Kleptocracy and Nepotism: The Family Business of Somalia

By Mukhtar H. Qoransay

There is a country in the Horn of Africa where the president’s term expired in May , and the president responded the way a man responds to an expired gym membership: he kept using the equipment and dared anyone to say something.

Welcome to Somalia, 2026.

President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud’s mandate ran out on 15 May; parliament’s a month earlier. There has been no election. Instead there was a rewrite, and the timing is the whole story. On 4 March 2026, with weeks remaining before its own term expired, parliament approved a revised constitution stretching the mandates of federal institutions from four years to five. The president signed it on 8 March and discovered, to what I assume was his complete surprise, that he was now entitled to an extra year in office. Imagine writing yourself a permission slip a few weeks before the deadline, signing it, grading it, then framing it.