Power does not reveal its limits in moments of weakness, but rather in moments of overreach, when ambition begins to outrun reality and when political vision, untethered from structural constraints, turns into a project sustained more by assertion than by feasibility.
For the past four years, Somalia’s political direction has been driven by President Hassan Sheikh’s push for direct elections, presented as both inevitable and imminent, yet this project was never grounded in the realities of the Somali state, whose institutions remain fragile, whose security landscape is uneven, and whose political order is still defined by negotiated arrangements rather than consolidated authority.
Beneath the rhetoric of democratic transition stood a far more precarious foundation, as insecurity persisted, institutional capacity remained limited, and core political bargains unresolved, and therefore what was framed as progress increasingly took the form of an attempt to manufacture legitimacy rather than to organically build it. Today, as tensions erupt between the federal presidency and one of its closest regional allies, the illusion that sustained this project can no longer be maintained, and the widening gap between ambition and reality is no longer theoretical but is instead unfolding visibly, and irreversibly, in real time.
The dispute between President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud and South West State President Abdiaziz Laftagareen does not merely reflect a breakdown in relations, but rather marks the unraveling of a four-year political arrangement built on mutual convenience, through which both sides navigated a shared but ultimately unsustainable project.
During this period, the federal government pursued constitutional changes while simultaneously organizing what were presented as local elections in parts of Mogadishu, and although these exercises were framed as incremental reforms, they were in fact intended as a prototype for a far more ambitious undertaking the simultaneous rollout of elections at both district and federal member state levels across politically aligned regions.
Yet from the outset, the structural feasibility of this project was deeply flawed, because Somalia lacks not only the technical infrastructure and financial resources required for nationwide direct elections, but also the administrative systems and security conditions necessary to guarantee their credibility, and these were not hidden obstacles or unforeseen challenges, but well-known constraints that had already defined the limits of previous political transitions.
The persistence of the project, therefore, was not the result of overcoming these limitations, but rather of attempting to navigate around them, constructing the appearance of an electoral process through voter registration, polling arrangements, and controlled participation without establishing the substantive conditions that give such processes legitimacy.
At the center of this strategy lay a closed-list proportional representation system, which, by design, concentrates power in the hands of President who control security apparatus, electoral commission, and financial flows, and in such a system the management of the process becomes indistinguishable from the management of the outcome. As a result, the allocation of seats in local councils and regional parliaments could be effectively predetermined, with smaller allied parties incorporated only symbolically while real authority remained centralized, and from this foundation, federal member state presidents would be selected by parliaments already aligned with the center, thereby completing a cycle of controlled political reproduction that preserved the appearance of competition while ensuring predictable results.
This ambition, however, was never fully accepted by the federal member states, because regional leaders such as Laftagareen realise both the risks inherent in the project and the implications it carried for their own political autonomy, and therefore they advocated for a more limited and pragmatic approach in which elections, if they were to take place at all, would begin at the district level, while the selection of regional leadership would remain within the established indirect framework.
Their reasoning was grounded not in resistance to reform, but in a sober assessment of reality, since even Mogadishu had struggled to establish a functioning elected council, and it was therefore neither credible nor sustainable to impose a more complex electoral model on the rest of the country.
President Hassan Sheikh now confronts a narrowing set of choices, each of which carries significant political costs, because the options available are no longer strategic but reactive, shaped by the constraints that were previously deferred.
One path is confrontation, in which the federal government seeks to apply pressure, coercion, or even the instruments of state power to remove Laftagareen from office, yet such a course would not only escalate tensions but would also expose the fundamental contradiction at the heart of the project, since in practice Laftagareen can only be removed through the very indirect system that the federal leadership has sought to replace, and thus any attempt to impose change through force would not advance the cause of direct elections but would instead undermine it entirely.
The alternative, however, is equally consequential, because if Laftagareen proceeds independently by organizing regional elections under his own authority and declaring a winner, this would constitute a decisive setback not only for the direct election agenda but also for the broader political strategy underpinning President Hassan Sheikh’s pursuit of re-election, which has relied on shaping the architecture of an electoral process capable of producing controlled and predictable outcomes. Once federal member states begin to decouple from that framework, the coherence of the entire project begins to erode, and what was once presented as a coordinated national transition risks fragmenting into parallel and competing processes.
At the same time, the political coalition that sustained this project has begun to fracture from within, as allies who once found alignment in shared interests increasingly reassess their positions in light of shifting realities, and as distrust spreads, what had functioned as a coordinated political alignment gives way to a landscape defined by competing calculations and diminishing cohesion.
The opposition, particularly the Future Council, has moved to capitalize on this moment by advancing an alternative path, encouraging federal member states to disengage from what they regard as a managed and unrealistic process, and instead to pursue a more grounded and sequential approach to political transition.
Their argument is not merely oppositional but structural, because it rests on the recognition that Somalia cannot impose one-person, one-vote elections through political design alone, but must instead build toward them through negotiation, institutional development, and careful sequencing, and in this sense, the current rupture is not an isolated disruption but the logical outcome of a project that attempted to move faster than the state’s institutional foundations could support while simultaneously centralizing control in ways that alienated key actors.
What is now unfolding, therefore, is not a sudden crisis but a long-delayed correction, as the accumulated weight of ignored constraints asserts itself and forces a recalibration of political expectations. With the presidential term nearing its end, the balance of power has shifted, alliances have weakened, resources have diminished, and the space for maneuver has narrowed, leaving behind a political landscape in which the avoidance of reality is no longer possible.
In the end, Somalia’s future cannot be built on managed outcomes or manufactured legitimacy, but must instead rest on negotiated consensus, institutional patience, and a clear-eyed recognition of constraints, because the failure of this project is not merely a failure of execution but a failure to reckon with reality itself. Reality, once ignored, does not disappear; rather, it accumulates, it hardens, and eventually it asserts itself.
And when it does, it does not negotiate.