The NCC That Never Was: HSM Through the Looking Glass Today should have been the second day of Somalia's National Consultative Council (NCC) in Mogadishu-- now postponed until next week, with little hope of achieving either a quorum or meaningful results. In today's editorial, Sahan explores an alternate reality-- one in which a successful NCC meeting offers a way out of Somalia's worsening crisis. With Al-Shabaab edging closer to Mogadishu and the risk of Somalia emulating an Afghanistan-style jihadist takeover ever more plausible, Somali political leaders convened yesterday in Kampala for the first full-fledged National Consultative Council (NCC) meeting to take place in well over two years. At the invitation of Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni, the leaders of Somalia's federal institutions, Federal Member State (FMS) presidents, and an array of former heads of state and government set aside their differences in a last-ditch effort to salvage Somalia's creaking political settlement and forestall an Al-Shabaab triumph.
The NCC That Never Was: HSM Through the Looking Glass Today should have been the second day of Somalia's National Consultative Council (NCC) in Mogadishu-- now postponed until next week, with little hope of achieving either a quorum or meaningful results. In today's editorial, Sahan explores an alternate reality-- one in which a successful NCC meeting offers a way out of Somalia's worsening crisis. With Al-Shabaab edging closer to Mogadishu and the risk of Somalia emulating an Afghanistan-style jihadist takeover ever more plausible, Somali political leaders convened yesterday in Kampala for the first full-fledged National Consultative Council (NCC) meeting to take place in well over two years. At the invitation of Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni, the leaders of Somalia's federal institutions, Federal Member State (FMS) presidents, and an array of former heads of state and government set aside their differences in a last-ditch effort to salvage Somalia's creaking political settlement and forestall an Al-Shabaab triumph.
Kampala Redux as TCCs Assert Control Over the weekend, a video recorded in 2021 began circulating. In it, then-an opposition leader, Hassan Sheikh Mohamud (HSM), warns incumbent President Mohamed Abdullahi Farmaajo that if he failed to negotiate destabilising domestic tensions within the Afisioni Tent, he would end up in Kampala and with foreigners deciding Somalia's future. And that is precisely what happened- Farmaajo was diplomatically frog-marched to Kampala, forced to relinquish control over the political transition and appoint a new PM to oversee the process that returned HSM to Villa Somalia. Fast forward to today, and it is essentially Somalia redux. Having failed to heed his own advice from 2021, HSM travelled to Uganda last week, where African Union peacekeeping troop-contributing countries (TCCs) announced they would assume a leading role in Somalia's political and military affairs. Spearheaded by Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni, the TCC's proposed political mechanism is intended to oversee Somalia's national security portfolio and, between the lines, to advance the domestic reconciliation that Villa Somalia has shunned.