Somalia’s Parliament Kills the Merit Hiring Plan: An Analytical Perspective

By Farah Mire

Somalia’s parliament has struck down one of the government’s key reforms. On Wednesday, 23 September, the House of the People voted to cancel Prime Minister Hamza Abdi Barre’s order requiring open competition for director posts across government. The vote wasn’t close. 136 MPs backed the annulment. Only two voted against it. Two more abstained.

Deputy Speaker Abdullahi Omar Abshir chaired the session and announced the result. About 30 lawmakers had pushed for the debate in the first place. Their motion made it onto the agenda after hours of argument over what changing the system might mean for Somalia’s civil service law.

The directive at the center of this fight was only six days old. Barre issued it on 17 September. It told the Civil Service Commission to start grading department directors on competence, knowledge, experience, leadership and performance — the first phase beginning 20 September. Barre grounded the order in Article 161(1) of the Constitution and Article 7 of the Civil Service Law. He called directors general the backbone of the state. Build a professional, permanent leadership layer, he said, and government policy actually gets implemented.

Two days after the PM’s order, the National Civil Service Commission followed up with its own directive — reference XGG/NCSC/1488/09/2026, sent to every ministry and agency, copied to the Prime Minister’s office. It laid out three rules.

Fill director general posts through internal merit-based competition first, giving current qualified staff priority. Fill future vacancies through open competition, open to any qualified Somali.

And the Commission itself would set the timetable and conditions. Ministries were told to freeze any appointments that might disrupt the process.

Pay had to keep flowing. And — a detail easy to miss — the directive specifically told agencies to prioritize and encourage qualified women to apply.

Then parliament stepped in. The House Committee on Social Services Development, led by MP Nadra Salah Abdi, had already challenged the directive before the vote. Some lawmakers argued it threatened people currently holding director jobs — that competence testing could simply push sitting officials out. After the vote, the Deputy Speaker sent the matter back to the federal government. The Civil Service Commission, for its part, came out publicly defending merit-based hiring anyway.

Step back, and this fight sits inside a much bigger story. In December 2023, Somalia hit the Completion Point under the IMF and World Bank’s HIPC debt relief programme. External debt fell from $5.3 billion — 64 percent of GDP — down to $0.6 billion, less than 6 percent of GDP. That wasn’t charity. It came with strings attached: An Extended Credit Facility arrangement running from December 2023 to December 2026, built on reforms to tax policy, debt management, PPP legislation, central bank operations, and — this is the part that matters here — payroll integration.

Most of those benchmarks are met or on track, according to a Central Bank of Somalia policy brief. But the brief also names eight fault lines still threatening the country’s fiscal footing: weak revenue collection, bloated recurrent spending, heavy aid dependence, thin debt-management capacity, and more.

The wage bill tells the story on its own. It climbed from 1.29 percent of GDP in 2013 to almost 6 percent by 2021, according to the World Bank. In that same year, wages alone ate up 53 percent of everything the Federal Government spent — a figure the Bank says puts Somalia in the same bracket as other fragile, conflict-affected states, where personnel costs routinely crowd out nearly everything else.

Temporary workers sit at the center of this problem, and here, at least, there’s a genuine success story. The Finance Ministry’s own review, published in March 2026, found that non-formal wages — money paid to staff outside the official payroll system — dropped from 36.3 percent of total compensation in 2021 to just 0.03 percent by the end of 2025. The original target was full payroll integration by the end of 2024. It arrived a year late, but it arrived. That’s real progress, and it’s worth saying so plainly.

Recruitment itself is the piece still stuck. A 2024 Heritage Institute report on the civil service didn’t mince words: hiring has run for years on nepotism, favouritism, clan affiliation and political patronage.

Its fix was straightforward — move qualified temporary staff into permanent roles based on merit, not connections. Separately, an audit of 6,448 positions found 1,626 of them belonged to “ghost employees” — people drawing salaries for jobs that, in practice, don’t exist.

Somalia’s Finance Minister puts the total civil service headcount somewhere between 10,000 and 11,000, and says the government is actively working to stop it from growing further.

So why did this particular reform collapse so fast? Look at how it was built. The procedure behind it — the Habraaca Hirgelinta Hannaanka Tartanka Furan — was never meant to go through parliament at all. Its Article 15 let it take effect by executive decree: Cabinet approval, the PM’s signature, publication in the gazette. Nothing more. That’s a deliberate design choice.

It’s also a fragile one. A rule that skips parliamentary approval can’t be repealed by parliament either — but parliament can still gut the decisions that come out of it, which is exactly what happened here. The exam requirement specifically, sitting in Article 4 and Article 10 of the procedure, is now dead in practice, even if the underlying document technically still exists.

What comes next isn’t clear yet. If parliament can strike down this decision, nothing obviously stops it from unwinding the rest of the framework too. And that raises the real question hanging over Somali governance: does hiring go back to competence, or back to clan and connections?

The IMF’s benchmarks stay on paper regardless. So does the World Bank’s praise for retention gains. But the actual distribution of power inside Somalia’s civil service — who gets which post, and why — is still being fought over, not settled. This week’s vote didn’t answer that question. It just made clear how far Somalia still is from answering it.