Turjumaad ayaa la diyaarinayaa

By Isha Qarsoon

Hassan Sheikh Mohamud’s (HSM) four-year term expired on May 15, 2026. He is not leaving office.On March 4, 2026, Somalia’s parliament pushed through amendments to Chapters 5 through 15 of the Provisional Constitution, excluding MPs who came to vote against them. The government’s position is that Hassan Sheikh’s term now runs to May 2027, pointing to the five-year term extension embedded in the Chapter 4 amendments passed in March 2024, which the March 2026 session formally incorporated into the revised constitution.

The one-year extension is the first layer of a two-layered extension strategy. The second is HSM’s insistence that one-person, one-vote elections will be held within one year. The infrastructure for universal suffrage does not exist and cannot be built in one year, and when the one-year extension and the election timetable fails, the parties will be forced back to the table to negotiate a substitute electoral process. The last time Somalia went through that negotiation, from Farmajo’s term expiry in February 2021 to HSM’s election in May 2022, it took fifteen months. Thus, the two-layered extension strategy effectively guarantees at least two-year extension.

A politically astute opposition would recognize this and demand the initiation of the indirect election process now, before the OPOV timetable is even allowed to fail. The current opposition has not done this. HSM is not making an implausible promise of OPOV in error. He is making it because its failure is the whole strategy. The one-year extension and the insistence on OPOV directly contradict HSM’s own public statements that the amended constitution would take effect starting with the next administration. No explanation has been offered for the reversal.