Some 21 years ago, for troubled Somalia, reconciliation-first governance was right for its moment. The fault since is that we did not evolve out of it, and the current administration has made a bad situation more dangerous. The fact is 21 years after Mbagathi, the architecture it produced is failing in full view.
On 5 March this year, Somalia’s Federal Parliament extended the terms of the President and Parliament from four to five years, delaying elections by a year. The president’s original term expired on 15 May. He did not leave office.
The current administration has changed the Provisional Constitution without the agreement of the federal member states, extended its own mandate without their agreement, and now presides over a federation in which Puntland and Jubaland refuse to sit with the president at all.
There is no agreed constitution. There is no agreed electoral model. There is no political consensus. Where consensus is absent, security risk rises, and Somalia’s security risk has never been ours alone.
The framework governing Somalia today has a name its practitioners rarely use in print. It is reconciliation-first governance: Somalia’s central task is to reconcile its clans, and governance capacity will follow. It took shape at the Somali National Reconciliation Conference in Eldoret and Mbagathi from 2002 to 2004, under IGAD mediation.
At Mbagathi, warlords entered the process, clan-family representation was locked in as the 4.5 formula, and federalism was written in provisional form. The framework was supposed to evolve.
Once a state was standing, the model was to move toward governance based on competence: professional civil service, independent judiciary, functioning parliament, security forces answering to institutions rather than to persons. That evolution never happened. Twenty-one years on, the operating grammar of the Somali state remains the operating grammar of a reconciliation conference. The fault is ours. Somalis did not follow the constitution.
Successive administrations used reconciliation vocabulary to explain away the absence of institutions rather than as an interim rationale for building them. The Corruption Perceptions Index scored Somalia at 21 out of 100 in 2005. In 2025, it scored 9.
The senior civil service is populated by clan balance more than by capability. The security transition promised for the end of 2024 did not occur, and the African Union Support and Stabilisation Mission’s funding cliff on 31 December will find Somali forces unable to hold the ground.
Reconciliation-first governance was right for 2004. It has been the wrong framework for a decade. The current administration did not cause that fault. It has aggravated it, badly, at the worst possible moment. The sharpest indictment is the reversal underneath every other dispute.
Security forces raised, trained, and internationally underwritten to fight Al-Shabaab are being deployed against political opposition.
In Mogadishu in early June, federal forces used heavy artillery originally supplied for counter-insurgency to bombard opposition positions in the capital. In Baidoa, federal troops were fighting opposition militias inside a state capital as recently as this month.
Al-Shabaab is the beneficiary of every hour those forces spend on this reversal. The mechanism underneath is straightforward: the ruling party has pre-selected the incumbents it wants to keep, and the states and clans that would normally compete are refusing the process because they do not trust it.
Somalia cannot choose the type of leader the next transition will produce. We can only describe the storm precisely enough that the country recognises the right leader when he appears.
