Somali politics will always be the business of deals. The question is which deals corrode the state and which ones build it.
Every serious Somali politician knows that politics is the business of making deals. A coalition is a deal. A cabinet is a deal. A budget vote is a deal. A federal compact is a long deal that has to be renewed every few years against the pressure of shorter ones. Somalia is not unusual in this. What is unusual is the kind of deals our politics now rewards.
There is a useful distinction, familiar to anyone who has spent time in the rooms where these things are settled, between the deal that builds a state and the deal that hollows it. A deal that builds a state trades something that can be defended in public: a portfolio for a competent minister, a security arrangement for a security guarantee, a constitutional concession for a constitutional concession in return. A deal that hollows a state trades something that cannot be defended in public: a vote for an envelope, a ministry for a signature, a court ruling for a quiet understanding. The first kind of deal still requires integrity, because both sides have to be able to stand behind it the next morning. The second kind requires only secrecy.
The integrity space is the room in which the first kind of deal is still possible. It is not a refusal to negotiate. It is a refusal to negotiate in the second currency. Call it the integrity space, because what it protects is not the politician’s purity but the public’s ability to know what was traded, by whom, and for what.
That space has been shrinking in Somali politics for a generation, and the cost of its shrinkage is now visible everywhere. It is visible in foreign capital that does not arrive, in courts that cannot enforce contracts, in security forces that fight each other as readily as they fight the insurgents they were raised to defeat, and in a federal compact that is renegotiated by force whenever the second kind of deal makes the first kind inconvenient. A country whose leaders cannot trade in the open will struggle to build institutions that outlast them. It will recycle its crises, dressed in new constitutional language.
A constitutional moment, not a constitutional settlement
The events of the past two years have made this argument harder to dismiss. In March 2026 a new federal constitution was signed in Mogadishu without the referendum that Chapter 15 of the previous text required. Puntland had withdrawn its recognition of the federal government two years earlier. Jubaland had suspended ties and held parallel elections, after which federal and state forces faced each other across the Gedo corridor. In South West State, the incumbent president declined to contest the entry of federal troops into Baidoa, and a new speaker was installed once rival candidates withdrew under pressure. Galmudug, Hirshabelle, and the capital remained inside the federal tent.
A defender of the new arrangement would call this consolidation. A critic would call it centralisation by other means. What it is, plainly, is a constitution whose legitimacy now rests less on the consent of its members than on the disposition of force between them. That is not a stable equilibrium. It is a holding pattern, and holding patterns in the Horn of Africa have a habit of ending badly.
The integrity space, in this context, is the place from which a leader can speak the constitutional language honestly. Not as a partisan of any faction, but as a defender of the process by which factions should be reconciled. A federation that is held together by the threat of intervention is not a federation. It is a unitary state with a federal vocabulary. The honest reformer’s task is not to choose between Mogadishu and the regions. It is to insist that the rules apply to both.
Why the space stays empty
Three forces keep it empty.
The first is the price of entry. A serious campaign in Somalia, at any level, now requires sums that no honest professional career can produce. The candidate without an envelope is assumed, by default, to be the candidate without a microphone. That assumption is wrong, and it is the first thing the integrity space has to disprove. There are other currencies a serious candidate can spend: a record that travels on its own, a network built over decades of public service, and an argument that the public is hungry to hear.
The second is the structure of the delegate system itself. Where electors are few and identifiable, they are also reachable, and what is reachable in a poor country is usually for sale. The 4.5 formula was meant as a transitional accommodation. It has become a permanent market.
The third, and most insidious, is the assumption among voters and donors alike that integrity is a luxury good. It is something Somalia might afford later, once the security situation improves, once the economy diversifies, once the diaspora returns in greater numbers. This is the argument that has kept the integrity space empty for a generation, and it is the argument that must be refused. A state that postpones integrity until it is convenient never finds it convenient.
What it would look like to occupy the space
Occupying the integrity space is not a matter of refusing to engage with Somali politics as it is. It is a matter of engaging in a different currency. Coalitions still have to be built, delegates still have to be persuaded, clans and constituencies still have to be brought into the room. The work of the politician does not change. What changes is what he is willing to put on the table, and what he insists be visible when the table is cleared.
In practice, this means a small number of disciplines. A candidate in the integrity space funds his campaign within publicly disclosed limits, and publishes the source of every contribution above a stated threshold. He negotiates portfolios with coalition partners on the basis of competence and constituency, and he is willing to defend each appointment in writing. He commits in advance to a single term, so that the office cannot become an instrument of the man who holds it. He treats the federal constitution as a contract to be honoured, including its amendment procedure, rather than a draft to be edited under pressure. He speaks the same way in Mogadishu as in Garowe, in Kismayo as in Dhusamareb, in Hargeisa as in Addis Ababa.
None of this requires sainthood. It requires a willingness to lose certain votes in order to keep certain commitments, and a calculation, made before the campaign begins, that the votes worth losing are the ones that would have been bought rather than won.
None of these disciplines is unprecedented. Each has been practised somewhere in the world by leaders working in conditions at least as difficult as Somalia’s. Mandela served one term in a country that would have re-elected him without effort. George Washington declined a third because he understood that the office was larger than the man. Patricio Aylwin in Chile, Joaquim Chissano in Mozambique, Festus Mogae in Botswana, each in his own way demonstrated that the integrity space is not a Western indulgence but a universal political technology, available to any society willing to use it.
The case for Galmudug as a starting point
If the integrity space is to be tested, it must be tested somewhere. The federal member state presidencies are the natural place to start, because they are where Somalia’s federal experiment is actually being lived. Galmudug, in particular, sits at the constitutional centre of the federation. It is large enough to matter, small enough to be governed by argument rather than by force, and aligned with the federal government in a way that allows reform from inside the tent rather than from outside it.
A Galmudug presidency claimed in the integrity space would set a precedent the rest of the federation will have to answer. It would show that the space can be occupied, that the candidate who occupies it can govern, and that the institutions built under that discipline can outlast the man who built them. That is what a federation is for. Not the celebration of the centre, but the cultivation of competing examples. The next federal presidency, and the one after that, will be argued for in the language that today’s state-level contests establish.
A word to the sceptics
The most common objection to the integrity space is that it is naive. The reply is that the alternative, the politics Somalia has practised for thirty years, has been tried, at length, and has produced the country we now have. The naive position is not the one that proposes a discipline. The naive position is the one that proposes more of the same and expects a different result.
The second objection is that integrity does not scale. One honest leader cannot fix a system built on its absence. This is correct, and it is also beside the point. The integrity space is not a claim about scaling. It is a claim about anchoring. A single occupied seat in the federation, held by a leader who refuses the methods of the market, changes what is thinkable for the next candidate, and the candidate after that. It moves the floor. Over time, the floor is what matters.
The seat is no longer vacant
There will be a Galmudug presidential vote. There will be federal elections after that. Most of the candidates who present themselves will speak in the language of the existing market. They will buy what they can afford and call it a campaign. That is a known quantity, and Somalia has lived with its consequences for a generation.
What is new is that the integrity space, for the first time in this electoral cycle, will be contested. It will be contested by candidates who fund their campaigns openly, who name their cabinets by qualification, who treat the constitution as a contract rather than a draft, and who are willing to lose a particular vote in order to keep a particular commitment. The seat is no longer vacant. The question for Somalia’s voters, donors, civil society, and international friends is no longer whether such a candidate exists. It is whether the space they occupy is worth defending alongside them.
The honest answer, on the evidence of the past thirty years, is yes.
Awale Ali Kullane is a Somali diplomat and writer. He served as Somalia’s Ambassador to the People’s Republic of China and to the Kingdom of Sweden, and has represented Somalia in multilateral forums on security, development, and constitutional affairs. He writes on Somali politics, East African geopolitics, and the future of the federation.