Both Farmaajo and the Union were looking for facesaving:
a) Farmaajo is suffering from legitimacy problem and had committed constitutional and civil rights violations. He was desperate for a temporary way out of the political pressure. He got more than he expected as the Union inadvertently recognized his legitimacy to continue to occupy Villa Somalia.
b) The Union has been made incompetent and paralyzed to mount effective opposition in Mogadishu to Farmaajo. They had realized that the Union presidential candidates were more unpopular than Farmaajo. They couldn’t marshal enough popular resistance to the political and security manipulations of Farmaajo. They desperately needed to avoid exposing their weaknesses in Mogadishu in confronting Farmaajo and Fahad Yassin’s security apparatus. In their desperate need for facesaving, the Union candidates had to sacrifice their Puntland and Jubaland allies and threw them under the bus, perhaps, even without realizing it.
Despite the temporary relief of political tension in Mogadishu for now, the political challenges for both fronts aren’t over before the run-up to the election. It is now Puntland and Jubaland administrations, who have to face Farmaajo’s reckless ambitions to remain in Villa Somalia, regardless of his constitutional mandate expiring in February 8, 2021 – an unprecedented legal situation that would have have deep implications on future Somalia’s governance.
The IC and Somalia’s International Partners get relief or facesaving too in whenever cosmetic agreements and deals in Somalia is released to media for international consumption, thus alleviating their donor communities’worries. Pretending to respecting Somali sovereignty, they now opt to be extremely diplomatic and go soft on Farmaajo, thus ignoring his problems of constitutional legitimacy and abuses of power on the part of Villa Somalia.
Warsame Policy & Media Network (WAPMEN) 