Somalia: Farmaajo Returns
TRANSCEND MEMBERS, 24 Nov 2025
Ann Garrison | Black Agenda Report – TRANSCEND Media Service
Mohammed Abdullahi Mohammed, aka Farmaajo, landed in Mogadishu on 13 Nov 2025 returning from three years in exile.
Black Agenda Report19 Nov 2025 – Farmaajo, a hugely popular Somali politician who has never been favored by the US, is widely expected to seek the presidency in Somalia’s 2026 election.
Mohammed Abdullahi Mohammed, aka Farmaajo, just returned to Somalia after three years in exile in Qatar. He served as Somalia’s president from 2017 to 2022, when he was undermined by the US. He is now expected to seek the office again in next year’s elections.
I spoke to Somali North American engineer, writer, and political analyst Jamal Abdulahi about what the consequences might be.
ANN GARRISON: Dr. M. Omar Hashi, writing in Borkena, describes Farmaajo as “the undisputed president-in-waiting for the upcoming 2026 presidential election.” Do you agree?
JAMAL ABDULAHI: No. That would be irrational exuberance.
AG: Why?
JA: Nothing is guaranteed in political campaigns, particularly one in Somalia.
Somalia uses an archaic method of selecting presidents where a combination of clan elders and regional political bosses select delegates, and the delegates then elect the president.
No one anticipated Farmaajo prevailing in 2017 and no one anticipated his defeat in 2022.
Hence, I think it’s foolish to declare a victor in a future contest.
AG: Somalis I know all seem to agree that he would have won in a landslide in 2022 if Somalia had managed to establish universal suffrage and hold a one-person-one-vote election. Why is it that Somalia always seems to be struggling to hold this kind of election?
In 2022, the election infrastructure wasn’t in place, and now, three or four years later, it still doesn’t seem to be.
JA: Somalia experienced one of the worst civil wars in Africa after state collapse in 1991. Many parts of the country are still active civil war zones while other parts experience periodic spikes in widespread violence.
Somalia’s civil war has been brutal. It’s difficult to know how many have been killed, but estimates are in the hundreds of thousands and millions have been displaced.
Enormous amounts of property were looted or destroyed. There are ongoing violent landgrabs and land disputes today as we speak.
There has not been genuine grassroots reconciliation. Peacebuilding and peacemaking have been largely overlooked. Clan separatism, toxic power sharing, and rampant political corruption have dominated the political culture.
Foreign interference by neighboring countries like Ethiopia and Kenya, as well as the wealthy Gulf states, also exacerbated Somalia’s civil war, leading to prolonged unrest and political instability.
These are some of the critical obstacles to legitimate universal suffrage. The foundational political culture just does not exist.
It has nothing to do with logistics or infrastructure to cast and count votes.
AG: You said that a combination of clan elders and regional political bosses select delegates, and the delegates then elect the president. Could you explain the 4.5 clan system?
JA: The 4.5 system gives delegates to four major clans of significant size and status. A consortium of minor clans get fewer delegates in a system that treats them as less worthy.
As I said, this system is very archaic and limited. It doesn’t have the depth or dynamism to resolve major political issues and reconstruct a fragmented, fractious nation.
AG: What is its origin?
JA: The clan-based political power system now practiced in Somalia was first imagined at a meeting of Somali warlords in Ethiopia in the early 1990s. It was then formally established at a conference of intellectuals, clan elders, and religious leaders in Arta, Djibouti, in 1999. It was meant to be a stopgap transitional system to end the war so that a foundation could be laid for electoral democracy.
The original meeting in Ethiopia was brokered by the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), which ruled Ethiopia from 1991 to 2018. The TPLF was a longtime client of the US, which used Ethiopia as an “anchor state” for controlling the whole Horn of Africa, so I think it’s fair to say that the US approved the clan system.
It has since been a divisive formula and a major obstacle to building a more rational, representative political system. It was meant to end a civil war but instead it further fueled it.
AG: Somalia faces a challenge similar to neighboring Ethiopia’s. It can’t seem to forge a national identity that supersedes clan identity, just as Ethiopia can’t seem to forge a national identity that supersedes ethnic identity. The challenge in Ethiopia is huge, given that there are more than 50 ethnicities and languages, with the three largest constantly competing for dominance, but Somalis share both language and culture. Why is this so difficult for them?
JA: I think the answer goes back again to Ethiopia. Yes, Ethiopia is different from Somalia given its many ethnic groups with different languages and cultures, but both are political unions that endlessly sub-divide.
The TPLF government that ruled Ethiopia from 1991-2018 had tremendous influence in shaping Somalia’s current political ecosystem. The Ethiopian constitution adopted in 1994 and ratified in 1995 established ethnic federalism, dividing the country into nine ethnolinguistic states, and three more have since been created.
This system was repackaged in Somalia as clan federalism. The 2012 Somali constitution laid out a process for establishing federal member states. Currently each of the so-called Federal Member States (FMS) is designed to be politically dominated by one clan or by a sub-clan, leading to never-ending political bifurcation, alliance, and re-alliance.
AG: In his previous time in office, between 2017 and 2022, Farmaajo was known for fighting corruption and not being corrupt himself. Isn’t this extraordinary in Africa where imperial powers have empowered one corrupt puppet after another?
JA: There is widespread agreement that Farmaajo did not abuse state power to enrich himself by buying properties and establishing businesses like the current president, Hassan Sheikh Mohamud (HSM), who preceded Farmaajo, from 2012 to 2017, then returned to power in 2022. HSM has been a complete disaster for Somalia.
AG: Farmaajo is also known for attempting to establish a functioning, technocratic state with stable institutions. Why is that such a challenge in Somalia?
JA: Farmaajo had the right governing philosophy for Somalia. His demeanor and conduct reflected the feelings of a majority of Somalis.
He was nevertheless very timid and less resolute in his decisionmaking. He often reversed himself in response to political pressure.
AG: Yes, that’s what I’ve heard, that he wasn’t able to stand fast behind his decisions.
JA: Still, however, the greatest obstacles to building national institutions are active civil war, fractious political culture, and widespread corruption.
AG: Farmaajo’s most important political project was probably establishing sovereign security forces capable of protecting Somalia’s borders and maintaining order. That’s the first thing that makes a state a state, and many people write Somalia off as a “failed state” because it lacks sovereign security forces. For decades a UN peacekeeping operation and a US drone bombing base have failed to defeat the Islamist terrorist group al-Shabaab, and they don’t even seem to have the motivation to do so.
Donors pay the African peacekeepers higher salaries than they’d make at home, so why would they want the conflict to end? The US drone bombing operation has been proven to be counterproductive because it hits civilians and their livestock and thereby helps al-Shabaab recruit. Still it continues with a bigger budget than the federal government.
In any case, Somalia needs its own sovereign security forces, and Farmaajo seemed to be making progress with the help of Eritrea, which was training Somali troops. I believe, however, that his progress was squandered by HSM.
JA: One of the things that Farmaajo focused on as Prime Minister and subsequently as President was ensuring that members of the security sector received their meager salaries regularly. He also pushed a bureaucratic approach, the type you would see at the state agency the New York State Department of Transportation, where he worked before returning to Somalia.
That effort boosted morale among members of the security sector and the Somali public in general.
Both Turkey and Eritrea tried to help Somalia get past the limitations that western powers put on its security sector by imposing UN and other multilateral forces. Turkey provided light armor equipment to Somalia despite a UN arms embargo, and Eritrea clandestinely started training over 5,000 Somalia special forces with some support from Qatar.
The advances made by both efforts were squandered by current President Hassan Sheikh Mohamed in a poorly managed and corruption-riddled effort to drive al-Shabaab out of central Somalia. The effort fizzled and many of the Somali troops trained in Eritrea were either killed, wounded, or captured, or they deserted, and Al Shabaab only grew in strength.
AG: What role does the genocide in Gaza play in Somali politics?
JA: Somalis strongly opposed Isreal’s genocide in Gaza. It is deeply embedded in the Somali culture and there are many songs, poems, and plays made about it.
AG: And what about the role of the United Arab Emirates?
JA: The United Arab Emirates’ (UAE) role in Somalia is very corrosive. The UAE’s objective in Somalia is centered around ports as strategic assets. It wants to control all the ports on Somalia’s long, highly geostrategic coast.
It has taken control of a number of Somalia’s key ports including Barbera, Bossaso, and Kismayo. In its pursuit of ports, it funded armed groups led by warlords in various parts of Somalia.
However, the UAE suffered a major setback in its main training center in Mogadishu when four of its officers, including Colonel Mohamed Al Mansouri, died in a gunfight. Al Mansouri was in charge of the UAE’s destabilization operations in Yemen, Sudan, Libya and Somalia.
AG: The US, particularly in the person of then Ambassador Elizabeth Shackelford, made it clear they didn’t want Farmaajo in power. She accused Farmaajo of being hugely corrupt even though he was most admired by Somalis because he was not. Do you know why?
JA: The piece that Elizabeth Shackelford wrote in January 2021 accused Farmaajo of not making the Federal Member States system work, but it’s an unworkable governing model.
The problem was not Farmaajo. The problem was a governing model expounded by secessionists, clan federalists, and merchants of chaos.
AG: So what do you imagine next year? Do you think Farmaajo has a chance of returning to power, and if so, what would you expect?
JA: I wouldn’t count out or discount anyone’s chance at this point. Farmaajo’s chance is as good as anybody’s.
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Ann Garrison is an independent journalist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. She attended Stanford University and is a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment. In 2014 she received the Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza Democracy and Peace Prize for her reporting on conflict in the African Great Lakes region. She can be reached at ann@anngarrison.com
Jamal Abdulahi is a Somali North American technology entrepreneur, writer and political analyst.
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Tags: Africa, Somalia
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