MOGADISHU, SOMALIA – Mohamed Abdirizak, foreign minister under former President Mohamed Abdullahi Farmaajo and head of Farmaajo’s Nabad iyo Nolol delegation in this year’s national dialogue, told President Said Abdullahi Deni in a piece published on September 25 that “Puntland is not Deni, and Deni is not Puntland.” It came a day after the federal Interior Minister, Ali Yusuf Hosh, called Deni’s September 13 letter to the United Nations Security Council a fabrication written by foreign hands. Both men answer the passage in which Deni says some Puntlanders want independence, and neither answers the letter’s requests to the Council. Deni sits on the Somali Future Council, the opposition bloc whose members Mohamed Abdirizak said in July had refused to admit Farmaajo, so the rebuke also comes from one opposition camp to the most senior figure in its rival.
Mohamed Abdirizak Asks Where Deni Found His Mandate
Mohamed Abdirizak opened on the line in Deni’s letter about pressure from people who want Puntland to break away from Somalia, and asked where the evidence was, whether a referendum had been held, whether any public consultation had taken place and whether anyone had gathered people’s views. He rested his answer on the Garowe constitutional conference of 1998, where Puntland’s founders chose to remain part of a federal Somalia in a decision he says no single leader can reverse. The letter as reported on September 24 speaks of pressure from “some of our people”; the version Mohamed Abdirizak quotes says “a very large number of people.”
Mohamed Abdirizak then turned to Deni’s motives, asking whether Deni had given up his ambition to become president or prime minister of Somalia, and read the letter as a conditional threat in which Puntland leaves if Deni does not get the political settlement he wants. The letter itself asks the Council to back an inclusive dialogue that would prepare elections for the federal government and the member states alike, and it closes by recommitting Puntland to “a stable, peaceful, democratic and federal Somalia.”
Mohamed Abdirizak also wrote that President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud has committed serious constitutional and political violations, that his term has expired, that his government turned the army on Jubaland and South West State, and that corruption and favouritism have reached their worst level. His complaint against Deni is tactical as much as constitutional: he asked why Deni would let the president appear to the world as more reasonable than his opponents on the question of Somali unity. He wrote that he cannot fight one man for abusing power while allowing another to claim a name and an authority for himself, and closed on the line that “Somalia belongs to all Somali people, and Puntland to its people.”
Where Mohamed Abdirizak Is Writing From
Mohamed Abdirizak was appointed foreign minister in November 2020 and removed in November 2021, amid reports that his closeness to Farmaajo had put him at odds with Prime Minister Mohamed Hussein Roble. In January 2022 he sought a House of the People seat allocated to Puntland and did not win it, and in May 2022 he announced a presidential bid and withdrew within weeks, saying his campaign lacked the potential to win under the indirect system. He had also run for president in 2017, the year Farmaajo won. The op-ed is written by a politician who has sought a Puntland seat and whose route back to national office runs through the same federal politics Deni’s letter threatens to leave.
In July, Mohamed Abdirizak led the Nabad iyo Nolol delegation into the talks between the federal government and the opposition, after Farmaajo’s supporters accused Future Council leaders, among them Abdirahman Abdishakur Warsame and former Prime Minister Hassan Ali Khaire, of trying to keep them out. On July 14 he said members of the Future Council had refused to let Farmaajo join. Deni’s membership of that council is the same membership Hosh singled out on September 24. Earlier in September Mohamed Abdirizak had asked whether the Doolow strike was meant to block the Democratic Transition Task Force agreement between the government and the opposition.
On September 24 Farmaajo urged President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud to open dialogue and cited the letter as having raised genuine concerns about politics, security, federalism and elections, a gentler reading than the one his delegation head published a day later. Mohamed Abdirizak attacked Deni on the ground of Somali unity, the ground on which Farmaajo built his own presidency, while keeping the opposition’s charge sheet against Hassan Sheikh intact. Farmaajo remains inside the dialogue with the government, and it is his delegation head who is contesting Deni’s standing as the opposition’s leading voice.
What Deni Asked and What His Critics Answered
Deni’s letter runs well beyond the passage on independence that Mohamed Abdirizak answered. Puntland asked the Council to review and tighten the arms restrictions lifted for the federal government in December 2023, to restore the mandate of the Panel of Experts, to extend the UN political mission beyond October 31 and to deal directly with the member states. It told the Council that Puntland has fought the Islamic State in the Cal Miskaad mountains for two years without federal support, counted 19 piracy incidents this year with five vessels held when it was written, and said Turkish strikes on the Nugaal coast on August 18 and 20 killed 14 Somalis.
On independence, the letter says that if the political situation continues, Puntland “may consider in the future” cutting its ties with Mogadishu permanently. Puntland withdrew its recognition of the federal institutions on March 31, 2024, and in June this year Deni said in Garowe that Puntland “has never abandoned the federal system of Somalia, but it insists on a consensus-based government.” Mohamed Abdirizak wrote that Puntland’s grievances are real and that his objection is to Deni claiming powers beyond his office.
Ali Yusuf Hosh, the federal Minister of Interior, Federal Affairs and Reconciliation and an MP for Nugaal in Puntland, said on September 24 that the letter does not represent the people or the intellectuals of Puntland, called it a fabrication handed to Deni by foreign hands, and described Deni as a politician who treats nationhood as everyday bargaining. On September 1, sixty members of the House of the People had filed a no-confidence motion against Hosh. His statement named no foreign government and offered no evidence that the letter was drafted abroad.
On September 25, the day Mohamed Abdirizak’s piece appeared, the federal aviation minister said ideas harmful to Somali unity are neither held nor accepted by the people of Puntland, and the cleric Sheikh Mahmud Haji Yusuf said Puntland was built on Somali unity. The political mission’s mandate expires on October 31, and the Council that received the letter will decide its future with Somalia’s own delegation among its members. None of the letter’s critics, Mohamed Abdirizak included, has said what should happen to the arms restrictions, the Panel of Experts or the strikes on the Nugaal coast.
