In January 2024, Somalia’s president Hassan Sheikh Mohamud made a promise. The work his government was doing to finalize Somalia’s provisional constitution, Mohamud said at the inauguration ceremony of Puntland’s president, “will begin in the next term and isn’t related to this term. I want people to know that.”
Last week, in a recorded statement to the country, after parliament passed the amended constitution, he offered a different kind of declaration. The provisional period, he said, was “the sun which set yesterday,” a poetic burial of the document that had governed Somalia since 2012.
Between those two statements lies the story of how Somalia arrived at its most consequential — and most contested — constitutional moment since the collapse of the state in 1991. And between the triumphalism of the government’s framing and the alarm of its opponents lies a question about the continued viability of the Somali state.
On March 4, Somalia’s parliament convened a joint sitting of both chambers and voted to pass an amended constitutional text, formally ending nearly 12 years of provisional governance. House Speaker Sheikh Adan Mohamed Nuur Madobe declared the document adopted and immediately in force. Two hundred and twenty-three lawmakers voted in favor, and no votes were recorded against, Somali state media reported.
On Sunday, the bill was signed into law, and the Somali president said the government “will now begin the effective implementation of the new Constitution.”
The changes are sweeping and move the country from a parliamentary to a presidential system. Regional presidents, figures who have commanded significant autonomous power, will have their powers curtailed. Members of parliament will, for the first time, be directly elected through universal suffrage, moving away from an indirect vote through clan representatives. The same MPs and senators will vote for the president. The presidential and parliamentary terms will be increased from four to five years, among other things.
Prime Minister Hamza Barre declared on X after the passage of the bill that “the Somali state henceforth stands upon a firm and enduring legal foundation rather than a provisional constitutional arrangement.” Two federal member states — North East State and Hirshabelle — along with the capital region of Banaadir welcomed the changes. The state of Galmudug has remained silent.
But for a significant portion of Somalia’s political class, the vote was not a milestone. It was a rupture.
The federal states of Puntland and Jubaland rejected the new constitution outright. So did the Somali Future Council, a broad opposition coalition that includes former presidents, prime ministers and prominent political figures who collectively represent much of Somalia’s post-civil war political establishment. Two government ministers resigned on the eve of the vote. A Puntland senator who had initially participated in the constitutional process told Mada Masr she walked away because she did not want to remain in power illegitimately. She was among over 60 MPs and senators from the Puntland and Jubaland federal states who boycotted the process.
Postwar Somalia has never been a unified state. Two of its four federal member states — Puntland and Jubaland — have withdrawn from the federal system over electoral and constitutional quarrels with the federal government. Somaliland has governed itself as an independent state since 1991 and rejects the federal project. Al-Shabab, a local Al-Qaeda affiliated armed group, controls large areas of the south and center and seeks to oust the government entirely. The new constitution lands atop this fractured landscape.
For the first time in Somalia’s post-civil war history, the country, with the exclusion of Somaliland, is in practice governed by two competing constitutional frameworks. The 2012 provisional constitution remains, for its defenders, the only legitimate document, the product of a negotiated political settlement that took years to produce. The new constitution is, for its backers, the long-overdue completion of a process that successive governments promised and failed to deliver. There is no constitutional court to adjudicate between them. Elections are unscheduled and it isn’t clear how they would take place. Parliamentary and presidential mandates are expiring. The country is, in the words of one opposition MP who spoke to Mada Masr, in the midst of a major “constitutional crisis.”
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The week before the vote was not peaceful. More than 30 Puntland members of parliament boarded a flight to Garowe, the capital of Puntland, to attend a consultative meeting convened by Puntland President Said Abdullahi Deni on Somalia’s political tension surrounding the constitutional vote. However, the aircraft was ordered back to Mogadishu and the lawmakers never reached their destination. Deni blamed the federal government, saying the move was an “irresponsible and unlawful act.” The federal government has not publicly responded to accusations that it ordered the aircraft back.
Several of the affected MPs accused the federal authorities of violating their constitutional rights and parliamentary immunity, saying the decision to turn back the plane amounted to political interference. Puntland also suspended Daallo Airlines, a major Somali carrier, from operating at all its airports.
Following the vote, two ministers from Puntland resigned. Petroleum State Minister Ismail Buraale said the constitution was “not properly finalized,” while Labor State Minister Caynaanshe Yusuf Hussein said “I cannot be part of anything that harms [the people of Puntland] and their government”. The deputy national security advisor followed, a sign that opposition to the bill goes to the top of government.
The umbrella group representing opposition politicians, Somali Future Council, alleged that more than 50 lawmakers at the time had been prevented from participating in parliamentary deliberations. “Amending the Constitution through unilateral decisions, without consultation and proper legal process, undermines the rule of law and may create a constitutional crisis that could weaken state institutions,” it said.
Of 275 lower house members, 186 were present on the day of the vote, roughly 68 percent of the full chamber, according to figures available on state media.
The opposition’s core charge is not merely that the process was procedurally flawed. Rather, it is that an outgoing political class used its final weeks to reshape the institutional and constitutional terrain it was about to vacate. Hassan Sheikh Mohamud’s presidential term ends in May and the parliament’s mandate expires in April and comes at the end of his term.
Sareedo Hassan Jeyte, a Puntland senator who was among those who boycotted the process and who had initially been working on the constitution, put the contradiction in stark personal terms when she spoke to Mada Masr. “The president promised us that the work that was being done on the constitution doesn’t apply to this term but will apply to the next,” she said. “I was among those who were initially working on it. Now we’re in a situation where our mandates are being extended and it will begin right now.”
Her objection was not, she insisted, primarily about the content of the amendments, but about the implications of making such a fundamental change so late in the mandate. “What is important for me is that the president doesn’t set a precedent of extending terms. They’ve all done that in the past. It isn’t just his own term he’s extended. It is also ours,” Hassan said. “We don’t want to remain in power illegitimately.”
Abdirahman Abdishakur, a veteran opposition MP, made the same point with a different edge. “Fundamentally, the president has around a month left,” he told Mada Masr. “How can he change a whole country’s constitution right at the end of his own mandate? He is wasting his political capital. He cannot even implement this. The federal states are too autonomous. He has de jure power, not de facto.”
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Not everyone in parliament sees it that way. Mohamed Ibrahim Moalimuu, a lower house MP who supported the amendments, offered Mada Masr a defense that was straightforward and, in its own terms, coherent.
The 2012 provisional constitution was always meant to be temporary. It was intended to be reviewed, completed and replaced. Yet successive governments failed to follow through, leaving nearly a decade and a half of Somalia’s state-building project in limbo. “It has been waiting for more than 12 years and can’t wait for 12 more,” Moalimuu said. “Parliament works by majorities and there is a majority now, and those who oppose this change can oppose it but they have to accept the new laws. This is a democracy.”
Completing Somalia’s provisional constitution was a central pledge in Hassan Sheikh Mohamud’s 2022 election manifesto. In a speech last week, he stressed the urgency, saying Somalia could not remain a “fragile state, and what is making us a fragile state is this draft constitution … Somalia isn’t the same Somalia today as it was back 12 years ago.” The old constitution was deliberately vague, leaving room for recurring disputes between the federal states and the central government, as well as between the prime minister and president’s offices.
The Somali president reached an agreement in 2025 with a breakaway faction of a former opposition alliance, watering down several key provisions of his originally proposed constitutional amendments. However, the changes failed to satisfy a larger and more influential group of politicians within the bloc, who later formed the Somali Future Council.
Several MPs and officials interviewed by Mada Masr expressed broad support for completing the document as an urgent priority, while opponents warned that moving forward without consensus would be even riskier.
Moalimuu said those treating the 2012 document as untouchable were mistaken, echoing the Somali president’s view that the door to further amendments wasn’t sealed. “It is a constitution, it is not the Quran,” he said. “If opposition figures aren’t happy, they can propose motions to make changes, to initiate a review process. But we urge those who boycotted to come back and forward a new motion.”
He also had a diagnosis for the intensity of the opposition’s reaction, one that, offered in the spirit of reassurance, inadvertently sharpened one of the opposition’s central arguments. “These issues in my view aren’t to do with the amendments,” he said, “but political issues between those competing for the presidency, and it is playing out in parliament.”
Abdinor Dahir, a Somali researcher and consultant, said the amendments themselves weren’t entirely controversial, noting that some “establish a clearer framework for federal-state relations regarding power and resource allocation.” But discussion over the substance of the amendments masks a deeper issue. He told Mada Masr that the dispute is largely a proxy battle over the presidential race.
“The opposition fears that by amending the constitution to mandate a system that cannot yet be delivered, the president is creating grounds to extend his mandate or control the electoral timeline to favor his re-election,” he said.
Afyare Elmi, a research professor at City University of Mogadishu was more direct. “The game behind the game,” he told Mada Masr, “is basically that the government wants to extend its term. That is the first agenda Hassan Sheikh Mohamud has. The second agenda is that he wants to tighten his grip on key institutions, including the presidency, electoral commission and so on.”
Elmi’s critique goes beyond motive to methodology. In a research report published last year by the Folke Bernadotte Academy, a Swedish government agency, he argued that Somalia’s original peace processes — the Arta conference in Djibouti in 2000 and the Mbagathi process in Kenya in 2004 — established constitution-making as a stage that should follow the consolidation of peace and reconciliation, not replace it.
The current government, he argued, has inverted that sequence entirely. “The government has basically totally replaced the peacemaking process with the constitution-making process,” he told Mada Masr, “and they’ve altered the fundamental political settlement without fully consolidating the peace which was meant to underpin the first one.”
He also raised a question that the government has not addressed: what happens when Somaliland eventually seeks reintegration, or if Al-Shabab, a jihadist organization in the south, reaches a political agreement and demands revisions? “The constitution cannot be finalised with major parts of the country outside,” he said. “Completing [it] at this stage makes other questions more complex. This could become a never-ending process.”
A senior Somali official, speaking to Mada Masr on condition of anonymity, said the government believes it can weather the opposition’s backlash and politically out-maneuver them, but added that their priorities are currently different. “The opposition only wants to talk about an election, the president about the constitution,” the official said. “They’re on a different page.”
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The constitutional dispute has not broken evenly across Somalia’s federal map. Three federal states — North East, Hirshabelle and Banaadir — have welcomed the amended constitution. Galmudug has offered no public position.
The picture is not a simple story of Mogadishu against everyone else. A source from the newly established North East State told Mada Masr the amendments on power-sharing between the federal states and the capital are “long overdue,” but said Mogadishu must now deliver security and fiscal support if it wants buy-in to spread.
But the two states that have rejected it most forcefully are not peripheral actors. Puntland and Jubaland are, between them, among the most institutionally developed federal member states in the country. They control significant territory, functioning security forces and manage their own foreign affairs and revenues that provide a degree of self-sufficiency that makes the federal government’s authority over them more theoretical than practical. Somaliland, which regards itself as an independent state and has not been part of the federal project since 1991, stands entirely outside the framework.
Mohamud Dirir, Puntland’s information minister, told Mada Masr that his state only recognises the 2012 constitution, underlining the legal fracturing of the state. His objection, he was careful to add, was not only procedural. “We don’t just oppose the substance of the new constitution but also the method by which it was passed.”
Dirir warned that Puntland could hold “a parallel election for our MPs and senators to renew their mandates,” adding that, “if necessary, we go further and hold a parallel election for a new head of state.” Such a move would effectively split Somalia between rival governments, each claiming national authority.
Abdishakur, the opposition MP, said Somalia was hurtling toward a scenario in which it would be governed by two separate constitutions. “If two states reject to be part of this amendment, and key opposition figures are rejecting, and the public don’t feel involved, who is this constitution meant to bind together?” he said. “The main objective of a constitution is missing. This is one man’s constitution.”
Elmi, whose scholarly work on this question spans decades, made the same argument in structural terms. The 2012 political settlement rested on four pillars: regular elections, a federal structure, a parliamentary system and the 4.5 clan power-sharing arrangement that distributed seats across Somalia’s major clan groupings.
The new constitution, he argued, dismantles three of those four without the negotiated consent that underpinned them. “We haven’t seen this before,” he told Mada Masr. “Previously the country was agreed around the 2012 provisional constitution and a high bar was created for change.”
His verdict on what this moment represents for Somalia’s state-building project was unsparing. “The Third Republic is indeed dead, if it is not already dying,” he said, invoking the country’s past political cycles, when an earlier democratic state collapsed and gave way to military rule and then also collapsed in the early 1990s.
Former president Mohamed Abdullahi Farmaajo, a leading figure in the Somali Future Council’s opposition coalition, invoked a remark few Somali politicians would normally repeat, citing Donald Trump’s disparaging claim that Somalia lacks a functioning government as he urged Mohamud to change course.
“Don’t make Trump’s claim true,” Farmaajo said. “If you continue on this path, it will only vindicate the argument that Somalia has no government.”
Source: Mada Masr
