Beyond institutional fetishism: Somalia’s Crisis Is a Failure of Nation-Building

By Abdirahman A. Issa

I recently listened to a debate between Ahmed Issa Awad, a former foreign minister, and Mustafe Guufe, chairman of Puntland First, on the path forward for relations between Puntland and the Federal Government Somalia. The intergenerational exchange exposed the rupture that will shape the future of the Somali state.

Ahmed grew up in a functioning state and witnessed the reconciliation conference as both observer and participant. Mustafe came of age as the central state collapsed and subnational identity became the main source of belonging as decades of civil war and clan polarization have hollowed out any shared sense of national purpose.

For four hours, they argued over whether federal institutions, especially the troops, can operate in Puntland. Ahmed argued that Puntland’s forces should be integrated into the national army, with proper support, including salaries and training.

Mustafe countered that federal troops should not operate in Puntland at all, because doing so would undermine its autonomy. Beneath the technical details, the dispute was about who belongs to whom and who has the right to command whom, something no integration formula can settle.

Ahmed’s position rests on the assumption that Somalia is a single nation whose authority flows from the center, so that federal forces operating in Puntland are simply the ordinary exercise of national sovereignty. Yet Somalia has long been a striking anomaly: a recognized sovereign nation-state without an effective central government able to hold a monopoly on the legitimate use of force across its territory.

Mogadishu enjoys formal diplomatic recognition, but governance on the ground is marked by fragmentation, deep structural dysfunction and competing jurisdictions. The institutions are form with no function.

What is missing is the shared belief that gives them authority.

Throughout the debate, Awad fetishized inclusive institutions and attributed state failure mainly to their absence. In doing so, he reduced a political and social question to a technical, administrative one.

That reduction overlooks the deeper problem. The heart of the Somali crisis is a fractured national identity, a profound deficit of trust and the absence of a genuine social contract.

Externally driven state-building has long overemphasized formal administrative structures while ignoring these socio-political realities. Donors have invested in bureaucracy, courts, security forces, and public financial management, yet state failure persists, which is exactly what we should expect when the problem is more than institutional.

The result is a dysfunctional center that treats sovereignty as a legal fiction to be leveraged for international aid, while Puntland sees that center as an existential threat to its autonomy.

The FGS derives much of its legitimacy from the international community and depends on it for financial support, so external recognition has become a convenient substitute for domestic consent. But foreign-driven administrative reform cannot import stability, nor can centralized decree impose it. It requires a negotiated social contract, born of genuine dialogue between the center and the states.

Puntland and the federal government have been at loggerheads for years. Their core disagreement is not about institutional design or policy detail; it is about the rules of the game, and about whether those rules have the consent of those who must live under them.

Puntland severed ties with the center, accusing it of unilaterally amending the provisional federal constitution without broad-based consensus. More recently, the FGS tried to recruit and deploy military units inside Puntland on its own, and Puntland’s authorities, seeing unauthorized federal troops as an encroachment, asserted their autonomy by neutralizing them.

A constitution amended without consent and an army deployed without agreement are institutions without a social contract behind them, and Puntland asserted it rejected them for that reason.

Similar dynamics played out in Jubaland, where Ahmed Madobe and the FGS clashed over the management of regional elections, culminating in the defeat of federal troops, who were pushed across the Kenyan border. The revised constitutional framework seeks to impose a centralized electoral model that recognizes a single federal body to run both national and regional elections. Madobe rejected it, held his own election, and forced the federal government to recognize the result. Again, the dispute was not over electoral procedure but who holds the legitimate authority to hold elections.

In the Southwest, the outcome was the opposite. Hassan Sheikh succeeded in removing Laftagareen and installing Aden Madobe, a former Speaker of Parliament, and the removal was followed by the appointment of a district commissioner and an interim president. This shows that federalism has failed to take hold in some FMS, as they have become extensions of Mogadishu.

Somali state-building has steadily drifted from bargaining and consensus toward flexing muscle under successive administrations, most notably under Farmajo and Hassan Sheikh’s second term. This has turned federalism from a cooperative mechanism meant to unite a fractured nation into an arena of perpetual turf wars.

In the early days, building the state required extensive negotiation and consensus among stakeholders. But as international resources and recognition concentrated around the central government in Mogadishu, successive leaders centralized power through coercion and co-optation.

It now seems that Somalia’s future will be settled by force rather than negotiation, and force cannot produce the consent that institutions need.

Inclusive institutions are necessary, but they are not the foundation. The foundation is a social contract built on consent, a shared identity people recognize as their own, and trust earned through honored agreements. These cannot be imported or imposed. They can only be built, together, by Somalis. Without them, institutions are nothing but empty shells.

Abdirahman A. Issa

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