By Khadar Afrah
Pragmatism and opportunism are not the same thing, though they are often treated as if they were. Pragmatism is the willingness to adapt means in pursuit of a consistent end. The objective holds; the approach adjusts. Opportunism has no such anchor. It is the pursuit of advantage in the moment, dressed in whatever language the moment requires. The difference is not always visible from the outside. It becomes clear over time, when the pattern of conduct reveals no consistent purpose beyond self-preservation and the accumulation of leverage.
That pattern is now visible in the conduct of federal leadership in Somalia.
The Federal Government presents itself publicly as the guardian of the constitutional order. Its officials speak the language of federalism, institutional integrity, and national unity. These are not small claims. They carry real weight in a country where the architecture of governance remains fragile and contested. The problem is that the conduct of federal leadership does not match its stated position.
Across several Federal Member States, the Federal Government has moved against elected or constitutionally recognised administrations when those administrations posed a political challenge. The pattern is consistent: interference dressed as oversight, pressure framed as constitutional duty, and the selective invocation of federal authority depending on which outcome serves the federal government. This is not the behaviour of an institution defending a principle. It is the behaviour of a political actor defending its position.
The current confrontation with Southwest State makes this plain. Whatever the legal arguments on each side, the federal government’s conduct in this dispute has been shaped less by constitutional consistency than by the approach of elections. Disrupting a regional administration, or at minimum tolerating its disruption, reduces a potential centre of political opposition and creates openings to shape the composition of future parliamentary selections. Instability, in this calculus, is not a risk to be managed. It is a resource.
This is the core of opportunistic behaviour in a political context: the manufacture or exploitation of conflict to generate leverage. The immediate damage is visible, civilians displaced, clan tensions sharpened, local governance paralysed. But the political purpose is equally visible to anyone willing to look at it directly. The conflict serves the centre by weakening the periphery at precisely the moment when the periphery might otherwise exert independent political weight.
Federal leadership has also shown a willingness to reverse its own stated positions when reversal becomes convenient. Arrangements that were publicly endorsed have been quietly abandoned. Commitments made to regional authorities have been reinterpreted or ignored. The argument shifts with the political wind. This is not strategic flexibility. It is the operational logic of opportunism: principle exists to be invoked when useful and set aside when it is not.
The consequences extend well beyond any single political dispute. Trust between the federal government and member state administrations is not an abstraction. It is the working material of federal governance. Without it, every negotiation becomes a confrontation, every policy initiative becomes a test of power rather than a question of merit, and every election becomes an arena for conflict rather than a mechanism for peaceful transfer of authority. The erosion of that trust is already advanced. Continued opportunistic conduct will exhaust what remains of it.
The damage to electoral credibility is particularly serious. As Somalia moves towards parliamentary selection, the integrity of that process depends on a political environment in which regional actors, clan representatives, and civil constituencies trust that the outcome will not be predetermined by federal manipulation. Where federal leadership uses pre-election tensions to weaken rivals, position loyalists, and shape the conditions of selection, it does not merely risk the credibility of one electoral cycle. It undermines the principle that elections serve to confer authority rather than to ratify arrangements already made behind closed doors.
There is a version of the argument that attributes all of this to necessity, that federal leadership is navigating genuine threats to state cohesion and that strong centralising action is the only available tool. This argument is not without force in the abstract. But it does not describe what is actually happening. The selective application of central authority, the abandonment of previously stated commitments, and the exploitation of regional instability for electoral positioning are not the actions of a leadership governing under duress. They are the actions of a political class prioritising its own continuity over the stability of the institutions it was elected to serve.
Opportunism in office is not a minor failing. At this stage of state formation, it is a structural threat. The institutions of Somali governance are not yet strong enough to absorb sustained bad faith from the actors who inhabit them. Each act of political manipulation that goes unnamed and unchallenged sets a precedent. Each reversal of stated principle that passes without accountability normalises the next one.
The distinction between pragmatism and opportunism matters here because the language of pragmatism is being used to shield conduct that does not deserve the cover. Flexibility in service of stability is legitimate. Flexibility in service of power retention, at the expense of the constitutional order and the trust of citizens, is not. The current conduct of federal leadership in Somalia falls into the second category. Naming it clearly is not a partisan act. It is a precondition for any serious conversation about what comes next.