By: Nuradin Dirie
There is a dangerous illusion of stability settling over Mogadishu right now.
When the Federal Government passed controversial constitutional amendment on March 4th to force through a unilateral mandate extension, the corridors of Villa Somalia celebrated it as a tactical victory. They believe they have bought themselves time. In the cold light of statecraft, however, what they have actually engineered is a strategic catastrophe.
You cannot govern a bifurcated nation by decree. By alienating the Federal Member States and tearing at the legal frameworks that bind our fragile federal system together, the centre has entirely isolated itself. We haven’t secured a year of governance; we’ve merely guaranteed a year of exhausting political attrition.
But the domestic constitutional crisis is just the symptom. The true danger lies in how this internal rupture leaves Somalia exposed on the geopolitical chessboard of the Horn of Africa.
A government that spends all its political capital fighting its own regions has nothing left to defend its borders. We are seeing this play out in real-time. By recklessly alienating our traditional international security partners, a dangerous vacuum has opened up. In a desperate bid to project strength, the current administration has allowed the AUSSOM transition to become a staging ground for external proxy conflicts. The escalating tensions between Egypt and Ethiopia are now being imported directly onto Somali soil.
This is the ultimate betrayal of sovereignty. Treating foreign militaries not as partners in the fight against extremism, but as leverage against domestic political rivals, is a recipe for state collapse.
For two decades, our politics has been trapped in a predictable, exhausting pendulum swing. Power shifts back and forth in a localised gridlock between the entrenched elites of the South and the traditional power brokers of the North. This binary system has simply reached its mathematical and political limit. The incumbent’s illegal extension isn’t a show of strength; it’s the dying gasp of this old framework trying desperately to hold onto power.
We don’t need to abandon our traditional power bases, but we absolutely must expand them to reflect the true geography of the Republic. The math of the old system no longer works.
If we look closely at the true centre of gravity in Somalia – the bridge that connects the North to the South, and the key to unlocking a functional, integrated national consensus – it has always been the South West.
When the founders of the Somali Youth League (SYL) envisioned an independent Republic, they didn’t base it on regional isolationism. They built a nationwide coalition that drew immense, foundational strength from the Digil and Mirifle regions. I know this history intimately because it is the history of my own family in Hudur. The water of Bakool runs deep in the roots of Somali independence.
To break the current deadlock, we need a “Third Way.” This requires an expanded national coalition that recognises the South West for what it truly is: the indispensable anchor of the Republic. By centring this historic, geographic, and political bridge, we can unite our traditional power bases into a single, functional state capable of actual governance.
Let me be unequivocal: we do not, and will not, accept a single day of this illegal extension. The incumbent’s attempt to artificially stretch their mandate is not a political reality we will simply wait out; it is a constitutional breach that must be actively dismantled.
By forcing this decree, the administration has not secured power – they have secured their own total political isolation.
However, our resistance will not look like the failures of the past. We will not burn our capital in armed rebellion, nor will we exhaust our energy in aimless online conflicts. Instead, we are building a unified, constitutional vanguard.
We are using this immediate crisis to aggressively organise the architecture of the next Republic and strip this illegal mandate of its political oxygen. We will force a resolution by forging an expanded, undeniable national consensus that the isolated centre cannot ignore. Somalia requires a leadership that understands true power comes from the legal consent of the regions, that our foreign policy must ruthlessly prioritise “Somalia First,” and that our economy will never grow while the federal government is at war with its own member states.
The March 4th rupture tore the old map apart. It is time we draw a new one.