrangement as a stop-gap for managing clan representation. The Garowe Principles of 2011 and 2012 acknowledged that history but drew a firm line: 4.5 would be used one final time to select the constituent assembly and the first federal parliament, and no further. The PC reflected that by leaving it out entirely.
A federal parliament selected through 4.5 elected HSM as Somalia’s founding federal president under the new constitutional order. He was not inheriting someone else’s project. He was present at the founding, and his choices in those first months set the direction of everything that followed. HSM’s first government moved 4.5 further down the path of governance and applied it to the cabinet, then to director general appointments, ambassadorial postings, and mid-level civil service positions ordinarily considered technical staff. The formula Garowe had explicitly retired became the permanent operating logic of the entire federal government. Whether a candidate could perform a job became irrelevant. The only qualification that mattered was which slot in the formula he filled and which political loyalty his appointment would purchase. The state existed to distribute positions among networks of loyalty, and those networks existed to sustain HSM’s political position. This is government by patronage, more damaging than ordinary corruption because it converts every institution into an instrument of political loyalty rather than public function. Under this system the PC could not be completed, because a completed constitution would have constrained the patronage machine, and constraint was what the machine was designed to prevent.
The FMS created during and after HSM’s first term were products of the same logic. Puntland had existed since 1998 and was instrumental in shaping the PC. Every other FMS was created after 2012 under federal government oversight, their formation conferences managed by Mogadishu, their leaders emerging from processes shaped to produce outcomes the center could work with. Jubaland in 2013, Southwest State in 2014, Galmudug in 2015, Hirshabelle in 2016. The PC required that FMS reflect genuine regional interests. In practice they reflected the patronage system’s extension into the regions. When the conflicts came, over the centralization of the electoral process and the constitutional amendments, the grievances were real but the motivations were not principled. The FMS leaders were fighting for their position within the system, using accurate constitutional arguments as instruments of political competition.
At the community level, the civil war had left behind material grievances the patronage state had every interest in leaving alone. The civil war and the displacements produced massive property disputes, homes and land occupied during the conflict and never restored or adjudicated. Those disputes kept the conflict concretely present in communities that had no appetite for continued war. A government serious about reconciliation would have made property restitution and land adjudication urgent priorities, which would have required functioning courts and enforceable judgments, and a willingness to rule against the powerful people who had benefited from the original seizures. Those people were frequently the same people the patronage system was built to protect.
IV. The Second Term and Baidoa
When HSM returned to power in 2022 he brought the same method with greater resources, a stronger army, and less patience for institutional constraints. The constitutional amendments of 2024 and 2026 inscribed his political preferences in supreme law without the consent of the FMS, and the mandate extension of March 2026 extended his presidency by decree. Prior to these, he had already violated the spirit of federalism twice, isolating Puntland until it withdrew from the framework entirely, then sending the army against Jubaland only to be defeated, hundreds of his soldiers disarmed across the Kenyan border. Southwest State was the third and final test.
Abdiaziz Laftagareen had been HSM’s own deputy chairman, loyal through Puntland’s withdrawal and the Jubaland defeat. He stayed inside the framework until the March 8 mandate extension made continued loyalty indistinguishable from permanent subordination, at which point he held his own election. HSM declared it invalid and sent the army into Baidoa, the capital of a state whose population had supported the federal project as their best protection against Mogadishu domination. Somalis died there so that HSM could remove from office his former partner, in his own party.
V. What Baidoa Has Done
Although Somalis broadly disapprove of the 4.5 system as a governing principle, survey evidence indicates that communities in Southwest State (particularly in Baidoa) have shown comparatively higher acceptance of it, largely as a defensive and pragmatic fallback in the absence of credible alternatives. Their region did not start the civil war and had no stake in it, yet it was drawn in by the conflict between the same two clans that have since dominated the federal executive.
Communities in Southwest drew a hard conclusion: in a system controlled by those actors, the only protection was a guaranteed share fixed in political arithmetic rather than dependent on goodwill in Mogadishu. Their acceptance of 4.5 was not ideological but pragmatic, a hedge against a center they could not trust without structural constraint. That guarantee has now proved illusory. The mistrust born of the civil war, which morphed into a patronage state, has been sharpened in Baidoa into something more concrete, less reversible, and unlikely to yield to dialogue or any reassurance based on constitutional language.
Every regional leader in Somalia will now run the arithmetic that Baidoa makes unavoidable. The federal center has shown it will use force against federal member states that refuse submission. Ahmed Madobe endured because he had enough force to raise the cost. Abdulaziz Laftagareen did not. The conclusion is rational and durable: each federal member state must retain its own military capacity. Disarmament into a national force becomes a direct exposure to vulnerability, and no regional leader will risk his administration on federal guarantees that collapse when they become inconvenient.
VI. What Comes Next
Federalism requires three things simultaneously: a center strong enough to defend the country and exercise genuine national authority; regions with real autonomy over their internal affairs and governance; and enough trust between the two that regions will eventually yield military capacity to the center in exchange for a credible guarantee that the center will not use it against them. That trust is what makes a monopoly on force at the national level possible and what makes the federal project possible. Baidoa destroyed it.
In Baidoa, the center demonstrated it will use military force against FMS that resist, destroying the trust that federalism requires. If the regions do not yield autonomy or arms to that center and the center does not tolerate genuinely autonomous regions within it, a constitutional arrangement whose foundational requirements actively prevent each other from being met is not in crisis. It is finished.
What follows federalism’s death depends on one question: whether the center accepts fragmentation or tries to prevent it by force. If regions drift toward full autonomy and the center lets them go, Somalia becomes a collection of de facto states, ungainly and internationally awkward but not necessarily catastrophic. Somaliland has lived that reality for thirty years. But if the center tries to hold the union together by the same instrument it used in Baidoa, the outcome is different in kind. The civil war of 1991 was catastrophic but disorganized, driven by animosity, fought by militias with limited arsenals and no coherent command structures. What would follow now would be categorically different. The country is flush with weapons. Regional forces are organized and in several cases backed by external powers with strategic interests in the outcome. Ethiopia, Kenya, the UAE, and Egypt are already present, each positioned to support whichever entity serves their interests, none with any stake in Somali unity. A war fought under those conditions would not be a repetition of the 1990s. It would be something Somalia and the region have not seen before.
In the end, the label may persist. Mogadishu may continue to call itself the capital of a federal republic, the IC may continue to recognize it as such, and donor financing may continue to flow to institutions that carry federal names. But the substance, which was never fully realized and existed for most of the last twenty-five years as hope rather than fact, cannot be recreated. The trust that hope required has been spent. What remains is the architecture of a federal state without the political foundation that would make it real.
The IC spent twenty-five years and billions of dollars funding the sequencing theory and the institutions it required, including the army that entered Baidoa. It has no theory for what comes next. Neither do Somalis.
Isha Qarsoon
Email: Ishaqarsoon1@gmail.com
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