Dr. Abdwali Sheikh Ahmed
A rushed election was held for political self-preservation, resulting in compromised outcomes. Federal troops were deployed not on constitutional principle but in response to a breakdown in personal loyalty. This is not an anomaly in Somalia’s federal system. It is the system working exactly as its structural flaws have always guaranteed it would.
The federal project in Somalia was built on personal allegiance rather than institutional foundations. When that allegiance held, the absence of functioning institutions was tolerable. When it broke — as it has now broken in South West State — there was nothing else to stand on. No Constitutional Court to adjudicate the dispute. No genuine independent electoral commission to validate or invalidate the process.
No agreed framework for what happens when a Federal Member State and the Federal Government reach an irreconcilable disagreement. Just competing claims, and ultimately, force. The consequences are serious and should be stated plainly.
Every remaining FMS administration is today asking the same question: if the Federal Government will deploy troops to resolve a political dispute it cannot win through legitimate means, what protection does any FMS have against the same fate? That question — unanswered, unanswerable under the current framework — is more destabilising than anything that happened in Baidoa today.
It transforms what should be a federal partnership into a conditional arrangement, revocable at will from the centre. The deeper design flaw is this: Somalia’s federal architecture was never completed. The Constitutional Court mandated in 2012 was never established.
The electoral commission, which should have been independent, became an instrument of the ruling party. These are not administrative oversights. They are the load-bearing walls that were never built — and what collapsed in Baidoa today is the structure that depended on them.
This crisis will not be resolved by determining who was more wrong. It will only be resolved by building what was never built — the institutions that make this kind of confrontation unnecessary, a Constitutional Court, a truly independent electoral commission., and a federal compact that all sides recognise because all sides shaped it.
Until those institutions are built, Somalia will keep reproducing these crises with different actors and in different locations. The names may change, but ultimately the same structural issues will persist.
Dr. Abdiwali Sheikh Ahmed is the former Prime Minister of Somalia.