Dhusamareb, SOMALIA – President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud told an audience during his Galmudug tour that Somalia had no regional states when he first took office, that they existed only as an outline in the constitution, and that he established them himself across the territory running from Galkayo to Kismayo, in remarks captured on video as Puntland kept its forces on alert over his itinerary. The boast is doing more work than the president intended. His map stops at the southern half of a divided city, the states he claims as personal creations are the ones his government now instructs, and the claim itself arrived three days after he called on Somalis to abandon personality-driven politics.
The Map Hassan Sheikh Mohamud Actually Drew
The sentence rewards a close reading. From Galkayo to Kismayo is a line through the territory once administered as south and central Somalia, and President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud offered it as the space in which he built statehood. Puntland, which has run its own administration since 1998 and helped write the federal charter the president calls an outline, sits outside it entirely. Somaliland, which walked away in 1991, goes unmentioned altogether. His founding narrative covers the portion of the federation that Mogadishu’s politics can actually reach, and the audience heard him say so.
The question the video has prompted is where Hassan Sheikh Mohamud considers Somalia’s borders to run. The fairer reading of his comments is that they describe the borders of his method. Within the Galkayo-to-Kismayo zone, Villa Somalia has spent two years replacing state leaderships through managed elections and military pressure, and the zone’s limit is precisely the point where that method stopped working. North of Galkayo the same government has spent the month watching its recruited units surrender their camps, one negotiated handover at a time, until the last of them changed sides this week.
The northern terminus is the detail that cuts deepest. Galkayo is the city Hassan Sheikh Mohamud reportedly intends to visit over Puntland’s objection, the city whose southern half marks the outer edge of the Somalia he says he built, and the city where his travel plans have put two administrations on alert. A president who defines his achievement as running from Galkayo southward has conceded, in his own founding story, where his writ ends, and the concession lands in the same week his government lost its last paid units north of that line. The map was offered as a boast about where his Somalia begins. Garowe will file it as an admission about where it stops.
What the States Remember Differently
The record complicates the authorship claim at every point on the line Hassan Sheikh Mohamud drew. Jubaland organised itself around Ahmed Madobe’s forces in 2013, and Hassan Sheikh Mohamud’s first government refused to recognise the outcome until Ethiopian mediation forced the Addis Ababa agreement on it. Southwest and Galmudug followed through conferences in 2014 and 2015, and Hirshabelle was assembled in 2016 from the two regions no other state would take, over the loud objection of communities in Hiiraan who have contested the arrangement ever since. The states emerged through bargains among clans, commanders and foreign mediators, with the presidency as one negotiator among several and often the most reluctant one. Kenya and Ethiopia midwifed Jubaland over Mogadishu’s protests, IGAD chaired the sessions that produced Galmudug’s charter, and the men who signed those documents remember who sat across the table.
Claiming sole authorship of that process erases the other signatories, and the erasure is the point. A federation built by agreement binds its centre; a federation granted by a president can be revoked by one. The constitutional outline the president dismisses as mere paper is the same document that makes the member states parties to the federal compact, and his revision of the history converts them from parties into products. Every dispute Villa Somalia now runs, from the constitutional amendments to the managed successions, follows from that conversion.
The states in the president’s zone have learned what being a product means. Southwest’s presidency changed hands under Turkish-backed force, Galmudug’s election returned a single viable candidate, and Hirshabelle’s next leader was settled with Hawadle elders in Mogadishu before the state’s own commission had printed a voter roll. Each intervention was justified in the language of national institutions, and each produced a leadership that owes its office to the president’s favour, which is what the founder’s privilege looks like when it is exercised a decade after the founding.
The Clan Language He Disclaims
The speech sits awkwardly beside the president’s own recent rhetoric. On Tuesday he called for an end to personality-driven politics and clan-based leadership, telling Somalis to wake up, become aware and build a system that outlasts the men who run it. On Thursday, at the start of the Galmudug tour, he insisted the federal government holds no enmity toward any Somali, wherever they stand, and that the country’s political disputes rest on no region, clan or person. Within the same week he described the federal map as his personal work, and the three statements cannot be reconciled with one another.
The contradiction runs deeper than a slip of rhetoric. A politics in which member states are one man’s accomplishment is personality politics in its purest form, and the geography of the accomplishment tracks the territory where Villa Somalia’s writ runs through familiar networks of kin, commerce and patronage. Hassan Sheikh Mohamud denounces clan-based leadership in the same season his government settles Hirshabelle’s presidency with a single clan’s elders and recruits, registers and pays units in Puntland along lines Garowe reads as deliberately communal. The disclaimer and the practice have stopped resembling each other, and the speech in Galmudug shows which one reflects the man.
Puntland’s response to the president has made the same point in its own register. The administration’s statements no longer call Hassan Sheikh Mohamud the sitting president, its forces treat his movements as a security file, and its case to the neighbouring states is that a federation cannot be safe in the hands of a man who believes he made it. The speech from the Galmudug tour will be quoted in Garowe for years, because it says plainly and in the president’s own voice what Puntland has been arguing at length and at cost.
A Founding Story With a Shrinking Audience
Hassan Sheikh Mohamud is the only figure in Somali politics who could deliver this speech, because he is the only man to hold the presidency twice across the federation’s formative decade, and the claim is strongest where it stays closest to autobiography. His first term did preside over the conferences that produced Jubaland, Southwest, Galmudug and Hirshabelle, and no serious account of the period writes him out of it. What the second term has demonstrated is what he believes that history entitles him to, and the member states have drawn their conclusions from the demonstration. An achievement narrated as a gift creates a giver’s rights, and every state election his government has managed since amounts to the exercise of those rights over communities that were told they owned their institutions.
Meanwhile, the audience for the founding story keeps thinning at the edges. Puntland has withdrawn recognition, Jubaland fought his deployments to a standstill, and the states inside his zone comply on terms that require constant management and constant money. The international partners underwriting the state-building project have started asking publicly why the counter-insurgency is losing roads while the presidency wins elections, and their December funding deadline gives the question teeth. A founder whose creations require this much enforcement has built something other than what he describes.
The speech will outlive the tour because it compresses the presidency into a single sentence. The constitution as an outline, the states as personal work, the map as the reach of one man’s method, and the two administrations outside the map recast as sources of discord to be managed. Hassan Sheikh Mohamud has spent two years being accused of centralising the federation into an extension of his office. Speaking to his hosts in Galmudug, he agreed with the accusation in every particular, and called it an achievement.
