Garowe (PP Editorial) — The deliberate native authorities elections in Mogadishu are a testomony that the federal system is working, regardless of setbacks and a fractious political class. In Garowe yesterday, the Inside Minister of Puntland State of Somalia Abdi Farah Saeed (Juha) not directly contrasted the native elections held in Puntland in 2023 with the native elections resulting from happen in Mogadishu in June 2025, which he described as “imitations out of rivalry.” Politics is as a lot about rivalry as it’s about studying from each other.
His unguarded comment shouldn’t overshadow his political place on the federal system in Somalia. With out attribution, Juha quoted the late Mohamed Abshir Waldo, who in 2010 wrote that the federal system affords “a center resolution between an autocratic, centralized system of governance and outright secession” as a result of “decentralisation empowers district and regional communities and provided extra balanced and extra productive socio-economic improvement alternatives.”
Waldo didn’t have a romantic view of the federal system in Somalia, nor did he see it as a system to use folks’s base political instincts (i.e., clannism). “The folks of Puntland are nonetheless studying that it takes greater than wishful considering to mobilize the potential of the folks and absolutely exploit the sources of a rustic, and that it requires certified and competent management to realize these objectives,” Waldo argued in his commemorative essay on the twelfth anniversary of Puntland State of Somalia.
What Waldo was selling earlier than his passing in 2016 was the argument that Puntland has an obligation to set a very good instance of governance. Juha claimed that Puntland State has launched the federal system of Somalia. Whereas this can be a far-fetched declare, he unwittingly highlights failures in Puntland State governance. Puntland is essentially the most centralised federal member state, whose auditing requirements fall beneath these demanded by the Monetary Governance Committee. Receipts from fishing licences issued within the identify of the Puntland State to overseas fishing firms stay unaccounted for, because the Puntland State Parliament MPs disclosed in 2022.
In his speech yesterday, Juha deserted the confederal system he has tweeted about a number of instances this yr. Puntland will be unable to make significant contributions to state-building initiatives in Somalia if its actions contradict its pronouncements about good governance. Political leaders are judged extra by what they do than by what they are saying.
© Puntland Put up, 2025