The cen­tral gov­ern­ment of So­ma­lia faces tough choices in deal­ing with re­gional states whereby some re­gional states’ lead­ers call the So­mali Pres­i­dent as their ‘coun­ter­part’.

The is­sue has also cre­ated a hot de­bate among So­ma­lis who took to the so­cial me­dia to match up to the So­mali lead­ers with top re­gional state of­fi­cials.

So­mali gov­ern­ment which main­tained tol­er­ance to­wards the stim­u­lat­ing sit­u­a­tion thus far seems to be los­ing for­bear­ance at last, with the par­lia­ment speaker Mo­hamed Os­man Jawari nixes call­ing them as re­gional states but rather a more be­lit­tled ti­tle: in­terim ad­min­is­tra­tions.

He stated that call­ing some ‘in­ter­im’ ad­min­is­tra­tions as re­gional states vi­o­lates the coun­try’s con­sti­tu­tion.

“They are not re­gional states, but rather in­terim ad­min­is­tra­tions – you can fit­tingly call a re­gional state as an ad­min­is­tra­tion which has at least two re­gions un­der its con­trol.” He said at a par­lia­ment
meet­ing on Thursday.

Mr. Jawari, Speaker of the So­mali par­lia­ment

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He did­n’t re­fer cer­tain ad­min­is­tra­tions; how­ever, his caveat in­di­cates the gov­ern­men­t’s in­tol­er­ance to­wards the num­ber of re­gional ad­min­is­tra­tions in So­ma­lia.

Mr. Jawari told the leg­is­la­tors that only states en­dorsed by the par­lia­ment can be re­ferred as ‘re­gional states’.

As So­ma­lia started adopt­ing fed­eral sys­tem across the coun­try, ri­val clans have formed their own ad­min­is­tra­tions, rais­ing con­cerns of fur­ther frag­men­ta­tion among the So­ma­lis who have been fight­ing each other in civil war since 1991.

So­ma­lia cur­rently has a cen­tral gov­ern­ment; and im­posed a rel­a­tive sta­bil­ity in large parts of the coun­try af­ter the ouster of mil­i­tants from the cap­i­tal and sur­round­ing re­gions.

Ac­cord­ing to a re­cent re­search pro­ject by the Her­itage In­sti­tute for Pol­icy stud­ies, a think tank based in Mo­gadishu, ma­jor­ity of So­ma­lis fa­vor a fed­eral sys­tem of gov­er­nance, de­spite se­ri­ous mis­giv­ings.

The sur­vey said that the ma­jor­ity of those sur­veyed con­sider fed­er­al­ism as the best way to achieve a power-shar­ing mech­a­nism among So­mali clans whereas a ver­ti­cal sys­tem of gov­er­nance with a highly
cen­tral­ized uni­tary state is seen as in­her­ently un­de­mo­c­ra­tic and op­pres­sive. Peo­ple de­mand hor­i­zon­tal power struc­tures where they can re­tain a fair de­gree of in­flu­ence at the lo­cal level.