Garowe, Puntland, Somalia

By Ismail H. Warsame

Mohamed Affey has spent recent weeks recounting his years as a Kenyan diplomat and mediator of the Mbagathi Somali National Reconciliation Conference, 2002-2004, in a series of interviews with Juxa Video. The episodes cast Kenya as a steady, even-handed host guiding Somali actors to consensus. What Affey omits is how his own government’s conduct, and his own hand in it, nearly collapsed the conference before it produced anything at all.
This writer was present in Mbagathi during the period Affey now narrates from a distance. The record deserves correction.
The State House Maneuver
The signing ceremony Affey treats as a milestone did not take place in the Mbagathi conference hall, where negotiations had run for more than two years. It was moved to Kenya’s State House, and that relocation was not incidental.
There, Abdiqasim Salad Hassan and Mohamed Abdi Yusuf signed the Kenyan-drafted document in their official capacities as president and prime minister of the Transitional National Government. Abdullahi Yusuf was told to sign as an individual, not as president of Puntland State. It was a diplomatic maneuver engineered inside Kenya’s Foreign Ministry, designed to diminish Puntland’s standing at the moment Somalia’s transitional order was being finalized on paper.
This was not oversight. It bore the marks of then-Kenyan Foreign Minister Kalonzo Musyoka and Affey himself, the two officials most responsible for managing Kenya’s role as host. A mediator who omits the one episode that nearly ended the process he claims to have safeguarded is not offering an incomplete memory. He is offering a curated one.
The Walkout That Almost Was
Abdullahi Yusuf recognized the insult and moved to leave the conference outright, a step that would have removed Puntland’s leadership and thrown more than two years of negotiation into crisis.
Reversing that took considerable effort, much of it this writer’s own. Working through two trusted Kenyan contacts, Gen. Mohamud and Kenyan intelligence chief Shukri, this writer argued that Abdullahi Yusuf’s grievance was legitimate and that Kenya’s credibility as host was at stake. The two officers persuaded Abdullahi Yusuf to stay.
More significant than that immediate save was what followed. Mohamud and Shukri, once aware of Musyoka’s and Affey’s bias, committed to backing Abdullahi Yusuf for the remainder of the conference. Their influence reached Kenyan Presidents Daniel arap Moi and, later, Mwai Kibaki, and it became one factor in Musyoka’s eventual removal from Kenya’s Cabinet.
Why It Matters
Signing Abdullahi Yusuf in as a private citizen, stripped of his Puntland title, was an attempt to redraw the balance among Somalia’s transitional actors at the exact moment that balance was being formalized. Had it succeeded, and had Abdullahi Yusuf actually walked, the Mbagathi process and the Transitional Federal Government built on it might not have survived intact.
Affey’s version, delivered more than two decades on with no one present to contest it, recasts Kenya as an even-handed midwife to Somali unity. The fuller record shows a Foreign Ministry that tried, at a decisive moment, to diminish one of the conference’s principal actors, checked only by Kenyan officials who saw the maneuver and corrected course.
Silence on that episode, sustained across a multi-part interview series devoted to the conference, is not forgetfulness. It is a choice. This writer’s account is offered here as a firsthand participant’s record, with an invitation to other participants, Somali and Kenyan, to add what they witnessed.

Ismail H. Warsame is founder of Warsame Policy & Media Network (WAPMEN) and Warsame Digital Media (WDM). He served as founding chief of staff and director general at the Puntland State Presidency, 1998-2004, and was a participant in the Mbagathi Somali National Reconciliation Conference.

Somalia’s federal system is being tested on five fronts at once: the reach of federal authority, the legitimacy of constitutional amendments, security relations between Mogadishu and the states, fiscal federalism, and an increasingly disputed presidential mandate. None of these is a manufactured grievance. They are, as a matter of plain constitutional analysis, genuine problems of national statehood — and Puntland is now the state most directly forced to answer them.
Where Federal Authority Ends
The federal government in Mogadishu holds real constitutional powers, but those powers have limits. Foreign affairs cannot be used to bypass the Article 53 consultation requirement. National defense cannot become a blanket justification for military intervention in regional political disputes. Fiscal oversight cannot double as political punishment. Constitutional reform cannot let the center unilaterally redefine the powers of the Federal Member States. Universal suffrage cannot substitute for the federal agreement the system was built on. And parliamentary majorities cannot vote federalism itself out of existence. The task, in short, is separating federal capacity from federal domination.
Three Paths for Puntland
The study lays out three constitutional options open to Puntland:
Reconstructed federalism — the least disruptive path, requiring clear allocation of powers, rule-based fiscal federalism, constitutional protection of state autonomy, agreed security arrangements, limits on unilateral federal troop deployments, transparent resource-sharing, and an independent mechanism binding both Mogadishu and the states.
Confederation — if trust in conventional federalism has broken down beyond repair, common institutions could retain narrow functions (external defense, currency, citizenship, select foreign affairs, interstate commerce, international debt, maritime coordination) while most domestic authority shifts to the states.
Separation — the most consequential and least romantic option, raising hard questions on international recognition, citizenship, borders, public debt, currency, trade, security, airspace, maritime jurisdiction and the succession of federal assets and obligations. Its appeal, the study argues, will grow in direct proportion to how thoroughly the first two paths are foreclosed.
Seven Policy Recommendations
The study’s recommendations center on institution-building rather than confrontation: an independent federal dispute mechanism so neither Mogadishu nor Puntland is judge in its own cause; a negotiated federal security compact covering troop deployment, state consultation and command structures; formula-based, audited development financing insulated from political conflict; a higher amendment threshold for constitutional provisions touching state powers; a transparent legal accounting of the presidential mandate controversy, including the disputed applicability of the March 2026 amendments to the sitting president; a Puntland Constitutional Futures Commission to study the three options without predetermined conclusions; and continued strengthening of Puntland’s own rule of law and governance institutions, since its case for autonomy rests on demonstrating better governance, not merely more localized power.
The Eritrea Warning
The study draws a limited but pointed institutional parallel to the 1952–1962 Ethiopia–Eritrea federation, established under UN General Assembly Resolution 390(V) and dissolved by Ethiopia after a decade of eroded autonomy. The legal circumstances differ sharply from Puntland’s, and the lesson isn’t that Puntland is destined to repeat that history — it’s structural: when a political union depends on protected autonomy, dismantling that autonomy tends to radicalize rather than extinguish demands for self-government. The center centralizes to prevent fragmentation; the periphery reads centralization as proof autonomy can’t be trusted. Federalists become confederalists. Confederalists may become separatists.
The Bottom Line
Mogadishu holds legitimate national powers. Puntland holds legitimate constitutional autonomy. What Somalia lacks is a trusted institution to define the boundary between them. The study frames the stakes plainly: restore genuine federalism and Puntland has strong reasons to stay committed to Somali unity; let federalism become nominal and confederation becomes the rational response; foreclose both federalism and confederal accommodation, and separation becomes progressively more attractive. The greatest threat to Somali unity, the study concludes, may not come from those demanding autonomy — it may come from a center that, in the name of strengthening the state, dismantles the constitutional bargain that makes the state worth belonging to.