Mogadishu: Where the Jungle Has a Speaker and the Republic Has None

WAPMEN EDITORIAL
What on earth is happening to Somalia’s so-called Federal Parliament and Government these days?
The short answer: everything that should not happen in a state pretending to be civilized.
Welcome to Mohamud–Aden Madoobe Mogadishu, where governance is improvised, legality is optional, and institutions behave like temporary tents erected for a photo-op—only to collapse before the cameras are even turned off.
This is what happens when people who have never governed are suddenly entrusted with governing; when there is no institutional memory, no respect for rules, no tradition of restraint; when power is mistaken for ownership, and the state is confused with personal property. This is not federal governance—it is the rule of the jungle wearing a suit and tie.
At the center of this tragic farce sits Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, presiding over a system where mandates expire but power refuses to leave, where “reforms” are announced daily but never practiced, and where every crisis is met with a press release instead of accountability. Around him orbits a parliament that no longer legislates, no longer oversees, and no longer even pretends to represent the public.
And then there is Aden Madoobe, the Speaker who has perfected the art of turning the House of the People into a personal courtroom, a clan council, and a political weapon—all at once. Parliamentary procedure is bent, suspended, or reinvented depending on who needs to be silenced that day. The gavel no longer enforces order; it enforces loyalty.
This is not politics—it is institutional vandalism.
Members of Parliament are summoned, suspended, expelled, or rehabilitated not by law, but by mood. Sessions open without quorum, close without resolutions, and erupt without consequences. Constitutional clauses are treated like disposable tissues: useful once, then thrown away. The idea that Parliament should check the Executive has been replaced by a simpler doctrine: obey or disappear.
In civilized systems, the government exists to restrain power.
In Mogadishu today, power exists to restrain government.
Federalism—the very compromise that kept Somalia from collapsing back into a Mogadishu city-state—is being slowly strangled. Federal Member States are lectured, threatened, and humiliated, while the center behaves like a jealous landlord demanding rent from tenants who legally own their homes. When regional leaders require “permission” to enter the capital, the message is clear: this is no longer a federal republic; it is a gated compound.
And yet, we are told—daily—to applaud.
To clap for “progress.”
To celebrate “reforms.”
To believe that chaos is governance and coercion is leadership.
No. This is not how states are built.
This is how states are mocked into irrelevance.
Somalia’s tragedy today is not just insecurity or poverty—it is misrule elevated to doctrine. A political class that cannot distinguish between the jungle and civilization has chosen the jungle, then wonders why institutions keep devouring each other.
History will not be kind to this era. It will record it plainly:
When Somalia needed statesmen, it got stage managers. When it needed law, it got spectacle.
And the jungle, unlike the republic, always collects its dues.

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