Somalia’s Crisis Is Systemic, Not Personal: The Case For Collective Accountability – OpEd
Key Takeaways:
- Hassan Sheikh Mohamud is not the whole problem. He spent 2026 arguing over when his term ends and only on 1 September, under foreign pressure, agreed to elections within seven months—a calendar a president should not get to bargain. The piece’s point: parliament and courts were too weak to stop him. That is a shared failure.
- The inheritance is older than any current name: Siad Barre denounced clans while staffing by clan; superpowers paid for order, not institutions; the 2000 Arta “4.5” clan quota was meant to be temporary and still runs Mogadishu. FMS presidents (Lafta Gareen in South West, Qoor Qoor in Galmudug) backed Villa Somalia when it paid and objected when it didn’t. Federalism copied centralization downward. Donors preferred calm to conditions.
- The system works for those inside it. Swap the president and the networks, the 4.5 formula, the quiet donors, and the rubber-stamp legislature stay. Fix: enforce the constitution, a court that can say no, transparent FMS money, aid tied to reform, retire 4.5. Until Mogadishu, the regions, and the donors own their piece, Somalia will keep changing presidents and keep the same arrangement.
Hassan Sheikh Mohamud is not the only one at fault. Responsibility here is shared.
Somalia’s problem was never one president. Every few years the country convinces itself otherwise, fixes its anger on whoever sits in Villa Somalia, and waits for his replacement to fix what he broke. The replacement rarely does, because the men around him, in Mogadishu, in the regional capitals and in donor missions, built their careers inside the same arrangement he now runs. Somalia has no shortage of critics of bad governance. What it lacks are enough people willing to admit they benefited from it.
Mohamud’s own year illustrates the point. His government spent most of 2026 disputing with the opposition over when his term should legally end, and only on Sept. 1 did he agree, under pressure from international mediators, to hold elections within seven months. A president should not be able to negotiate the constitutional calendar with his own country. That he could suggests the institutions meant to settle such questions, parliament, the judiciary, were not strong enough to do so. That is a shared failure, not solely his.
The pattern is familiar by now. A new leader takes power promising reform. Over time, he weakens the institutions meant to check him and rewards loyalty over competence. Somalis grow frustrated. Regional presidents issue statements. Donors express concern. Eventually he is replaced, and the country treats his departure as the end of the problem rather than one chapter in a longer one.
It rarely is the end. The names change. The habits persist.
A pattern older than any of today’s leaders
Somalis did not build this system in 2022, or in 2012, or even in 1991. Mohamed Siad Barre governed Somalia for 22 years, from his 1969 coup to his 1991 overthrow, and spent much of that period publicly denouncing clan politics as backward while privately staffing his government along clan lines. The lesson later leaders absorbed was not that patronage is shameful. It was that patronage endures, so long as it is condemned loudly enough in public.
Somalia’s foreign patrons reinforced a related habit. The country was a Soviet client until the 1977-78 Ogaden War, when Moscow shifted its support to Ethiopia and Mogadishu, in turn, aligned with Washington. Neither superpower was especially invested in Somali ideology. Both were invested in which government could maintain order, or the appearance of it. That calculation did not end with the Cold War. Successive donors have applied a version of it ever since, prioritizing stability over the harder, slower work of institution-building.
When Barre’s government collapsed in 1991, more than a dozen internationally sponsored reconciliation conferences failed over the following decade before the 2000 Arta Conference in Djibouti produced the “4.5 formula,” dividing political representation equally among four major clan families and giving smaller clans a half-share. It was intended as a temporary bridge to a fuller democracy. The 2004 Transitional Federal Charter, negotiated in Kenya, formalized the arrangement further, and it has outlasted every government built on top of it. Somalia’s 2012 Provisional Constitution called for its eventual replacement with direct elections. More than a decade later, the 4.5 formula still governs how power is allocated in Mogadishu.
This is the inheritance today’s leaders received rather than invented: a system in which clan arithmetic substitutes for accountability, foreign assistance rewards stability over reform, and arrangements introduced as temporary become permanent once someone finds them useful. Lafta Gareen, Qoor Qoor and Hassan Sheikh Mohamud did not design that system. Each learned to operate within it, as most of their predecessors did.
Regional leaders have not been passive observers
Few, if any, Federal Member States, Puntland, Jubaland, South West State, Hirshabelle, Galmudugh, have entirely avoided aligning with Mogadishu’s centralizing tendencies when it served their own interests. Some of the same regional presidents now criticizing constitutional overreach were largely silent when that overreach worked in their favor. Their objections, in several cases, followed the moment the arrangement stopped benefiting them, not the moment it began.
Abdiaziz Hassan Mohamed “Lafta Gareen” illustrates how this can play out. Installed as South West State president in December 2018, he backed Mogadishu’s centralizing agenda with little resistance, calculating that alignment with Villa Somalia was the safer course. He resigned in March 2026, and the office passed to Aden Madobe as acting president. Ahmed Abdi Kariye “Qoor Qoor” of Galmudugh, who built his own tenure on similar alignment with the center, is now facing mounting political pressure of his own. Their experiences are not simply misfortune. They reflect a system that has little long-term loyalty to any single actor within it.
Federalism was meant to restrain power. In practice, it multiplied it
Somalia’s 2012 constitution envisioned checks, balances and power distributed across the country. In practice, several Federal Member States have developed governing styles that echo Villa Somalia’s own: concentrating authority, marginalizing opposition and treating state revenue as closer to a personal resource than a public one. Federalism was designed to limit centralized power. In important respects, it has instead reproduced it at the state level.
Donor assistance has often prioritized stability over reform
More than a decade of international assistance has flowed into Somalia under the banner of state-building. The state remains fragile, and the political elite is arguably stronger than it has been in years. This outcome reflects, at least in part, a longstanding donor preference for calm over accountability, a preference with roots stretching back to the Ogaden War. Assistance disbursed without meaningful conditions tends not to strengthen institutions. It often reinforces the patronage networks already in place, networks that answer more directly to those funding them than to the citizens they are meant to serve. Donors are not the sole cause of Somalia’s governance troubles, but they are not bystanders to them either.
A system that rewards the wrong incentives
The more troubling reality may not be that Somalia’s governance keeps failing its people. It may be that, on its own terms, the system is working reasonably well for those who run it. Federal officials, regional presidents and foreign donors have each found ways to manage dysfunction rather than resolve it, in part because managing it has proven more sustainable than ending it. Removing Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, or any single president, would not by itself alter the patronage networks, donor incentives, weak judiciary or compliant legislature that remain in place beneath him. There is little reason to assume a successor would operate differently absent structural change.
Who, then, is accountable?
A durable fix requires more than a new occupant in Villa Somalia. It requires a constitution enforced consistently rather than invoked selectively, a judiciary insulated from executive pressure, a legislature willing to check the presidency rather than ratify it, federal-state finances transparent enough for citizens to examine, and donor funding tied more explicitly to measurable institutional reform. It also requires, eventually, retiring the 4.5 formula that a 2000 peace conference in Djibouti designed as a temporary measure and that a quarter-century of Somali elites have since treated as near-permanent.
Until federal officials, regional presidents and international partners each acknowledge their share of responsibility for Somalia’s current state, the country is likely to keep changing presidents while leaving the underlying system largely intact. Lafta Gareen will not be the last leader to discover that power built on expediency offers no lasting protection, not even to those who once believed themselves essential to it. The open question is which of today’s critics will be the next to learn that lesson.
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