The Structural Crisis of Legitimacy: A Covenant of Law and Enforceable Accountability for Somalia.

Date: Oct 8, 2025

By: Mariam Mohamed

Somalia’s political crisis is no longer cyclical, it is structural. What began as a governance dispute over elections has evolved into a full-fledged legitimacy breakdown, where key federal institutions and regional states now operate as parallel systems of authority. The May 2021 political agreement, reached under Prime Minister Mohamed Hussein Roble with the mediation of opposition leaders, regional states, and international partners, temporarily resolved the last electoral impasse. It allowed the peaceful transition of power and restored a semblance of stability. Yet it failed to repair the deep trust deficit at the core of Somalia’s fragile federal experiment. Four years later, that deficit has widened into institutional collapse. The Federal Government’s unilateral amendments to the Provisional Constitution in March 2024, the withdrawal of Puntland from the federal framework in January 2023, and Jubaland’s rupture later in 2024 collectively mark the end of cooperative federalism. Dialogue has not merely stalled; it has ceased to exist.