Somalia’s president Hassan Sheikh Mohamud is Somaliland’s biggest independence supporter, former U.S. ambassador Larry Andre says

MOGADISHU (Somaliguardian) – A former United States ambassador to Somalia has delivered a stinging indictment of President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, accusing him of systematically dismantling the country’s federal architecture and, in doing so, inadvertently advancing the cause of Somaliland’s long-sought independence.

The remarks by Larry Andre, a veteran American diplomat, cut to the heart of a festering political crisis in one of the world’s most fragile states – one that analysts warn could unravel years of painstaking international investment in Somali stability.

“Destroying Somalia Federalism”

“Somalia President HSM is effectively another major Somaliland independence supporter by his actions destroying Somalia federalism. Also, Somaliland’s record on civic freedoms (especially freedom of speech) and treatment of minority clans is problematic,” Andre said.

The blunt assessment, rare in its candor from someone who served in the diplomatic trenches of U.S.-Somalia relations, echoes a chorus of domestic critics who have long contended that Mohamud – whose presidential mandate expired two weeks ago, though he insists a further year remains on his constitutional clock – governs with an eye trained firmly on Mogadishu and its immediate environs, indifferent to the fate of the country beyond.

A Federal System Under Siege

The evidence marshaled by Mohamud’s detractors is considerable.

In the semi-autonomous region of Puntland, President Saeed Abdullahi Deni has repeatedly and publicly charged that Mohamud is engineering the country’s fragmentation. Deni and other regional leaders accuse the federal president of bypassing negotiated constitutional and electoral frameworks, pursuing instead unilateral amendments tailored to consolidate his political ambitions while marginalizing opponents.

The fallout has been dramatic. In Southwest State, federal authorities moved in March to unseat the sitting regional president, paving the way for an election that opposition figures condemned as fraudulent – a process critics say was engineered to deliver the presidency to Adan Madobe, the federal parliament speaker, whose own mandate had already lapsed when he entered the race.

That gambit has now produced consequences far beyond the ballot box. Former regional paramilitary forces, their loyalties severed by Mogadishu’s intervention, have coalesced into a new armed insurgency. This week, those fighters briefly seized Baidoa, Southwest State’s regional capital, in pitched gun battles with federal security forces – a jarring demonstration of how swiftly political miscalculation can metastasize into open conflict in Somalia’s volatile interior.

In Galmudug, Mohamud is pressing for a similar exercise in political engineering, seeking to dislodge the incumbent regional president. The gambit has triggered an extraordinary internal rupture: Mahad Salad, the director of the National Intelligence and Security Agency – a pillar of the federal security establishment – has broken openly with Mohamud over the issue, demanding either that the president back his own candidacy for the regional presidency, guarantee a genuinely competitive election, or abandon the push to remove the sitting leadership. All three conditions have been rebuffed.

The Somaliland Dimension

Andre’s remarks arrive at a geopolitically charged moment for Somaliland, the self-declared republic that has governed itself independently from Mogadishu since 1991 without achieving internationally recognized sovereignty.

In recent months, Israel became the latest and most conspicuous country to formally recognize Somaliland, with both sides moving swiftly to establish embassies. Somaliland has announced it will open its mission in Jerusalem – a decision that drew condemnation from Mogadishu and eighteen other Muslim-majority nations.

The Somali federal government has trained much of its diplomatic fire on the United Arab Emirates, which Mogadishu accuses of bankrolling international lobbying efforts on Somaliland’s behalf. Last week, Prime Minister Hamza Abdi Barre alleged that Abu Dhabi was spending millions of dollars to advance Somaliland’s recognition drive, a charge Emirati officials have not publicly addressed.

Yet for a significant segment of Somalia’s political class and analytical community, the more consequential actor in Somaliland’s advancing international standing is not Tel Aviv, nor Abu Dhabi, but Mohamud himself – a view now validated by the public intervention of a former senior American diplomat.

The Shadow at the Gates

The deeper anxiety coursing through Somalia’s political establishment, and through the corridors of allied capitals, concerns what happens next.

Al-Shabaab, the Al-Qaeda-affiliated militant group that has waged a multi-decade insurgency against the Somali state, has not retreated. It remains entrenched at the fringes of Mogadishu itself, patient and adaptive, watching as the African Union peacekeeping mission – the backbone of whatever military equilibrium exists – moves toward drawdown.

Analysts warn that the centrifugal forces Mohamud has set in motion – a fracturing federal compact, mutinous regional forces, an intelligence chief in open rebellion, and a new insurgency born in Somalia’s breadbasket – risk consuming the security architecture that billions of dollars in U.S. and European taxpayer funding have labored to construct over the better part of two decades.

Whether Washington’s currently serving diplomats share Andre’s unflinching diagnosis of the danger, or have the leverage to alter its trajectory, remains an open and urgent question.

Additional reporting by Somaliguardian staff. Editing by Somaliguardian Desk.