From MODH to HIRAAB: The Changing Face of Political Power in Somalia

By Ahmed M. Roble
Saturday September 12, 2026

The political history of modern Somalia cannot be understood without examining the relationship between clan organization, pastoral society, and the construction of the modern state. In A Pastoral Democracy, published in 1961, I. M. Lewis described Somali pastoral society as a political order in which lineage, clan affiliation, contractual solidarity, and negotiated authority formed the foundations of political life. Lewis did not simply portray Somali society as a collection of competing tribes. Rather, he described a sophisticated system in which political obligations were distributed through kinship, alliances, and contractual relationships, while authority was constrained by the dispersed nature of power among lineage groups.

The strength of this system was also one of its weaknesses when transferred into the politics of a modern state. Clan identity could provide security, social welfare, and mechanisms for resolving disputes where state institutions were weak. But when access to ministries, military commands, parliamentary seats, public employment, and economic resources became dependent upon control of the central government, lineage solidarity could be transformed into competition for state power.

The creation of the Somali Republic in 1960 represented a decisive effort to replace localized political structures with a unified national order. Nationalism, Islam, and a shared Somali identity offered alternatives to narrow lineage loyalties. Yet the parliamentary era revealed the difficulty of building centralized governance within a decentralized society. Although political parties promoted national interests, regional, lineage, and clan loyalties continued to shape political competition, contributing to defections, factionalism, and succession disputes that weakened democratic stability.

The case of the Irir Alliance against the Majeerteen government between 1960 and 1967, led by Sheikh Ali Jumale Barale and Mohamed Haji Ibrahim Egal, did not ultimately become a durable political alignment. Its emergence was overtaken by a negotiated settlement led by Ismail Nahar, which helped reshape the political balance and prevent the alliance from consolidating. The subsequent resumption of the Abdirashid–Egal alignment, culminating in their victory in the 1967 presidential race, effectively closed that chapter of political contestation. The episode illustrates how strategic negotiation and political accommodation could prevail over attempts to consolidate politics around competing clan alliances.

The assassination of President Abdirashid Ali Shermarke in October 1969 created the immediate crisis in which the military intervened. On 21 October 1969, army units took control of strategic locations in the capital and overthrew the civilian government. Major General Mohamed Siad Barre subsequently emerged as leader of the Supreme Revolutionary Council. Political parties were banned, parliament was abolished, and the constitution was suspended.

The paradox of the revolutionary state

The military regime initially presented itself as the solution to clanism. Its political vocabulary condemned what it called qabyaalad—tribalism or clanism—alongside corruption, nepotism, and political disorder. The government promised to construct a modern, centralized, and socially transformative state.

Yet the history of the regime demonstrates a profound paradox: the state that publicly declared war on clanism increasingly depended upon clan-based political networks to maintain power.

Following the failed military coup of 1978, associated particularly with Majeerteen officers, the regime’s relationship with clan politics changed dramatically. The government increasingly viewed political opposition through a clan lens. Repression initially focused heavily on Majeerteen communities and subsequently expanded toward other groups perceived as threats to the regime.

It was in this environment that the ruling coalition commonly known as MODH—Marehan, Ogaden, and Dhulbahante—became associated with the regime’s political and security establishment. The acronym referred to three Daarood clan groups: Siad Barre’s own Marehan clan, the Ogaden, and the Dhulbahante; became associated with a clan-based patronage structure through which selected members of these groups gained disproportionate access to senior positions in the bureaucracy, military, intelligence, diplomacy, and economy.

The historical significance of MODH therefore lies less in the idea that every member of these clans collectively supported or benefited from the regime, and more in the political construction of a ruling coalition around selected kinship networks. Clan identity became increasingly politicized from above. Instead of functioning primarily as a social mechanism for solidarity and dispute resolution, it became an instrument through which the state could distribute patronage, identify enemies, and organize coercive power. Ultimately, the concentration and abuse of state power along perceived clan lines contributed to the regime’s collapse in 1991, followed by widespread violence, displacement, and clan-based reprisals that profoundly reshaped Somalia’s political landscape.

The removal of Mohamed Siad Barre in 1991 by broader opposition forces, including the Somali National Movement (SNM) and United Somali Congress (USC), did not produce an agreed political settlement. Instead, the collapse of the regime opened a struggle over who would control the institutions and resources of the Somali state. The central figures emerging from the USC and the wider Hiraab political landscape, particularly Ali Mahdi Mohamed and General Mohamed Farah Aideed, were unable to agree on how political authority should be reorganized after Barre’s fall.

Their rivalry was driven not only by personal and political competition but also by wider struggles over representation, access to state institutions, territory, and control of Mogadishu.

For more than two decades after the collapse of the Somali state, repeated efforts to reconstruct central authority failed to produce a durable political settlement. The absence of agreement within the victorious Hiraab made it difficult to establish a mutually accepted centre of power, while competing factions repeatedly treated control of Mogadishu as the key to national authority. From the Aideed–Ali Mahdi era
through the transitional governments, competition within Hiraab constituencies gradually shifted from armed confrontation toward greater cohesion and control of key political appointments, institutions, elections, federal relations, and public resources.

The establishment of Somalia’s Federal Government in 2012 marked a decisive turning point. Hassan Sheikh Mohamud’s election symbolized the transition from transitional government to a permanent federal political order, while political competition increasingly shifted from armed confrontation toward control of state institutions. One interpretation is that an informal elite accommodation gradually emerged among influential Hiraab politicians: a politics of give-and-take in which cooperation became more advantageous than the factional warfare associated with the Aideed–Ali Mahdi era. This can be seen in the continued importance of Hiraab politicians in key cabinet positions and significant state institutions.

Hassan Sheikh’s political re-emergence to the presidency in 2022 further reinforced this interpretation. The Hiraab pact should therefore be understood not as a formal command structure, but as an evolving network of political accommodation, influence, and reciprocal interests. Critics argue that similar dynamics extend into Southwest State, where Hiraab representatives have reportedly sought the deputy presidency despite being a demographic minority.

Somalia’s federal system was designed to prevent the excessive concentration of political power that contributed to the collapse of the centralized state. Yet federalism has itself become an arena of competition between Mogadishu and the federal member states. The central question is therefore how much political, security, and economic authority should remain with the federal centre and how much should be distributed to the periphery.

The argument that a Hiraab-centred political configuration is emerging suggests that control over the presidency, key ministries, security institutions, intelligence structures, and administrative positions could provide the centre with increasing political leverage. The comparison with the former MODH system should not imply that the two systems are identical. Rather, the concern is that a similar mechanism could emerge: control of the centre produces control over resources, political appointments, security, and international relations, which in turn strengthens a coalition’s ability to retain power.

This configuration could become longer lasting than MODH because it is potentially embedded in federal institutions rather than dependent on one military ruler. Electoral structures, government ministries, security institutions, project and business networks, donor financing, and foreign partnerships can provide continuity beyond individual leaders.

If this institutionalization continues to deepen, political competition may become increasingly zero-sum: losing control of the centre could mean losing access to state resources and security. That perception could make the resulting political struggle longer, more entrenched, and potentially more bitter than the earlier MODH experience.

Ending Winner-Takes-All Politics

The real danger is the reproduction of a system in which every major coalition concludes that its survival depends upon controlling the centre. That logic contributed to the concentration of power under Siad Barre, helped fuel violent competition for Mogadishu after 1991, and can reappear today beneath the language of federalism, constitutional reform, and democratic elections.

Somalia’s central challenge, then, is not to determine which clan should control the state but to build a state that no clan needs to control in order to feel secure. The country will not escape its historical cycle by replacing the ideal MODH-style system with a different winner-takes-all coalition, whether described as Hiraab-centred, Darod-centred, Hawiye-centred, Isaaq-centred, or anything else. The objective must be to make the state larger than the political coalition occupying the presidential palace, federal member states, key ministry portfolios, or the capital. That means meaningful federalism rather than federalism in name, transparent and predictable intergovernmental transfers, equitable public appointments, professional security institutions, independent judicial mechanisms, credible elections, and constitutional rules capable of preventing the presidency and Mogadishu from becoming instruments of permanent political capture.

The Somaliland (Isaaq) argument is not merely about historical identity or territorial sovereignty; it is also shaped by a political experience in which the Somali state became associated with insecurity, centralization, and the failure to provide a settlement that Somaliland (Isaaq) considers sufficiently protective of its interests. From this perspective, the pursuit of recognition can be understood partly as an exit strategy from a political system perceived as winner-takes-all: if the centre cannot be trusted to distribute authority fairly, why should a peripheral political community remain subordinate to that centre? The question is uncomfortable because it shifts the Somaliland debate from a purely constitutional dispute to a judgment on the credibility of Somali state-building itself.

A national state that repeatedly convinces its peripheral communities that their political survival depends upon capturing or resisting Mogadishu will inevitably generate pressure for political exit. Somali political history is too fluid for any clan to be treated as permanently victorious or defeated, and no community should be collectively blamed for institutional failures.

Above all, Somalia requires a political culture in which losing national office does not mean losing one community’s future. Somalia’s historical problem was never simply that Somalis had clans; clan identity existed long before the modern state. The crisis emerged when clan became the currency of access to the state and the state became the prize of clan competition. The transformation from MODH to a possible Hiraab-centred political architecture should therefore be understood not as proof that one community has permanently conquered Somalia, but as a warning that the country’s most destructive political mechanism may be reproducing itself under new institutional and geopolitical conditions.

The historical sequence remains painfully familiar: exclusion produces resistance, resistance produces militarization, militarization produces fragmentation, fragmentation produces reconciliation, reconciliation produces reconstruction, reconstruction produces centralization, and centralization produces renewed exclusion. Breaking that cycle is the real test of Somali state-building. A durable Somali state must belong equally to the centre and the periphery, to every clan and to no clan. Until political victory ceases to mean institutional domination—and political defeat ceases to mean existential insecurity—Somalia will remain vulnerable to reproducing the very winner-takes-all politics that has repeatedly prevented the state from becoming larger than the factions competing to control it.