By Dawan Africa - -
Two days of preparatory meetings aimed at finding a solution to the electoral dispute concluded today in Mogadishu. The talks, held on Tuesday and Wednesday, were led by a Turkish delegation, attended by a Federal Government delegation as observers, and conducted with three opposition factions. A broader meeting is scheduled for Thursday, bringing together all sides of the opposition, the Federal Government, Turkey, the United States, the United Kingdom, the European Union, and the United Nations. On paper, this sounds like progress. In practice, it exposes a question that Somali politics has never honestly answered: who, exactly, is the opposition, and by what criteria do we decide?
Three Platforms, One Label
Today, at least three distinct political platforms claim, or are assigned, the mantle of opposition.
The first is the Mustaqbal Council, an unusual coalition that brings together two sitting federal member state leaders, the presidents of Puntland and Jubaland, with the Somali Salvation Forum, which counts among its ranks former President Sharif Sheikh Ahmed; three former Prime Ministers, Hassan Ali Khaire, Mohamed Hussein Roble, and Abdi Farah Shirdon (Saacid); and former Minister Abdirahman Abdishakur Warsame. It is a coalition held together less by a shared program than by shared grievance, and it could split at any moment over the question of the electoral model, with the Somali Salvation Forum, often called the “Jazeera opposition” after the hotel that hosts its meetings, on one side, and Puntland and Jubaland on the other.
The second is former President Mohamed Abdullahi Farmaajo, who stands alone under the banner of his Nabad iyo Nolol party, a one-man platform carried by the weight of a former presidency.
The third is the National Union Forum, led by two-time Prime Minister Omar Abdirashid Ali Sharmarke, together with Sharif Hassan Sheikh Aden, the former South West State president and former Speaker of Parliament, and Dahir Mohamud Gelle, a former minister, ambassador, and presidential adviser.
Three platforms, overlapping memberships of former office-holders, sitting state presidents, and party structures, all under a single, undefined word: opposition. When the government and its international facilitators say they will negotiate with “the opposition” on Thursday, which chair are they pulling out, and for whom?
Five Possible Criteria, and Each One Fails the Test
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If we try to define opposition seriously, every available criterion collapses under scrutiny.
First: legal status. In a functioning democracy, the opposition is defined by law: registered political parties competing for power. But in Somalia today, there is no legal opposition, because all sides have refused to register their platforms as formal opposition parties. If legality is the standard, then the government is preparing to negotiate with entities that, strictly speaking, do not exist.
Second: territorial control. Puntland and Jubaland have cut their ties with the federal government. But these are not opposition movements; they are constituent governments of the federal system itself. Can a government body be the opposition to the government it belongs to? And if the true measure of opposition is controlling land, then we have quietly adopted the logic of insurgency: you matter only if you hold territory. That is a dangerous criterion for any state to legitimize at a negotiating table.
Third: former high office. Perhaps opposition status flows from having once held power. Somalia has two former presidents and four former prime ministers active in these platforms. But this raises its own hierarchy problem: is a prime minister, an appointed official chosen and dismissed at the discretion of a president, politically equivalent to a former president elected by parliament? And if former office is the ticket, where does the line stop? What of the outspoken former ministers who criticize the government daily? Do they get a seat, or only a smaller chair?
Fourth: recent confrontation. There are those who have clashed with the government, politically and even militarily, in recent memory. If they are the opposition, then we are saying, in plain terms, that clan loyalty and access to weapons are what make an opposition “strong” and worth negotiating with. That criterion does not build a state; it rewards those most capable of destabilizing one.
Fifth: volume. Finally, there are the loudest critics: those with the largest followings on X and Meta, the sharpest press conferences, and the most viral clips. Public opinion matters; in a country that has not held one-person, one-vote elections, it may be the only barometer we have. But influence is not the same as representation: followers are not a constituency, and a trending hashtag is not a political mandate. If social media metrics define opposition, we have replaced politics with performance.
The Real Danger of an Undefined Table
The problem is not that Somalia has too many opposition figures. The problem is that “opposition” has become a self-declared title rather than a defined political role. The government benefits from this ambiguity; it can choose its preferred interlocutors and call it dialogue. The platforms benefit too, since each can claim to speak for a national constituency no one has measured. And the international facilitators risk blessing a process whose most basic term is undefined.
A negotiation whose parties cannot be defined cannot produce an agreement that binds anyone. Whatever is signed on Thursday will be contested the next morning by whoever was left outside the room, and they will have a point, because no criteria excluded them in the first place.
What Should Happen Before Thursday
Before the broader meeting convenes, the government, the platforms, and the international community should answer the question this editorial poses, publicly and in writing: what qualifies a party to sit at this table? Ideally, the answer should push all sides toward the one criterion that actually builds a state: legal registration as political parties, with defined memberships and accountable leaderships. It is true that registration itself is contested; the platforms have avoided it partly because the legal framework around it is disputed. But that is an argument for negotiating the framework, not for negotiating without one.
Until then, Somalia is not negotiating with the opposition. It is negotiating with a word, and words without definitions produce agreements without owners.