That logic does not hold across the amended constitution as a whole. Several provisions in Chapters 3, 4, and 5 assign authority to the FGS over matters that do not appear in the schedules, or that the original Provisional Constitution ("PC") deliberately left to the FMSs. These assignments do not go through the schedule framework, do not invoke Article 71's negotiation requirement, and in at least one case produce an internal contradiction between what a substantive article says and what Schedule 2(A) provides. The effect in each instance is the same: the FGS acquires authority through provisions buried in other chapters, using a route that bypasses the power allocation framework the constitution built precisely to make such acquisitions transparent and subject to inter-governmental agreement.

The clearest example is electoral law. Electoral law does not appear in any of the four schedules. Under the amended constitution's own internal logic, it is therefore a residual power under Article 71, requiring negotiated agreement between the FGS and the FMSs before either level can act. The PC's treatment of the subject was consistent with that logic and made the exclusion deliberate. Article 47 of the PC confined the FGS's electoral mandate to elections at the federal level, leaving the question of state elections outside the scope of that provision. Article 120 of the PC assigned the establishment of the legislative and executive bodies of the FMSs to their own constitutions, which meant each state governed its own democratic processes through its own constitutional framework. Most significantly, Article 54 of the PC enumerated the matters within the FGS's exclusive competence: foreign affairs, national defense, citizenship and immigration, and monetary policy. Elections do not appear on that list. That omission was not a drafting error. The PC placed elections outside the FGS's exclusive domain through three mutually reinforcing provisions — Article 47's confinement of the federal electoral mandate to the federal level, Article 120's assignment of state democratic processes to state constitutions, and Article 54's exhaustive enumeration of federal exclusive powers that contains no mention of elections. The PC was not silent on state elections by accident. It was silent because state elections were a state matter.

The amended Article 54 removes that silence and replaces it with a federal mandate. It provides that all elections for all constitutionally established institutions shall be contested by political parties officially registered with the National Independent Electoral Commission, and that the Federal Parliament shall enact the law governing registration and formation of political parties. A party qualifies as a national party by winning ten percent of the seats in both houses of the Federal Parliament — a threshold that structurally advantages parties with existing federal presence and excludes organizations whose genuine constituency is confined to a single member state.

That requirement is not a neutral technical condition. Eligibility to contest elections at any level — federal, state, or local — is determined by registration with a federal body operating under a framework defined by federal legislation. A political organization with a genuine constituency in a single member state but without national registration cannot contest elections for that state's legislative council or its local councils. The federal legislative process thus controls the terms on which political competition occurs across the entire federation, including at levels where the PC's explicit exclusion of elections from federal competence would otherwise leave the states free to organize their own political life.

The mechanism by which this centralization occurs is significant. The amended provisions do not place electoral law in Schedule 2(A) as an exclusive federal power. Had they done so, the matter would be visible within the power allocation framework, subject to the shared powers logic, and potentially open to challenge through the intergovernmental processes the constitution provides. Instead, amended Article 54 — operating under the heading of political party competition — imposes a direct electoral mandate without locating it within the schedule structure at all. The FMSs have no constitutional basis to object through that framework because the matter does not appear in the schedules. They cannot invoke Article 71 because amended Article 54 does not leave the question open for negotiation. And they cannot rely on the PC's original design as a defense, because amended Article 54 supersedes the deliberate three-provision exclusion of elections from federal competence without acknowledging that the exclusion existed. A power the PC assigned to the states, and that the amended constitution's own schedule structure would classify as residual, is federalized through a provision that the power allocation framework cannot reach.

Natural resources present a different but equally significant problem. The PC's Article 44 required that the allocation of natural resources be negotiated and agreed between the FGS and the FMSs. Article 54 of the PC reinforced this by making resource allocation, like power allocation generally, subject to intergovernmental negotiation rather than unilateral federal action. Neither requirement was ever satisfied. The absence of agreed natural resource revenue arrangements was a persistent source of federal-state conflict throughout the federal period. The amended Article 44 of Chapter 3 addresses the management side of the problem by declaring natural resources to be national property and establishing federal institutions to manage them: a Minerals Authority, a Water Authority, a Petroleum Authority, and a Wildlife and Forestry Authority. The negotiation requirements of the PC's Articles 44 and 54 are replaced by a framework of federal institutional management.

The revenue side of the natural resources question is handled separately, and the handling produces an internal contradiction within the amended constitution. Amended Article 44(3) says that the body responsible for coordinating and accelerating revenue collection shall ensure that revenue from natural resources is shared equitably among the FGS, the FMSs, and LGs. That is a commitment to distribution across all three tiers. Schedule 2(A) item 26, however, assigns the revenue from natural resources exclusively to the federal government. The same amended constitution, in different sections, says two incompatible things about who receives natural resource revenue. One provision distributes it across all three tiers. The other assigns it exclusively to the federal level. The schedule provision, as the more specific operative allocation, would likely prevail in any legal dispute, but the contradiction means that the FMSs have a textual basis for claiming a share that Schedule 2(A) denies them. Whatever the outcome of that dispute, the negotiation requirement that the PC imposed through two separate provisions — and that gave the FMSs a formal role in determining their share — is gone.

The most structurally consequential provision is Schedule 2(A) item 27, which lists among the exclusive financial powers of the federal government "other services specifically determined by a law enacted by the Federal Parliament." This is an open-ended self-expansion clause. It allows the Federal Parliament, through ordinary legislation and without constitutional amendment, to add matters to its own exclusive powers list. The schedule that is meant to be the closed and exhaustive statement of federal exclusive authority contains within it a mechanism for its own enlargement. Any service area the Federal Parliament designates by law becomes, by operation of item 27, an exclusive federal power. The member states have no formal role in that designation. Article 71's negotiation requirement does not apply because item 27 places the designated matter inside Schedule 2(A), removing it from the residual category. The power allocation framework, which the amended constitution presents as the guarantee of each tier's defined authority, is therefore not closed. It is open at one end, and the party holding the key to that end is the FGS acting through its own legislature.

Item 29 of Schedule 2(A) adds a further dimension to the fiscal centralization. It assigns to the FGS exclusively the power to determine revenue sources, to create taxes specific to the FMSs, and to prepare, approve, and manage the federal budget. The power to create taxes specific to the FMSs is a direct federal authority over state fiscal arrangements. The PC's Article 54 left the allocation of resources, like the allocation of powers, to negotiation and agreement. The amended constitution replaces that negotiation with a unilateral federal power to determine what revenue sources the FMSs may use. The states retain the revenue types listed in Schedule 2(C), but the federal government holds the authority to define what those types include and to create new tax instruments applicable to the states without their agreement.

Items 27 and 29 of Schedule 2(A) share a common structure with amended Article 54. Each assigns to the federal government authority over a matter that the PC either left to the FMSs or required to be resolved through negotiated agreement. None of them engages with the power allocation architecture through which such assignments are supposed to occur. And each forecloses the intergovernmental process that the constitution nominally preserves through Article 71 — the elections provision by imposing a direct federal legislative mandate that Article 71 cannot override, and the natural resources and fiscal provisions by placing the relevant matters inside Schedule 2(A) as exclusive federal powers before Article 71 can be invoked.

The relationship between these provisions and Article 71 is the key to understanding their combined significance. Article 71 is the residual powers safeguard: it ensures that unallocated matters require intergovernmental agreement rather than unilateral federal action. Its value depends on two conditions: first, that the schedules are a complete and honest account of what has been allocated; and second, that the rest of the constitutional text does not distribute authority through channels that bypass the schedule structure altogether. Both conditions are violated here. Natural resource revenue reaches Schedule 2(A) without a transparent record of the negotiated agreement the PC required through two separate provisions. Electoral authority is federalized through amended Article 54 without appearing in the schedules at all. In each case the FMSs are left with a negotiation right over a residual category that has already been reduced by provisions they had no formal role in shaping.

Article 71 itself compounds the problem. It is a one-sentence provision with no procedural content — no forum, no timeline, no trigger mechanism, and no consequence for federal unilateral action in the absence of agreement. The PC's Article 54 had the same structural weakness and produced fourteen years of unresolved conflict. Amended Article 71 repeats that failure in shorter form. The FMSs hold a nominal right of negotiation over residual matters, but that right operates against a background in which the schedules have already been populated, and supplemented, through channels that bypassed intergovernmental agreement. What remains to negotiate is whatever the FGS did not already take.

A federal framework's integrity depends on the power allocation rules applying consistently across the entire constitutional text. When the framework provides for schedules, residual powers negotiation, and intergovernmental agreement, those mechanisms must be the exclusive route by which authority is distributed. Provisions that assign federal authority outside those mechanisms do not merely add to the federal government's powers — they undermine the principle that each tier's authority is defined, bounded, and protected by the same constitutional rules. Somalia's amended constitution contains a power allocation framework whose internal coherence is compromised in execution. The FMSs enter the new constitutional order with formal protections whose reach is narrower than the schedule chapters suggest, and with a federal government whose effective authority is broader than Schedule 2(A) alone reveals. The centralization is real. It is also quiet — distributed across provisions that individually appear to address other subjects, and collectively visible only when the amended constitution is read as a whole against the PC it replaces.

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Notes and References:

[1] This essay is a companion to "From Two Tiers to Three: How Somalia’s New Constitutional Provisions Complicate an Already Difficult Federal Bargain,” which examines the structural complexity of the amended Chapter 5.

[2] Bashir M. Sheikh Ali, J.D., Ph.D., is a Somali American lawyer based in Nairobi. 

The views expressed in this analysis are his own and do not reflect those of any organization with which he may be affiliated. He can be reached at [email protected].