LAS ANOD, SOMALIA – Five lawmakers quit the North East State parliament on Sunday, and their joint statement was notable less for what it alleged than for what it did not. Makhtal Said Mohomoud, Ahmed Caabi Hassan, Abdulsalam Abdullahi Mohamed, Sadiq Jama Muse and Ahmed Ali Mohamed said they had formally relinquished their seats after months of internal talks failed to settle their concerns about how the administration is run. They promised fuller reasons later. None of them announced a defection, and that is why the walkout stings.
A member who leaves for Hargeisa or Garowe can be written off as bought. A member who leaves for nowhere at all is passing judgment on the institution rather than on himself. In a chamber of 83 seats filled barely a year ago through a clan power-sharing formula, five departures on the same morning read as a verdict on the North East State project itself.
A Legislature Shedding Members Before Its First Birthday
The chamber the five men left was unveiled with real fanfare in Las Anod, its 83 seats shared out among the clans that make up the new administration. It then handed Abdikadir Ahmed Aw-Ali, known to everyone as Firdhiye, the presidency on 62 votes against 18 for Abdirisaq Khalif Ahmed. That margin was the point. It signalled that the constituencies which fought Somaliland for Sool and parts of Togdheer in 2023 had turned a military outcome into a settled political order. It also gave Mogadishu a governing partner in territory it had never administered.
A year on, the same arithmetic runs in reverse. Sunday’s resignations came eight days after Fahima Qooje, one of the best-known civilian faces of the Dhulbahante uprising, gave up her seat and rejoined Somaliland. She said she had abandoned the Greater Somalia idea altogether, and offered no account of what changed her mind. Qooje had appeared in frontline videos firing an AK-47 at the forces she has now rejoined, and the parliament moved formally against her membership after she spoke.
Two exits of that kind inside a fortnight would strain any young legislature. What makes this sequence worse for the North East State is that the five who left on Sunday pointedly did not follow her. That denies the administration the easy line that Hargeisa is simply buying members.
The remaining lawmakers now have a working precedent for exit, and a formula that hands out seats by clan also hands out the political cost of losing them. The administration’s spokesman has not commented publicly.
Resignation is also cheaper here than in an established parliament. Members were appointed through clan negotiation rather than elected, they draw allowances that arrive irregularly, and the chamber has passed little that would give a departing member something to defend. Walking out costs a seat that was never especially valuable, which is precisely why the North East State should worry about how easily five men decided it was worth surrendering.
What the North East State Was Built to Solve
The fracture matters more once you are clear about the problem this state was created to solve, because governance was not really it. The entity was reconstituted from SSC-Khatumo at a conference in Las Anod on July 30 last year, folding Sool, Sanaag and Cayn into the federal structure. Hassan Sheikh Mohamud’s government moved fast to bless it. That timing sat inside a wider pattern of state-building by decree. The pattern runs from the constitutional amendments that led Puntland to withdraw recognition of the federal government to the federal push into Jubaland’s elections.
A new member state in the north gave Villa Somalia three things it wanted. It gained a friendly vote in any future council of member states. It gained a lever against Somaliland at a moment when Hargeisa’s outside partnerships were multiplying. Above all it gained a rival claimant to land Puntland treats as its own. Garowe has separately accused the federal government of running a deliberate destabilisation campaign against it, a charge Mogadishu rejects.
The trouble with a state built for leverage is that leverage does not pay salaries. Analysts warned last year that the initiative risked destabilising the north rather than integrating it, and the past twelve months have tested which reading was closer to the mark.
An administration that exists partly to make a point in Mogadishu’s quarrels with Garowe and Hargeisa must still raise revenue, seat a cabinet, police a contested boundary and keep 83 legislators invested in a shared enterprise. Little in the federal record suggests Villa Somalia ever treated those unglamorous tasks as its own.
The comparison with Puntland is the one Garowe presses hardest. A federal member state that raises its own revenue at Bosaso port, pays its own forces and runs its own courts can absorb a political dispute without dissolving. An administration funded by promises cannot, and every month that the North East State spends without a functioning budget converts a governance problem into a legitimacy problem.
Promises From Villa Somalia and a Treasury That Cannot Keep Them
The financial record is the clearest evidence of that neglect. Mogadishu first promised to inject substantial support into the region. The North East State has instead been left to manage post-war reconstruction on very limited resources. Las Anod spent much of 2023 under artillery fire. Its new government inherited a displaced population, wrecked infrastructure and no real tax base, along with the expectation that federal recognition would arrive with federal money.
It did not, and the reason is no mystery. Mogadishu is not withholding money from the North East State out of calculation; it does not have the money. The federal treasury is visibly strained, and the foreign ministry in Mogadishu shut down this month after its power was cut over unpaid bills. That is a fair proxy for the state of the accounts. Meanwhile the security budget faces a cliff. Washington will not fund the United Nations Support Office in Somalia beyond December 31. African Union members are now openly debating a managed withdrawal, and the mission’s troop reimbursements already run roughly $70 million short for this financial year. The end
of UNSOS leaves the offensive dangerously exposed, and the same squeeze explains the quiet abandonment of the North East State.
Villa Somalia is fighting to keep foreign troops in the south, contesting command of Puntland’s forces in the north east, and bracing for an electoral confrontation it has not won, one in which Puntland and Jubaland have already refused Ankara’s mediation. It has nothing spare for a client state that yields neither revenue nor votes it can bank before 2027. Sunday’s five resignations are what that arithmetic looks like from inside the chamber.
Federal officials would answer that the money is genuinely not there, which is true and beside the point. Mogadishu chose to create an administration it could not fund, in territory two neighbours contest, at a moment when its own treasury was contracting. The decision was political and the consequences are administrative, and the people now paying for it are the residents of Las Anod who were promised reconstruction.
Garowe and Hargeisa Watch a Rival Weaken
Puntland and Somaliland refuse to recognise it, and Hargeisa’s defence minister said the two had agreed to coordinate efforts to stop the entity taking root. Neither capital would have contemplated that alignment over any other question. Puntland’s objection rests on its historical claim to Sool and Sanaag, and on clan ties to communities inside the disputed areas. Somaliland’s rests on the loss of territory it administered for nearly two decades.
Neither has needed to do much lately, because the North East State’s troubles are internal and self-reinforcing. Garowe in particular can afford to wait. Its own confrontation with Mogadishu has escalated into gunfire near Bosaso, and its Darawiish command has been reshuffled and reinforced in Mudug. Puntland also spent this month accusing the federal government of arming proxies on its soil. Mogadishu has not answered those claims.
Against that backdrop, a rival administration in Las Anod losing legislators with no outside inducement is the cheapest available win.
It also feeds the case Deni’s government has pressed on international partners since 2024, that Villa Somalia’s federalism produces paper states while Puntland produces working institutions.
Whether Sunday’s walkout proves an isolated dispute or the start of a wider unravelling depends on how Firdhiye responds, and on whether other members follow. The North East State can survive five resignations. What it cannot survive is the discovery, by the remaining 78, that leaving costs nothing, and Mogadishu no longer has the money to argue otherwise.
The wider lesson runs beyond Sool and Sanaag. Villa Somalia has spent four years building political facts on the ground, through constitutional amendment, through electoral intervention and through the recognition of new administrations, and each of those projects assumed that recognition alone would generate loyalty. The North East State is the clearest test of that assumption, and the answer arriving from Las Anod is not the one Mogadishu wanted.
