By Abdijaliil Osman, An investigative analysis
Baidoa, Garowe, and Kismaayo. Three cities. Three administrations. Three formal ruptures with the federal government in Mogadishu — each one a structural fracture in the architecture of the Somali state. And in the centre of this accelerating collapse stands a Prime Minister who, by every observable measure, has chosen silence over statesmanship.
This is not merely a political commentary. This is a structural diagnosis of an institution, the Office of the Prime Minister, that is being hollowed out in real time, and of a federation that cannot survive if its second-highest executive continues to govern as though his primary obligation is to one man rather than to a million Somalis.
Let me be direct: When three of your five federal states have left the table, when a constitutional crisis is consuming what remains, and when you have 47 days before the clock strikes midnight on your president’s legal mandate — silence is not loyalty. Silence is complicity.
I. The latest rupture: southwest cuts the cord
On March 17, 2026, the now re-elected Southwest State President Abdiaziz Hassan Mohamed Laftagareen stood before reporters in Baidoa and delivered words that should have shaken every corridor of power in Mogadishu.
“Starting today, there will be no contact between us and the federal government until something Somalis agree on is brought.”
This was not a rhetorical flourish. This was a constitutional declaration of suspension — a sitting federal member state formally withdrawing from engagement with the federal executive. Laftagareen accused Mogadishu not of neglect but of active destabilisation: the deliberate undermining of the federal system that the Somali state is constitutionally premised upon.
Southwest State is not a peripheral actor. It borders Ethiopia, contains the strategic city of Baidoa — historically proposed as an alternative federal capital and sits at the intersection of al-Shabaab’s territorial pressure and federal military ambition. Its estrangement is not a regional inconvenience. It is a national emergency.
The Prime Minister’s public response? Silence.
II. 47 days: the clock villa Somalia cannot stop
Here is the fact that reframes everything else in this analysis.
Hassan Sheikh Mohamud was elected on May 15, 2022. His four-year constitutional mandate ends on May 15, 2026. As of today, that is 47 days away.
I ask this question directly, and I want every Somali — in Mogadishu, in London, in Minneapolis, in Nairobi — to sit with it:
While Hassan Sheikh Mohamud is reportedly planning a military and financial campaign against Southwest State, does he have a single hour to spare? He is a president with 47 days left. What exactly is he fighting for?
The answer, according to analysts and documented reporting, appears to be this: he is not simply fighting for Southwest State. He is fighting, legally, politically, and now constitutionally, to ensure there is no May 15 reckoning at all.
On March 8, 2026, President Mohamud signed a new constitution into law, a document that replaces the 2012 provisional charter and shifts Somalia from a four-year to a five-year institutional cycle. The signing effectively extended both the parliamentary mandate and the presidential term by one additional year. The parliament’s term was set to expire on April 14, 2026. The president’s on May 15. With a single signature, both deadlines became contested.
Opposition figures accuse the federal government of using constitutional amendments to cling to power and alter the political timetable without a broad national consensus. Lawmakers aligned with the opposition coalition largely boycotted the parliamentary vote.
This is not a constitutional reform. This is a constitutional rescue operation — for one man’s grip on Villa Somalia.
The Africa Center for Strategic Studies has assessed that Hassan Sheikh’s attempts to amend the constitution, impose a new electoral system, and redraw the federal map are widely viewed as maneuvers to stay in power beyond May 2026, with the effect of spinning Somalia even faster toward fragmentation.
The Prime Minister, who swore an oath to the Somali state, has said nothing.
IV. The architecture of collapse: a timeline
To understand where Somalia stands today, it is necessary to trace the fractures not as isolated incidents but as a compounding pattern — one that began the moment Prime Minister Hamza Abdi Barre took office in June 2022.
Puntland, 2022–2024: From the day he was sworn in as Prime Minister, Hamza Abdi Barre never once visited Puntland. Not once. In four years. He will make history as the first PM not to visit Puntland during his 4-year term. Puntland, the most institutionally organised and historically assertive of Somalia’s federal member states — the state that has provided more technical governance capacity than any other region — was never honoured with a single official visit from the man constitutionally mandated to lead Somalia’s government. This was not an oversight. It was read in Garowe precisely as it appeared: indifference bordering on contempt.
Puntland subsequently suspended its participation in federal institutions, then formally withdrew from the federal framework entirely, declaring itself an independent federal state under its own provisional constitution. A Prime Minister who never crossed into Puntland. A Prime Minister whose geographic and political loyalty never extended north of the Mudug region. The message Garowe received was unambiguous.
Jubbaland, 2024–2025: The Jubbaland crisis represents the most personally damning chapter of Hamza’s tenure. When tensions between Villa Somalia and Jubbaland President Ahmed Madobe escalated following the November 2024 elections — elections Mogadishu contested — the federal government chose military confrontation. The result was catastrophic: SNA units engaged in direct clashes with Jubbaland forces, and in one of the most embarrassing military incidents in recent Somali history, Somali National Army soldiers crossed the Kenyan border. This was not a tactical withdrawal. This was a military force losing operational control — an incident that triggered a diplomatic crisis with Nairobi and exposed the SNA’s fundamental incoherence.
The significance demands to be stated without softening: Hamza Abdi Barre is from Jubbaland. His political roots, his constituency, his clan geography, all anchored to that region. Yet when Mogadishu chose war with Jubbaland, the Prime Minister could not — or would not — broker a settlement in the very territory where his name carries political weight. If he could not leverage his own regional standing to prevent bloodshed in his home region, the question must be asked plainly: what is his function?
Southwest State, March 2026: And now Baidoa. A third rupture. A third formal estrangement. The Somali federal system — already operating without Puntland, already fracturing around Jubbaland — has now lost Southwest State from the table of national governance.
As the constitutional timeline approaches mid-May 2026, the political stakes are extremely high. If no agreement is reached on a presidential election before May 15, 2026, the federal member states and opposition groups are expected to take unilateral action.
The Prime Minister remains silent.
V. The comparison that cannot be avoided: Hassan Ali Kheyre
Political memory matters. Institutional comparison is not nostalgia — it is the most rigorous diagnostic tool available to analysts of governance.
Under President Farmaajo, Prime Minister Hassan Ali Kheyre operated with a level of executive initiative that is now conspicuously absent from Mogadishu’s second office. Kheyre’s most consequential achievement was the construction of Galmudug State — specifically the landmark reconciliation process that brought Ahlu Sunna Wal Jama’a into the formal federal framework.
ASWJ had been an armed faction operating independently for years. Integrating them into a structured federal state required political engineering of the highest order: sustained negotiation, personal travel, resource commitment, and the willingness to move without waiting for presidential authorisation at every turn. Kheyre built Galmudug. He invested time, resources, and political capital — not because the president commanded it, but because the nation required it.
There is an important footnote to Kheyre’s legacy that this analysis must include honestly: after he left office, his successor Mohamed Hussein Roble became vulnerable to external manipulation — specifically through UAE influence networks — precisely because a strong Prime Minister had been replaced by a weaker one operating in a power vacuum. This is not an argument against prime ministerial strength. It is an argument for principled independence. Roble’s susceptibility to external actors was a consequence of institutional weakness, not of strength. The lesson is not that Prime Ministers should be quiet. The lesson is that they should be principled.
Kheyre governed as though the office carried independent responsibility. Hamza governs as though the office is an extension of presidential will.
Successive federal presidents have sought to concentrate power in their own hands, both by unilaterally arrogating authorities to the central government and by assuming executive authority that is constitutionally vested in the Council of Ministers. This trajectory has reached its zenith during Hassan Sheikh’s second term.
And the Prime Minister — the constitutional chair of that Council of Ministers has watched it happen from his office.
VI. The loyalty paradox
Political analysts who track Somali governance have raised what is perhaps the central structural question of this administration: at what point does loyalty to a president become disloyalty to a nation?
There is an argument — and it is not without merit — that prime ministerial coherence with presidential direction is architecturally desirable in a fragile state. A divided executive creates parallel power centres that external actors exploit. This is not a trivial concern in the Somali context. But this argument collapses when the presidential direction itself is the primary source of national fragmentation.
Under Hassan Sheikh’s second term, the power struggle has plunged the federation into political chaos and a constitutional void, paralyzing the war effort against al-Shabaab.
The electoral reforms form part of a wider package of constitutional amendments that critics claim centralise power in Mogadishu and specifically the presidency. Important constituencies are in effect boycotting the process, with parallels to the electoral strife of 2021–2022, which saw street fighting in Mogadishu and polls delayed for over a year.
Security sources indicate that despite the Jubbaland debacle — the border crossing, the international embarrassment, the unresolved military outcome — Hassan Sheikh is reportedly preparing to repeat the same model in Southwest State. Significant financial resources are being positioned. Traditional elders across Buurhakaba, Baraawe, and Baidoa are reportedly being engaged in preparation for a political and potentially military campaign against Laftagareen.
I ask this as both a journalist and a Somali: Can a president with 47 days on his constitutional clock, a collapsed opposition dialogue, a contested new constitution, and three estranged federal states afford another war? And if he pursues it — who stops him? Who in Villa Somalia looks him in the eye and says: enough?
That person is constitutionally supposed to be the Prime Minister.
VII. What the office requires
The Somali Constitution, provisional or new is not ambiguous about the Prime Minister’s mandate. The Prime Minister chairs the Council of Ministers. He is not a senior adviser to the President. He is the head of government. He has both the constitutional authority and the political responsibility to:
Engage directly with federal member states on matters of federal cohesion. Convene emergency council sessions when the federation is under structural threat. Publicly position the federal government toward dialogue rather than confrontation. Utilise his personal political networks — including in Jubbaland — to create space for negotiation. And in this specific moment: tell the president that chasing Southwest State with 47 days’ left is not governance. It is self-destruction.
None of these functions require presidential permission. They require political will.
I have one question for Prime Minister Hamza Abdi Barre: When Jubbaland was burning, you were silent. When Puntland left, you were silent. Now Southwest has walked out. At what point does your silence become a decision?
VIII. The geopolitical reckoning: What fragmentation costs
This analysis would be incomplete without the security dimension. Al-Shabaab appears content to watch and wait while its enemies quarrel, international partners cut back on security and development assistance, and AUSSOM contemplates withdrawal. As a growing number of international partners have begun quietly exploring prospects for a negotiated peace with the militants, absent some intervention to salvage Somalia’s federal system, al-Shabaab’s strategic position strengthens by default.
Southwest State’s estrangement removes a critical partner in counter-insurgency operations across Bay and Bakool — historically among al-Shabaab’s most actively contested territories. The SNA-Jubbaland conflict created operational vacuums in Lower Jubba that al-Shabaab exploited. Three estranged states means three degraded security partnerships. Three degraded security partnerships means al-Shabaab needs to do less to advance.
Although Hassan Sheikh governs only an estimated 20% of Somalia’s territory, he has pushed forward constitutional changes widely viewed as unilateral and lacking national consensus — an attempt to override the agreed framework of the 2012 provisional constitution and impose a new political order favouring extended executive power.
Somalia’s international partners — the AU, the UN, bilateral donors funding the security transition from ATMIS to AUSSOM — are being asked to invest in a federal architecture that the architecture’s own constituent states have abandoned. That is not a sustainable ask.
IX. The verdict
Hassan Sheikh Mohamud stands increasingly alone at Villa Somalia with 47 days left, a constitution contested by the states he governs, an opposition that walked out of talks in February, and now a third federal member state suspending all contact.
Jubbaland is not at the table. Puntland has left the building. Southwest has walked out. The Prime Minister — constitutionally his government’s head, politically his potential bridge to the estranged states remains silent, loyal, and functionally invisible to the crisis consuming the federation.
This is the central political failure of Somalia in 2026: not simply that the country is fracturing, but that the institutional mechanism designed to prevent that fracturing has been voluntarily decommissioned. Hassan Ali Kheyre built states. Hamza Abdi Barre watches them leave.
Somalia’s constitution has not failed. Somalia’s federal model has not failed. What has failed is the political will to exercise the power those instruments provide and the courage to stand before a powerful president, with 47 days left on his clock, and say: this path leads to collapse, and my loyalty is to the nation first.
The Prime Minister still has time. Three states have left the table. The constitutional deadline is 47 days away. The February dialogue is in ruins. History is not waiting. It is time for Hamza Abdi Barre to decide whether he entered Villa Somalia to serve a president, or to serve Somalia.
Abdijaliil Osman
Email: [email protected]
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Abdijaliil is the founder and host of The Abdijaliil Show, an award-winning Somali-language media platform with over 500,000 subscribers. A former BBC producer and Best Somali Podcaster of the Year 2024, he writes on African geopolitics, Somali governance, and digital media strategy.
