By Mohamed Dhugad - policy analyst and humanitarian expert
“For once, the opposition may have to compete on ideas and programmes rather than waiting for government divisions.” Mohamed Dhugad
The first two parts of this series examined Somalia’s recurring cycle of conflict between Presidents and Prime Ministers and the different political philosophy that has emerged from the relationship between President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud and Prime Minister Hamze Abdi Barre.
Has the Hassan-Hamze relationship solved Somalia’s political instability? I do not think so, and that is not the argument I am making.
Somalia continues to face serious disputes over federalism, constitutional reform, elections and relations between Mogadishu and the Federal Member States. Those challenges remain.
What I found politically significant, however, is that despite these broader disputes, the relationship between the President and Prime Minister has not developed into the kind of open executive war we became accustomed to seeing under previous administrations.
In my view, that distinction matters.
Somalia can remain politically unstable while its executive remains comparatively cohesive. These are not contradictory realities. A government that is not constantly fighting itself has greater capacity to deal with the country’s actual problems.
I would also not attribute Somalia’s security progress to Hamze personally. Security is the product of the efforts of Somali security forces, communities, Federal Member States, international partners and the sacrifices of thousands of Somali soldiers and civilians. The government has experienced both gains and setbacks on the battlefield.
My argument is narrower: a more cohesive executive creates better conditions for pursuing national priorities without constantly losing momentum to internal political rivalry.
Recent Somali political history gives us plenty of evidence of what happens when that cohesion is absent. Prime Ministers were removed, governments lost momentum, Parliament became politicised and political camps hardened. National priorities were repeatedly pushed aside by struggles over who controlled the government.
I believe Hamze has broken much of that pattern by demonstrating a different political philosophy: cooperation over competition, coordination over confrontation, continuity over political disruption, and government over personal positioning.
And that has produced another consequence that I think deserves more attention.
Weakening the Opposition’s Playbook
For years, the opposition operated with a fairly familiar political assumption: the President and Prime Minister would eventually become rivals.
Once that happened, the opposition could play one against the other, position itself as the alternative to a divided executive, mobilise Parliament and wait for the government to weaken.
It was a strategy that worked repeatedly. But what happens when the executive refuses to divide itself?
This, in my view, is where the Hamze model has changed the political game.
By refusing to compete with the President, Hamze has quietly deprived the opposition of one of its most familiar political entry points.
The opposition can still oppose the government. It can criticise its policies, challenge its decisions and present an alternative. That is entirely legitimate.
But an opposition strategy built around executive division and privileged violence becomes much less effective when there is no executive division to exploit.
This creates a more difficult question for the opposition: if the government is functioning, what exactly is your alternative?
I think that is the uncomfortable question the opposition has increasingly had to confront.
A divided executive made the opposition look more powerful. A functioning executive requires it to demonstrate what it can actually offer.
The Loss of an Ally Inside the System
I see two developments that explain why the opposition ultimately accepted the extension of the government and Parliament.
The first was the loss of its traditional ally inside the system.
For years, one of the opposition’s most effective strategies was to find an ally within the executive, exploit tensions between the President and PM, and use that division to weaken the government. Once the government became paralysed, the opposition would position itself as the kingmaker.
This time was different. The opposition could not find the same opening because Hamze refused to become a rival political centre. He maintained his relationship with the President and kept the executive unified.
When the opposition approached Hamze from the familiar hotel podium, as it had approached previous Prime Ministers, it found no interest in competing with the President.
When it tried to drive a wedge between the two leaders, it found no gap to exploit.
The political irony is rather simple: they were looking for the usual crack, but the crack was not there.
I also believe this discipline extended into the cabinet. Ministers understood that the Prime Minister was not waging a separate political war against the President. Loyalty to government therefore meant loyalty to the executive as a whole, rather than to one faction within it.
That made it even harder for the opposition to find allies inside government. The traditional entry point had effectively disappeared.
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Then the Public Stopped Playing Along
The second development was the public. For years, opposition leaders could rely on another familiar formula: call people into the streets, present the political struggle as a national struggle, and mobilise public anger against the government. That formula worked when the government looked weak and divided.
But something changed after 2025. Repeated calls for street protests did not produce the level of public participation that opposition leaders had previously relied upon.
When the opposition called people to the streets again in mid-May this year, the public largely stayed home. More tellingly, the calls for protest soon became a subject of ridicule, with young Somalis turning them into jokes and TikTok content.
I do not interpret that simply as public support for the government. But people may have been politically tired. Public trust may have changed. Security conditions may have influenced their calculations. Or perhaps citizens have simply become better at distinguishing between genuine national interest and the political ambitions of a few self-branded politicians.
Whatever the explanation, the political effect was the same: public mobilisation could no longer be treated as an automatic source of opposition leverage.
Somalis have watched political elites use national suffering as a bargaining chip while the country lost years to internal conflict and the real enemies, al-Shabaab, poverty and drought, continued to thrive.
At some point, the public appears to have had enough. The government is not perfect. It has not delivered everything. But it has delivered enough to make the old opposition narrative harder to sustain.
There has been visible progress on security. Somalia took its seat on the UN Security Council. The government continued functioning despite political disagreements. The opposition complained. It issued statements. It expressed displeasure. But it could not stop the process.
The Political Equation Has Changed
This is why I do not see the opposition’s weakening as the result of one political defeat.
Rather, two of the conditions that historically gave it leverage have diminished: internal executive division and effective public mobilisation.
The Hamze model did not eliminate political opposition. In my view, it did something more consequential: it changed the environment in which opposition has to operate.
For years, opposition politics could depend heavily on the government eventually fighting itself.
That strategy is much harder when the President and Prime Minister remain politically aligned, the cabinet remains comparatively disciplined and the public is less willing to mobilise simply because political leaders call them to the streets.
The opposition therefore faces a different political task. It must organise. It must present programmes. It must persuade citizens.And ultimately, it must answer a question that Somali politics has too often avoided:
If you want to replace the government, what exactly will you do differently?
That, in my view, is a healthier basis for political competition.
The real significance of the Hamze model is not that it has made Somalia politically stable or that it has defeated the opposition.
It has changed the game.
The opposition can no longer rely as comfortably on the government’s internal divisions to create its political leverage.
For once, it may have to compete on ideas, programmes and public confidence rather than waiting for the government to defeat itself.
And that may be the most important political transform of all.
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Mohamed Dhugad is a policy analyst and humanitarian expert focused on governance and civic issues in Somalia. He can be reached at: mdhugad@gmail.com
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The opinions expressed in this article are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect the views of Dawan Africa.