By Isha Qarsoon [1]

Part I: Somalia Does Not Need Less Disagreement. It Needs More but Different.

There is a particular anxiety that runs through almost every serious analysis of Somalia’s current political crisis. It goes something like this: the country’s elites are too divided, their quarrels too intense, their mutual suspicions too deep, and unless they find a way to sit down and reach accommodation, the federal system will buckle under the weight of its own contradictions. This anxiety is understandable. It is also, in its essential logic, wrong. And getting it wrong had consequences, because a misdiagnosis reliably produced the wrong cure.

Somalia is not in danger because its political leaders disagree. It is in danger, among other reasons, because the disagreements its leaders do have are almost entirely the wrong kind. Watching Abdiaziz Laftagareen, the president of Southwest State, stand before newly trained troops and accuse Mogadishu of a blatant invasion of his territory, one could be forgiven for thinking that a fundamental rupture in Somalia’s political order is underway. After all, the flights are suspended. The militias are reportedly moving. The accusations are vivid and mutual. It has the look and feel of a country coming apart. But look more carefully at what the disagreement is actually about, and the picture changes in an important way. Laftagareen is not arguing for a different vision of governance. He is arguing for his continued occupancy of the regional presidency. Hassan Sheikh is not defending a constitutional principle. He is defending his preferred successor arrangement in a region he needs to control before May 2026. The noise is enormous. The substance is surprisingly narrow.

This is the first thing that needs to be said clearly: political disagreement, even when fierce and disruptive, does not fragment states. Principled disagreement is what holds states together over time. It holds them together because it forces competing ideas about governance into the open, subjects them to public scrutiny, and creates the conditions under which better ideas can eventually prevail. Every functioning democracy in the world is characterized by deep, persistent, sometimes bitter disagreement among its political elites. That disagreement does not weaken those countries. It produces accountability. It is the mechanism through which democracies self-correct. The United States has survived multiple constitutional crisis (a civil war, a president forced to resign rather than face certain impeachment, other multiple impeachment processes, and an attempted disruption of its electoral process) in significant part because underneath the political conflict there has always been genuine contestation about fundamental questions of governance, rights, and the proper limits of power — and institutions capable of enforcing those limits on those who would exceed them.

What does fragment states is not principled disagreements but the absence of the framework within which they can be managed. States fragment when they lack institutions with the authority to adjudicate competing claims, when political actors stop recognizing any common rules as binding, and when the only remaining tool of political competition is force. That is a real risk in Somalia. But it is a risk produced not by the fact that Deni and Madoobe and Laftagareen disagree with Hassan Sheikh, but by the fact that Somalia has never built the institutional infrastructure that would make principled disagreement possible in the first place. Courts that cannot enforce constitutional limits, a parliament that approves whatever the executive requires, electoral bodies whose independence is a legal fiction, a civil society too exposed to sustain serious public pressure on leaders: these are the conditions that make political conflict dangerous, not the conflict itself.

The international community and the donor ecosystem surrounding Somalia have consistently misread this dynamic. For years, the response to each cycle of Somali political confrontation has been to push for dialogue, reconciliation, and accommodation. Delegations fly in. Conferences are convened. Communiques are issued. Leaders are pressed to lower their voices and find common ground. Sometimes they do, for long enough to satisfy the immediate external pressure, and then the underlying dynamics reassert themselves in the next cycle. The dialogue imperative is not wrong as far as it goes. Political crises do need to be managed. But dialogue between actors who share the same vision of what the state is for, and who disagree only about who should control it, does not produce governance reform. It produces power-sharing arrangements that stabilize the existing system by distributing its proceeds more broadly. Somalia has had many such arrangements. None of them has produced institutional accountability, and none of them was designed to.

Somalia needs a political culture in which leaders are challenged on what they actually stand for. It needs regional presidents who can articulate, in specific and testable terms, how their administration intends to govern differently from the one in Mogadishu, rather than simply arguing that it should be their turn. It needs civil society voices, independent journalists, and public intellectuals who are willing to hold all sides to the same standard, not just the side they oppose politically. It needs, in short, a genuine marketplace of ideas, where governance proposals compete on their merits and where the political cost of being exposed as hollow is real.

This is not sentimentality for democracy in a fragile state. It is a practical observation about how political systems improve. They improve through pressure, and pressure requires disagreement — not disagreement over who gets the seat, but over how the country should be governed. The absence of principled disagreement in Somalia is not a sign of stability. It is a sign of a political class that has reached an unspoken agreement that certain questions will not be asked. That agreement is the subject of the argument that follows in Part II.

Part II: The Cartel and Its Constitution

There is something worth pausing on in the political career of Southwest State President Abdiaziz Laftagareen. He came to power in 2018 through an election that was, by any serious account, engineered by Mogadishu. The circumstances were grim. Mukhtar Robow, a former al-Shabaab deputy who had defected and genuinely commanded popular support in the region, was arrested by federal forces on the eve of the election and removed from the race. Fifteen protesters died in Baidoa in the unrest that followed. Laftagareen was elected in an atmosphere of coercion and federal imposition. For years afterward, he governed Southwest State as a reliable partner of the very government that had installed him. He backed the push for universal suffrage. He served as deputy chairman of Hassan Sheikh’s political party. He was, in the vocabulary of Somali politics, aligned—within this administration until the recent rupture.

Robow himself was eventually accommodated in the customary way: he was made a minister, given his share of the spoils, and the conflict was filed away.

Then, in March 2026, Laftagareen became the most vocal accuser of federal overreach in the country, resigning from HSM’s party, severing state ties with Mogadishu, and joining the opposition bloc gathered under the Somali Future Council, whose members present themselves as a principled constitutional front united against the federal government’s unilateral conduct. That presentation deserves scrutiny. The bloc’s members do share real grievances, and many of their specific accusations against Villa Somalia are constitutionally credible. But the coalition is held together by one thing: the shared objective of removing Hassan Sheikh Mohamud. Said Deni, Ahmed Madoobe, Sheikh Sharif and the former prime ministers of the Salvation Forum, and now Laftagareen do not share a governance vision. They share a political target. This is not new. A similar bloc coalesced in the lead-up to HSM’s own election, dissolved the morning after he won, and has now reassembled as his term approaches its end. The cycle is a reliable feature of Somali political life: opposition unites around a target, not a program; the target is removed or accommodated; the coalition splinters; and the questions of governance that were never asked go unasked for another term. The day that target is removed, this coalition too will lose its only source of cohesion. And when one of them eventually occupies Villa Somalia, the constitutional principles currently being invoked will be as available to him as they have been to every previous occupant: useful when needed, and set aside when not.

This is the argument that the fragmentation narrative misses entirely. Analysts who worry about elite disagreement fracturing Somalia are looking at the surface of Somali politics, where the noise is. Underneath the noise, there is a remarkable degree of elite consensus, and that consensus is the country’s deepest and most durable problem. Somalia’s political leaders, across every level of the system and across the full spectrum of nominal positions, share a common understanding of what the Somali state is. It is a mechanism for accessing and distributing resources: donor revenues, port and airport proceeds, oil and gas agreements, security sector allocations, and the political rents that flow from controlling territory and commanding clan loyalty. The person who sits in Villa Somalia controls the largest share of those resources. Everyone else is negotiating their portion. The constitutional arguments, the federalism principles, the invocations of the 2012 Provisional Constitution as the only legitimate charter: all of these are deployed in service of that negotiation, not in defiance of it.

The consensus is self-reinforcing at every level. No federal member state president has governed according to genuinely different principles — building independent revenue systems, publishing transparent accounts, holding his own administration to constitutional standards. The absence is not accidental. The arrangement suits those inside it. A leader who demonstrated that transparent governance was possible would simultaneously demonstrate that its absence elsewhere is a choice, not a necessity. He would create a standard against which others could be measured and found wanting. The incentive to avoid that demonstration is powerful, and it operates on everyone.

The current opposition figures are not such leaders. Said Deni governed Puntland for years without producing the institutional transformation that would distinguish his record from the federal government he now opposes. Ahmed Madoobe has governed Jubaland through arrangements that reflect the same logic of personal political consolidation he criticizes in Mogadishu. The former presidents and prime ministers gathered under the Somali Future Council served in governments whose governance record, examined honestly, does not support the reform credentials they now claim. This is not a personal indictment of any of these individuals. It is an observation about the system they all emerged from, operated within, and have no demonstrated interest in fundamentally changing. When one of them eventually replaces Hassan Sheikh, the transfer of power will be presented as a political breakthrough. The governance system will continue as before. And the next cycle of political confrontation will begin, once again framed as a crisis of elite disagreement, once again missing the elite consensus underneath.

Somalia does not need its political leaders to stop fighting over Villa Somalia. It needs leaders who, when they win it, govern differently from all who came before. It needs institutions strong enough to demand that difference even when the occupant of the villa has no personal interest in providing it. And it needs a public and an independent press willing to call plunder by its name, regardless of which leader is doing the plundering, and regardless of how eloquently that leader invokes the constitution while doing it.

The country’s crisis is not that its elites disagree. It is that on the question that matters most, they do not.

Isha Qarsoon
Email: Ishaqarsoon1@gmail.com
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[1] Isha Qarsoon- is a platform dedicated to addressing critical issues pertaining to good governance, corruption, and social challenges. It aims to foster informed public discourse and contribute to societal awareness and reform.