By Abdisaid M. Ali

Somalia’s standoff is not a two camp quarrel. It is a clash over legitimacy. Villa Somalia insists the Federal Government can set the constitutional and electoral sequence in the name of continuity. The opposition insists rules written under expiring mandates, without consent across the federal map, will not command compliance.

President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud has pushed a unilateral fast-track of constitutional amendments and an executive led election pathway. The objection is institutional: when incumbents who benefit from continuity also write the rules of continuity, state building starts to resemble self-protection. Terms are fixed, and foundational changes and electoral bodies require broad federal consultation, credible parliamentary scrutiny, and safeguards that bind winners and protect losers.

Golaha Mustaqbalka Soomaaliyeed has emerged as the loose opposition’s coordinating umbrella, bringing together politicians and key federal member state interests around a familiar Somali drift: procedure displaces consent, consent yields to boycott, and boycott hardens into parallel legitimacy. In December in Kismayo, the bloc warned against term extensions, demanded inclusive election talks by 20 January 2026, and anchored the dispute to the April 2026 parliamentary deadline and the May 2026 presidential deadline, signaling it would move to its own planning if ignored.

By late January, it reportedly agreed to talks in Mogadishu on 1 February 2026, with a clear opening condition: pause the constitutional amendment track as a confidence building step.

The fight is over rule-making authority as mandates lapse, trust weakens, and the temptation to pre-commit the republic’s future grows. In late-forming states, power is rarely decided by day-to-day administration or public rhetoric. It is decided upstream, in the authority to set the rules that governs how power, and authority is acquired, constrained, and transferred. Where institutions remain fragile, the rules do not merely organize competition. They often determine its outcome.

This pattern has deep African historical roots. Much of the continent’s political order evolved through negotiated political authority over people, trade routes, and coercive capacity rather than through uniform territorial sovereignty. For much of Africa’s history, movement and layered jurisdiction constrained rulers more than fixed territory secured them. People could leave, realign, or withhold cooperation, so rule endured only when extraction was matched by protection and restraint. Colonial rule imposed fixed borders and absolute sovereignty without building fiscal reach, administrative discipline, or integrated coercion. The state that followed was strong in law but weak in execution, able to claim authority formally while applying it unevenly on the ground. Independence carried this imbalance forward, granting statehood without the institutional depth needed to make authority routine, transferable, and binding.

Somalia lays the inheritance bare. The 1991 collapse dissolved coercive coherence and localized legitimacy, leaving authority improvised beyond the centre. Post-2012 federalism restored a forum for negotiation, not a discipline of rule. Elites bargained under a constitution that restrained neither winners nor defeat, stabilizing contestation while leaving authority unresolved. Federalism therefore did not stabilize authority. It institutionalized bargaining, leaving power perpetually negotiated rather than routinely exercised.

The constitutional dispute sits inside this structural constraint. When Villa Somalia advances constitutional redesign while the electoral pathway remains unsettled, opposition actors experience the move as baseline capture rather than neutral reform. The political authority initiating the changes is also the authority most affected by them, and constitutional revisions shape the competitive field long after the current administration leaves office. In fragile institutional settings, even technically defensible reforms carry destabilizing force when introduced under contested legitimacy, because they look like pre-commitment. From the other side, when opposition groups demand an open-ended pause on constitutional change as a condition for dialogue, the Federal Government reads this as immobilization. Somalia’s political record contains too many instances in which delay served elite advantage while citizens paid through insecurity, stalled services, and economic drift. Both concerns arise logically from the same institutional environment, which is why procedure has become the arena of conflict.

The election dispute gives this anxiety practical form. In consolidated states, legitimacy flows mainly from outcomes. In fragile political systems, legitimacy is earned first through transparent process, not outcomes. Political contenders and their supporters accept losing only when they believe the rules are fair, fixed, and applied to everyone, including those who win. That is why a Somalia’s election cannot rest on declarations alone. It needs an electoral commission whose formation is broadly trusted, dispute resolution that sits outside executive influence, and an implementation model that spreads authority across the federation so no single political actor can easily dominate it. When those conditions are missing or contested, early rejection of the process and the rise of parallel claims are not acts of sabotage. They are predictable attempts by political actors to protect themselves from exclusion in a system where losing can carry permanent consequences.

Federal tensions then elevate the stakes. Once arrests, warrants, or security pressure enter political contests, compromise becomes costly and dialogue reads as acquiescence. Actors entrench to avoid turning today’s concession into tomorrow’s exposure. The Federal Government asserts sovereignty through command. Federal member states seek safety through autonomy. Each move draws a reply, and the federation shifts from restraint to hedging.

External actors loom larger than they should because Somalia’s sovereignty is often asserted politically while enforced unevenly through institutions. Security assistance, budget support, investment, and diplomatic backing remain essential to the state’s day to day functioning, from financing recurrent government costs and reform programs to sustaining the security transition as international missions draw down and Somali forces assume greater responsibility.

The problem is not partnership itself. It is the way external relationships enter domestic political competition when institutional discipline is weak. Reform linked budget support is often seen as extending a governing coalition, while security assistance becomes leverage in disputes over command, appointments, and political sequencing. Long horizon agreements, including recent defense and offshore resource frameworks, carry high political stakes because they shape revenue expectations and coercive doctrine beyond a single mandate. When trust is low, incumbents present them as national strategy, while rivals experience them as pre-committing the future without consent.

In that setting, foreign ties become insurance and leverage inside the republic rather than instruments of national strategy. As domestic rules grow more contested, external backstops appear increasingly decisive to actors who fear exclusion, and foreign engagement is drawn into short term bargaining instead of consolidating durable state authority.

 When the Federal Government distances itself from one external partner while federal member states maintain continuity in their own ties, sovereignty appears selective, exercised through political alignment rather than institutional rule. Domestic actors then treat foreign relationships as leverage rather than as components of a coherent national strategy. External partners become woven into internal bargaining, not necessarily by design, but because institutional discipline is weak.

In this environment, perception carries as much weight as formal agreement. The belief that a rival enjoys external backing reshapes bargaining behaviour, making defection appear manageable and compromise less urgent. Actors who feel externally backed face fewer incentives to accept domestic constraints, while those who feel exposed seek outside hedges of their own. The result is a political economy of sovereignty in which foreign ties replace internal trust and authority fractures across security, diplomacy, and economic policy, with weak coordination.

The most destabilizing accelerant, however, lies in the FGS’s long-term delegation of sovereign functions through strategic agreements, particularly those linked to Turkey in maritime security, fisheries, ports, offshore resource management, and defense cooperation. The issue is not Turkey. Somalia requires capable partners, investment, and security cooperation.

The central issue is discipline. Strategic commitments shape revenue streams, coercive doctrine, and territorial control across administrations. In serious constitutional orders, such commitments undergo transparent ratification, parliamentary scrutiny, meaningful federal consultation, and enforceable review, because sovereignty is strengthened when unilateral pre-commitment becomes difficult. Where these safeguards remain weak, agreements are experienced domestically as executive commitments of national assets under contested legitimacy. That perception elevates the stakes of political competition by making electoral loss feel permanent. Opponents anticipate inheriting a state whose strategic assets are already allocated. Incumbents anticipate scrutiny if power changes hands and past decisions return to public view. External partners then find themselves drawn into legitimacy disputes they did not intend to shape.

These political dynamics carry direct security consequences. Transnational insurgents advance when the state falters at basic governance. When a state stops doing the basics, insurgents do not need to “win” in the heroic sense. They just need the gap. Authority weakens, legitimacy slips, and ordinary governance starts to pull back from daily life. That is where Al Shabaab lives. It taxes the roads and markets, moves recruits through borders that work more like corridors than barriers, and enforces compliance wherever the state has stopped being present in a real, everyday sense. Then politics turns inward. Leaders get trapped in rule fights and procedural trench warfare, and security coordination loosens right when it needs to tighten. That pause is sufficient.

The insurgency uses it to consolidate and tighten its grip. It needs time, space, and a distracted state. That loss of focus buys time. And time is what allows the insurgency to deepen its local grip and push its influence beyond Somalia itself. In fragile institutional environments, political deadlock creates opportunity.

A credible exit requires enforceable restraint. Freeze contested constitutional changes during talks so no side can tilt the rules while they are being negotiated. Build a Somalia owned election framework that fixes commission appointments, dispute adjudication, implementation authority in each federal unit, and a binding timetable to prevent capture. Submit long term resource and security agreements to formal review and oversight, because commitments that bind future governments require national consent.

Somalia faces a choice. It can steady the federation through institutions that bind incumbents, protect losers, and make competition survivable, or it can slide into a politics where unity is proclaimed as sovereignty fragments through external channels and security vacuums widen. Disciplined sovereignty is not performance. It is enforceable restraint, routine consent, and limits that outlast personalities. It remains the most reliable way to hold the federal republic together and shrink the space in which violent actors thrive.

Abdisaid M. Ali
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Abdisaid is the chairperson of Lomé Peace and Security Forum, Former Minister of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation and Former National Security Advisor, Somalia. X account @4rukun.