“HSM: A President or Just the Hawiye Tribal Chairman?”
In Mogadishu’s marble palace, the man in the chair still believes the Somali state is his clan’s chessboard. Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, the self-proclaimed “national reconciler,” has spent two terms proving that he is nothing more than a tribal bookkeeper—counting how many Darood heads he can keep out of Villa Somalia’s banquet hall.
During his first season of Villa sitcom, he flopped spectacularly at stopping Jubaland, a Darood-dominated federal member state, from surfacing. Furious that the “wrong clan” had managed to organize itself, Mohamud scribbled together two artificial states—Hirshabelle (a half-baked wedding between Hiraan and Shabelle) and Galmudug (the constitutional miscarriage of central Somalia). These were intended to be anti-Darood sandbags, stacked hurriedly to block Jubaland’s rise.
When that circus failed to satisfy his clan arithmetic, Hassan Sheikh dusted off the script from Mohamed “the naïve” Farmaajo, his predecessor who mistook dismantling federalism for statesmanship. Mohamud, instead of correcting Farmaajo’s constitutional vandalism, doubled down on it with tribal relish. His campaign? Harass Puntland and Jubaland—because nothing screams “national unity” like targeting presumably Darood federal states for extinction.
And when even that effort stumbled on the rock-hard resilience of Garowe and Kismayo, Hassan Sheikh went for the nuclear option: invent another Galmudug clone for an unsuspecting Darood subclan constituency, the Dhulbahante clan to fight off Puntland state. Forget the Constitution, forget federalism, forget the state-building project—what matters is blocking Puntland at all costs, even if Somalia itself burns in the process.
In his twisted tribal doctrine, “nation-building” equals Darood dismantling, and constitutional law equals whatever satisfies Beesha Hawiye and his accomplice: His cousins-in-arms and family members. He waves the flag of Somalia, but the reality is uglier: Hassan Sheikh isn’t a president; he’s the chairman of a clan militia disguised as a government.
History will not remember him as a unifier, a peacemaker, or even a competent politician. It will remember him as the man who tried to shrink Somalia into a Mogadishu-sized clan fiefdom, and failed—again and again.
Warsame Policy & Media Network (WAPMEN) 