For years Somalia’s leaders could not agree. A pact can change that.
Somalia’s constitution is being tested, and the person testing it is President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud. His government says the amendments it pushed through are the path to one-person, one-vote elections. But they also extended his own term by a year, and they were adopted without the agreement of key Federal Member States and the opposition. He is not the first Somali leader to test the limits of a mandate. Our task is to make sure he is the last one able to. That is why the most important question is not only what happens now, but what we do the day after.
The Record Behind the Promise
The record behind that promise matters. State and national elections were placed under a single commission under federal supervision, and Jubaland walked out rather than accept it. Puntland had already withdrawn from the federal system over the amendments. In South West, Galmudug and Hirshabelle, expired mandates were extended federally, although state constitutions place state elections under the states. When South West’s President opposed the amendments, federal troops took Baidoa. In Galmudug, the party that won its case in the Supreme Court was excluded from the rerun. A vote can be direct and still not be fair when one side writes the rules and controls the referee.
What a Crisis Can Teach
Political scientists have a name for what a nation can do with a crisis like this. Nancy Bermeo called it political learning, the process through which people “modify their political beliefs and tactics as a result of severe crisis, frustrations, and dramatic changes in environment.” Nic Cheeseman, Marie-Eve Desrosiers and Edem Selormey have described democratic resilience not as simple survival but as the capacity to adapt, regenerate and deepen democratic norms in the face of crises. They also note that of the 60 attempts to evade presidential term limits between 2000 and 2020, 23 took place in sub-Saharan Africa. A crisis, in other words, is not an achievement. But what a nation does with it can be.
There is a warning in the research too. Cheeseman’s work on Burundi, Kenya and Uganda finds that extending a leader’s time in office is especially likely to become a turning point that closes off the chance of bouncing back. If the lesson is not drawn while the wound is fresh, the precedent hardens and becomes the rule for the next leader.
Lesson One: Return to the Agreed Foundation
The first lesson is about the foundation. The government regards the text adopted in March 2026 as the supreme law that supersedes all earlier frameworks. But Somalia’s 2012 Provisional Constitution remains the last framework that the country’s political actors broadly accepted, and its Chapter 15 tells us how it should be changed. Under Article 132, amendments must be put before the public for debate, the Federal Member States must be engaged where their interests are affected, two-thirds of each house must approve, and the revised constitution must then go to a referendum. Article 136 envisaged that the people would adopt the final constitution by referendum before the end of the first parliament’s term. That step was never taken. The part of the process that would have made the constitution belong to every Somali is the part we skipped. The disputed amendments of 2026, which pushed elections to 2027, show us the cost of building on a foundation that not everyone agrees on. The lesson is to return to the last agreed text and finish what it asks of us, including the referendum.
Kenya shows that this is possible. After the disputed election of December 2007, more than 1,100 people were killed and hundreds of thousands displaced. Yet rivals who had fought bitterly over the presidency campaigned together for a new constitution, and in August 2010 Kenyans approved it by about two to one. It reduced the power of the presidency, devolved authority to the counties and rebuilt the electoral commission. Kenya did not solve every problem, and accountability for the violence never came. But it turned its worst crisis into a constitution that the people themselves had voted for.
Lesson Two: The Courage to Face Uncertainty
The second lesson is about courage. There is a Somali saying that a brave man is not someone who is never afraid, but someone who is not afraid to be afraid (Geesigu waa ninka aan ka baqin inuu baqo). Nelson Mandela said something similar: courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. For a leader, the fear is easy to name: losing office, and facing an election whose result cannot be known in advance. Constitutional courage is accepting that uncertainty rather than changing the rules to escape it. A leader who can restrain his opponents is powerful. A leader who can restrain himself understands what a constitution is for.
Senegal showed what that looks like. In February 2024, three weeks before polling day, the presidential election was postponed and parliament moved it to December. Protests followed and three people were killed. Then the Constitutional Council ruled the delay unconstitutional, and the president said he would fully implement the decision. The vote was held in March, the opposition candidate won, and the governing coalition’s candidate conceded. Three things saved Senegal: citizens who refused to accept the delay, an institution with the courage to say no, and a leader willing to accept its ruling.
A Pact for the Day After
Together, these two lessons point to a practical place to begin. The Federal Member States, together with the opposition parties and coalitions that reject the amendments, and any leader willing to join them, should sign a pact for the day after, each in their own name and as an equal. Kenya’s rivals took a similar step in 2008, when the agreement that ended the violence made constitutional, institutional and legal reform one of its central commitments.
A Somali pact would commit its signatories to the 2012 Provisional Constitution as the common reference point, to negotiating an electoral model, an electoral body and a timetable that all sides accept, to a date for the review and referendum that Chapter 15 requires, and to settling political disputes by political means. Above all, it would bind those who sign it: from the day it is signed, no leader extends his own mandate outside agreed procedures. It would also settle a principle on which every federal system depends: no change to the federal arrangement without the agreement of the Federal Member States. The constitution already points that way. Article 132 requires that state legislatures be engaged on any amendment that touches their interests, and Article 142 requires that the states be consulted on decisions about the federal system. The pact would turn that duty to consult into a commitment to agree. From the day it is signed, anyone, in Mogadishu or in a state capital, who tries to change the constitution outside that process would find every signatory standing together against it, by lawful and political means.
Nothing in this pact takes away any power the constitution gives the President. Whoever holds the office remains free to govern, and to use every authority the constitution provides. What the pact asks is narrower: that those powers be used within the constitution, never against the states it was written to unite. When the constitution is amended, the Federal Member States must be part of the decision. When elections are organised, including elections to both houses of the federal parliament, the states must keep the role the constitution gives them. A president who governs within these rules loses nothing under this pact. It constrains only the use of the constitution’s own tools to push the states aside.
The first step would be simple. The leaders who accept this invitation would agree on the pact’s principles, each name representatives, and open talks on the constitutional and electoral settlement, with a mediator acceptable to all of them to help the talks along. The electoral model, the electoral body and the timetable would be settled at that table, not before it. The pact is the beginning of a political process, not a finished legal text.
The pact is not a judgment on one man. It draws on the lesson of every crisis since 2012, in which mandates outran agreement and the rules were written by whoever held the pen. That is why the invitation remains open to President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud. Should he choose to embrace the principles of this pact, including a return to an agreed constitutional foundation, respect for the Federal Member States and a negotiated electoral settlement, he would be welcomed on the same terms as every other signatory, and the pact would then belong to the whole nation. The same welcome extends to those who have supported the present constitutional course but are prepared to reconsider it in the interest of a common national settlement. The purpose is not to divide Somalis by their past political choices, but to bring them together around rules that will bind everyone in the future.
Such a pact cannot replace the constitution. Its value lies in a published commitment that the public, and a trusted mediator, can hold its signatories to. A pact that demands restraint only from others is a manifesto. A pact that demands it of those who sign it is the beginning of a constitution that belongs to everyone.
What Every Signatory Gains
Every signatory would gain something real. For the Somali Future Council, which has already called for talks on an agreed timetable, the pact turns a demand into an offer and answers the charge that the opposition only obstructs. For Nabad iyo Nolol, which has made clear that no other group speaks for it, a pact signed by equals protects that independence while ending the divisions that weaken every opposition voice. For Puntland and Jubaland, it offers a shared national platform without surrendering the autonomy they have defended. Above all, it protects every Federal Member State for the future: whoever wins the next election, no president will again be able to run away with the constitution. For every side in South West’s conflict, it offers what military gains alone cannot: a political settlement, at the price of halting the fighting. And for the federal government, it offers a partner that has bound itself to the same rules it asks others to keep.
An Invitation by Name
I therefore invite, by name, the leaders whose signatures would make such a pact national, beginning with those it most directly concerns. The pact exists to protect the place of the Federal Member States in the constitution, so the first invitation belongs to the leaders of those states: President Ahmed Mohamed Islam Madobe of Jubaland, President Abdiaziz Hassan Mohamed Laftagareen of South West, President Said Abdullahi Deni of Puntland, President Ali Abdullahi Hussein Gudlawe of Hirshabelle and President Liibaan Ahmed Hassan of Galmudug. Without their consent no federal settlement can stand. Whatever their party, the constitution gives their states a rightful role in how it is changed, and a pact that protects that role protects them too. Their signatures matter most, and the pact should be shaped with them first.
Others can lend the pact the weight of experience. Former Presidents Abdiqasim Salad Hassan, Sharif Sheikh Ahmed and Mohamed Abdullahi Farmaajo each handed power to a successor. Each knows from experience what a country needs on the day after, and what it costs when the rules of that day are in doubt.
The invitation extends to every member of the Somali Future Council and the Somali Salvation Forum, which have brought former prime ministers, ministers and parliamentarians onto a common platform with Puntland and Jubaland. They have already shown that leaders with different histories can stand together. The pact asks them to carry that platform to the whole nation.
I also invite former Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Fawzia Yusuf Haji Adam. Born in Hargeisa, she was the first woman to hold either office, a choice the Daily Nation described as a victory for those advocating the union of Somalis. Her experience in government and diplomacy, and her ability to connect north and south, make her voice a reminder that Somali unity is not something to be assumed. It has to be renewed by agreement, and a pact for the day after is one way to renew it.
A pact among leaders is not enough on its own. Traditional elders, religious scholars, the business community, young people, the diaspora and the communities too often left out of Somali politics have carried this country through every crisis, and their voice belongs in this one. Many of those invited here have argued, in their own way, that Somalia’s rules cannot be decided by one side. A pact is how they can show it. The names here are a beginning, not a limit, and others will be invited as the pact takes shape. For my part, I intend to share this proposal with each of them and to do what I can to follow it up.
Stronger Institutions, Not Stronger Leaders
The day after, we will not be able to undo this crisis. But we can decide what it teaches us. If it leads us back to an agreed constitutional foundation, to a referendum that gives the constitution to the people, and to rules that bind the next president as firmly as the present one, then this period will not have been wasted. We cannot always choose the leaders who test our institutions. We can choose whether to leave those institutions just as weak for the next one. The aim is to build a state in which the character of the next leader matters less, because the institutions matter more.
Awale Kullane is a Somali diplomat and political analyst who writes on institutions and political leadership in the Horn of Africa. Find him at www.linkedin.com/in/awale-kullane-2632a5388.
