Golaha Mustaqbalka Soomaaliya was announced with trumpet blasts and heroic adjectives. An alternative leadership, we were told. A corrective lens for a broken state. A platform bold enough to say what Villa Somalia refuses to hear. In short, the Future finally arrived—only to ask politely for permission to sit next to the Past.
Now comes the punchline.
Some members of this much-advertised “Future Council” are reportedly pushing for reform and negotiation with the same regime that has engineered Somalia’s deepest constitutional crisis and political paralysis in recent years—namely, the administration of Hassan Sheikh Mohamud. One must admire the creativity. When history fails repeatedly, Somalia’s elites simply rebrand failure as dialogue.
This is not statesmanship. This is political recycling.
The Regime of Paralysis: A Record of Failure
To understand the folly of unconditional negotiation, one must first look at the record of the entity the Council seeks to engage. The Mohamud administration’s second term has been marked by a series of profound failures that have brought the state to the brink:
· A Constitutional Coup: In March 2024, the federal parliament, pushed by the executive, approved sweeping amendments. These changes included expanding presidential powers and unilaterally shifting to a universal suffrage model without consensus. This move was widely seen as a power grab that shattered the fragile federal pact, leading Puntland to withdraw recognition of the Federal Government altogether.
· Catastrophic Military Miscalculation: The regime launched an ill-planned and disastrous offensive against Al-Shabaab in central Somalia, which resulted in the decimation of elite Somali National Army units and empowered the insurgency. It then turned its weakened military inward, attacking Jubaland’s forces in December 2024, only to suffer a humiliating defeat that saw federal troops flee into Kenya.
· Governance as Corruption: Beyond the battlefield, the administration stands accused of unprecedented corruption, including the illegal sale of public land in Mogadishu—a scandal that displaced hundreds of thousands and eroded the last vestiges of public trust. Analysts note that international donor goodwill is evaporating, with Somalia perceived as a “black hole of accountability”.
This is the regime that the Future Council is being urged to “reform” through dialogue. This context is not incidental; it is the entire premise of the Council’s raison d’être.
The Council’s Composition and Crossroads
Formed in Nairobi in October 2025, the Council is a coalition of the National Salvation Forum and the Federal Member States of Puntland and Jubaland—the very states most defiant of Mogadishu’s overreach. Its founding figures include prominent opposition leaders like former Presidents Sharif Sheikh Ahmed, former Prime Ministers Hassan Ali Khaire and Mohamed Hussein Roble, and the elected presidents of Jubaland and Puntland, among others.
The Council’s declared aim is to safeguard Somalia’s democratic process and constitutional order against unilateral term extensions or power grabs. Its first major test and opportunity to define itself will be its inaugural general conference, slated for Kismayo, Jubaland, before the end of 2025.
This sets the stage for the critical dilemma: Will the Kismayo conference forge a firm, principled strategy backed by the collective leverage of its members? Or will it become another forum where the urgent call for change is diluted into closed-door “talks” with a regime that has mastered the art of absorbing and fragmenting its critics?
Negotiating with a Wall—and Calling It Wisdom
The Hassan Sheikh Mohamud regime has shown, consistently and unapologetically, that it does not negotiate in good faith; it weaponizes dialogue. It uses the spectacle of talks to divide opponents, tire out critics, and legitimize its own agenda. To approach such a system without hard red lines, a unified popular mandate, or a clear alternative institutional vision is not pragmatism—it is surrender dressed in the vocabulary of donor workshops.
The international community, wary of another collapse, has issued clear, if precarious, red lines: no unilateral term extension by the government, and no parallel political projects by the opposition. The Council’s strength lies in upholding the latter while vehemently holding the government to the former. Any negotiation that begins without these guarantees is not a step toward reform but a concession to illegitimacy.
A Future That Refuses to Break with Failure Is No Future at All
More than 70 percent of Somalia’s population is youth—young people with no memory of a functioning state and no patience for recycled elites holding recycled meetings. They were waiting for rupture, not reconciliation with decay.
Somalia does not suffer from a shortage of meetings. It suffers from a shortage of courage. The future generation does not need another council that mistakes access for influence and proximity for power. It needs leadership willing to confront illegitimacy, not normalize it.
Golaha Mustaqbalka Soomaaliya was supposed to be a scalpel. It must not become a sponge, absorbing the very failures it was created to excise. If it cannot distinguish between engagement and entanglement, between reform and the rehabilitation of failure, then Somalia has not lost an opportunity—it has simply revealed another illusion.
And Somalia is running out of illusions to afford.
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[This article was edited after posting].
Warsame Policy & Media Network (WAPMEN) 