Somalia Is Not Collapsing. It’s Doing Politics
Somalia is not collapsing — it’s doing messy politics. President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud extended his term via controversial constitutional amendments, sparking protests and clashes in Mogadishu, but no overthrow. The article argues this is a recurring legitimacy dispute in a weak institutional system, resolved through armed posturing and negotiation, not state failure. Stronger courts and mechanisms are urgently needed.
Abdurahman Nur
6/9/20264 min read
Hassan Sheikh Mohamud’s four-year term expired on 15 May. He has not left office. In March, Somalia’s parliament passed constitutional amendments extending both parliamentary and presidential terms from four years to five — a process that lawmakers from Puntland and Jubbaland, alongside opposition members, boycotted in protest. The government frames the amendments as the completion of a fourteen-year constitutional review. The opposition calls them a power grab dressed in legal language. When protests were planned, the government moved first: gunfire broke out near the Mogadishu residence of former Prime Minister Hassan Ali Kheyre, then spread to Abdiaziz district where supporters of former President Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed had gathered. At least a dozen people were killed, scores were injured, and thousands of households fled. The rest of the city watched and waited.
The familiar verdict — “Somalia collapsing” — was already forming. It was wrong before the facts were checked.
What did not happen: an attempt to seize state institutions or overthrow the government. Kheyre was escorted from his city residence back to the fortified compound on Mogadishu’s outskirts where most politicians and international missions are based. What this is, stripped of the competing framings, is a legitimacy dispute inside a political system.
The actors in Mogadishu this week are not contesting whether Somalia should exist or who should own its territory. They are contesting who governs it, on what terms, and by what rules. Collapsing that distinction is how the failed-state narrative gets reproduced long after it has stopped being accurate.
Outside Mogadishu, the picture is more complicated. Puntland and Jubbaland have rejected the March amendments entirely — not just the timing or the author, but the process that produced them. They continue to operate under the 2012 provisional constitution, disputing whether the new framework has legitimacy at all. That is not secession, but it is not unified national politics either. A constitutional standoff layered beneath the term-expiry crisis — which means that when we say “Somalia is doing politics,” we are describing a country where different regions are operating from different interpretations of what the rules actually are. The confrontation in the capital, though, remains recognisable: armed positioning followed by negotiation.
This is not the first time Mogadishu has been through this. In April 2021, Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed - Farmaajo — extended his mandate through a parliamentary vote after his term expired. The same skirmishes, the same districts, the same displacement. The political system bent — and then produced a negotiated settlement. And before 2021, Hassan Sheikh’s own first term ran five months beyond its constitutional end date — not through deliberate manoeuvre but because a system without firm enforcement mechanisms simply could not organise an election on time. The precedent of flexible mandates was established then. Later presidents made it a tool. The detail that should not get lost: Hassan Sheikh Mohamud was among the opposition figures whose compound was targeted in 2021. He condemned it. He called it an abuse of power. He is now doing the same thing, using a constitutional amendment rather than a parliamentary vote — a different instrument for the same end. The fig leaf may be more elaborate, but the logic is identical.
Somalia’s presidents since 2012 have all exceeded their initial terms — some by system failure, some by design, now by constitutional rewrite. Each watches what the predecessor received and asks for the same.
What you are watching is not Somalia failing to do politics. It is Somalia doing politics without the institutional plumbing that would make it less lethal. In a system with stronger institutions, Hassan Ali Kheyre files a constitutional challenge. A court rules on whether the March amendments were procedurally valid. Hassan Sheikh either complies or faces a crisis with defined legal parameters.
Every actor in this dispute is behaving rationally given the system they are operating in. Hassan Sheikh uses constitutional cover because it is available and the system rewards those who can arrange it. The opposition mobilise armed supporters because, without courts that can enforce a ruling, armed positioning is the only credible signal. If Sheikh Sharif were president, the incentives would produce the same behaviour. This is not a story about bad men. It is a story about a system that makes this the rational play — every time, for everyone — until the institutions exist that make a different play more rational.
When dialogue was proposed, both sides accepted. In a system where everything is contested, the willingness to talk at all matters.
Foreign partners — Western donors, Gulf states, regional neighbours - shape the environment in which this plays out. None of them determine the outcome. This remains, at its core, a Somali political contest over legitimacy and terms. Al Shabaab has stayed out — pleased, no doubt, but not a direct player in this round.
Universal suffrage is now the stated destination of every major actor in this dispute. Hassan Sheikh claims his extension builds the foundation for it. The opposition endorses it in principle while rejecting his method, his timing, and his role as architect. Both sides are competing over who gets to deliver something they claim to agree on. A popular vote without institutions to run it, protect it, and sustain it does not resolve the underlying problem — it moves the confrontation to a different arena. What Somalia needs alongside elections, urgently and not afterwards, is the infrastructure that makes the result mean something. Courts that can hear challenges. An electoral commission that cannot be captured. A process that does not require militia deployments to adjudicate legitimacy.
Kheyre is back in his fortified compound — not in a cell, not in exile. The guns have quietened. The politics continues. The question Somalia now needs to answer is how to make that resolution institutional rather than violent — so that the next time a president’s term expires, the argument goes to a court, not to the streets.