GAROWE, SOMALIA – Yasin Taakilo, a member of Puntland’s House of Representatives, has asked President Said Abdullahi Deni to tell the people of Puntland plainly whether the state has been beaten at politics, and on Wednesday 11 November his appeal was set beside a warning from Abdirizak Abdullahi Xagaa, a former Puntland fisheries minister, that Banadir and the regions around Mogadishu will choose Somalia’s presidents for the next thirty years once the vote is opened to the public. Both men spoke in the weeks before the election talks President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud has called in Mogadishu for 14 to 18 November, which President Deni dismissed on 31 October as a waste of time, and while Mogadishu builds a payroll for federal soldiers inside Puntland that bypasses the state’s own institutions.
What Yasin Taakilo Asked of President Deni
“Ha naloo sheego haddii siyaasadda nalagaga adkaaday; siyaasadda waa lagu kala adkaan jiray,” Yasin Taakilo said, which reads in English as “let us be told if we have been beaten at politics; politics has always been a contest that somebody wins.” He addressed the appeal to President Said Abdullahi Deni by name, and the commentary that carried it records his view that Puntland’s leadership has turned the first regional administration in Somalia into one without political influence. Furthermore, he recalled that for sixty years the people of Puntland had brought Somalia a programme the rest of the country accepted, and the same commentary notes that twenty years ago Puntland sent 45 per cent of its revenue to the Transitional Federal Government.
Yasin Taakilo, whose full name is Yasin Jama Omar, sits in Puntland’s sixth parliament, the 66-member house seated in January 2024, as a member elected from Buurtinle in the Nugaal region. In June 2025 he said on video that Mahmoud Aidid Dirir, a Puntland minister who had insulted Prime Minister Hamza Abdi Barre, did not speak for the people of Puntland and held no mandate to attack the prime minister. Hamza Abdi Barre is still prime minister, and his remarks about Puntland in early October drew the vice president’s public answer that the state would not secede.
On 3 October 2026 the legislator went further, arguing in a recorded interview that “it was a mistake to let Somalia leave the transitional period on the understanding that the division of powers would be settled later,” and adding that “we must set conditions for any future Somali state-building arrangement.” Somalia left that transition in 2012 under a provisional constitution whose chapters on the division of powers between Mogadishu and the member states remain unsettled fourteen years later. Accordingly, the appeal published on 11 November comes from a legislator who argued in October that Puntland conceded too much too early, and who sits in the same parliament that re-elected President Deni in January 2024.
Abdirizak Xagaa Counts Where the Votes Sit
“The president of Somalia for the next thirty years will be decided by Banadir and the Shabelle regions, if the public is given the right to vote,” Abdirizak Xagaa said in a clip that circulated from 3 November, using the Somali verb jaangoyn, to set or settle. The version printed in Garowe on 11 November lists Lower Shabelle, Banadir, Middle Shabelle, Bay and Bakool, the densely settled belt around the capital and the agricultural south. Similarly, the commentary that paired him with Yasin Taakilo accepts his premise outright and adds that politics follows the opinion of the people who turn out to shape it.
Abdirizak Xagaa is an academic who spent twenty years with international organisations, UNICEF among them, before President Deni appointed him minister of fisheries and marine resources in March 2024. In the reshuffle of 31 March 2026 that portfolio passed to Mohamed Abdulkadir Donyale, so Xagaa now speaks from outside the cabinet, as a former minister of the administration whose strategy Yasin Taakilo has asked the president to explain. His condition, a public vote, is the model Villa Somalia has promised for 2027 and Puntland has refused to join.
Abdikarim Ahmed Hassan, chairman of the federal electoral commission, said on 17 October that the commission would run the 2027 vote as a single national constituency in which seats belonging to areas that stay out can be filled from ballots cast elsewhere, the practice that put Somaliland’s seats in Mogadishu in 2016 and again in 2021. His commission has registered voters in Las Anod, the capital of the North East State built on land Puntland claims. Consequently, under that plan, Puntland’s share of a national election would be decided by voters in the very regions Xagaa listed, whether or not Garowe takes part. Yasin Taakilo’s call for conditions on any new arrangement was made two weeks before the commission chairman set out that plan.
The Case Garowe Makes for Standing Apart
President Said Abdullahi Deni has set out Puntland’s position in his own words throughout the autumn. On 31 October he advised President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, “out of mercy for the people, the country and himself,” to resign and hand the country to a council that takes it to elections, and he dismissed the 14 to 18 November talks as a waste of time. Five days later the Supreme Court in Mogadishu ruled that President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud’s term had ended on 15 May, gave the parties thirty days to agree an electoral framework and ordered elections within ninety.
Garowe has also answered the charge that its distance from Mogadishu amounts to secession. Vice President Ilyas Osman Lugatoor, then acting president, said on 2 October that Puntland will not secede from Somalia, and accused the federal leadership of spreading the story to cover its own failures. Earlier, on Tuesday 8 September at Baargaal, President Deni had told the far eastern districts that every agreement with the federal government was annulled, and that Puntland would run its own constitution and its own statehood until Somalis agree on a political order to replace the one abandoned in Mogadishu. Yasin Taakilo’s interview of 3 October, recorded the day after Lugatoor spoke, asked for the same thing in the language of conditions.
In early November the federal government began issuing payment cards to federal soldiers stationed in Puntland, so that their salaries reach them directly, after Puntland refused in October to let those salaries pass through private banks in the state. Puntland has declared that it ended the presence of forces under federal command on its territory, and a payroll run from Mogadishu keeps soldiers inside Puntland answerable to Mogadishu. The 11 November commentary reads President Deni’s refusal of federal salaries for Puntland’s own forces as a cost to the state, while Puntland’s civil servants have reportedly gone without pay for a cumulative eight months this year.
What Yasin Taakilo and Xagaa Carry Into November
“Ha loo daayo shantiisa sano,” let him serve out his five years, is the principle the 11 November commentary says Puntland can no longer live by, and it reads the disappointment of Yasin Taakilo and Abdirizak Xagaa as a good start toward a Puntland that stops blaming the federal government for its own political losses. President Deni was re-elected by the Puntland parliament in January 2024, and his term runs to the start of 2029, two years beyond the federal elections the electoral commission has scheduled for 2027.
The commentary supports Abdirizak Xagaa with two precedents from Somali history. The Digil and Mirifle party, known as Hizbiya, lost its standing after it left the political field to the Somali Youth League, which campaigned for independence and union with the British-ruled north; and Somaliland, with support from politicians in Mogadishu, gained ground on Puntland inside the federal system. Yasin Taakilo’s appeal arrives as the Quartet of the United States, Britain, Turkiye and the European Union was reported on 10 November to have agreed to facilitate the Mogadishu talks.
Neither man proposes leaving Somalia or abandoning federalism. Yasin Taakilo asks for conditions on any future state-building arrangement and for an honest account from his own president, while Xagaa warns about the weight of a public vote Puntland has stayed out of. Both positions sit inside the federal framework that Puntland’s founders argued for in 1998, and the commentary dates the failures Yasin Taakilo described to 2023, the year President Deni suspended cooperation with the federal government.
Moreover, both remarks came from men who have held office under President Said Abdullahi Deni, one in his cabinet and one in the parliament that elected him, and both reached the public through video and print in the same fortnight that President Deni dismissed the Mogadishu talks. The thirty-day window the Supreme Court gave the parties closes in the first week of December, and the talks in Mogadishu fall inside it, with Yasin Taakilo’s question to his president, whether politics has beaten Puntland, already on the record.
