Mogadishu Elections: Rebranding a Discredited System

Why We Rejected Participation and Refused to Recognize the Results

This election was fundamentally flawed from its inception. The election management committee, the legal framework governing the process, the rules and procedures, the financing of the election, and the overall political environment were all controlled by a single side. In effect, one actor designed the rules, managed the process, financed the exercise, and competed in it—eliminating any possibility of fairness.

For these reasons, the Somali Salvation Forum and the Somali Future Council, the country’s largest opposition coalitions, boycotted the election. Our decision was based on clear and principled objections: the entire process was grounded in a constitution that had been unilaterally altered by the President and his inner circle, without national consensus or legitimate legal procedure. The election laws and regulations were repeatedly adjusted to suit the President’s political objectives and to legitimize a disputed constitutional framework.

Other political organizations initially hoped to participate in the process, but they too ultimately withdrew. They cited the government’s failure to respect its own electoral laws, its refusal to ensure a balanced and independent election committee, and its unwillingness to allow proper verification and auditing of election equipment—particularly voter registration systems and servers. They also demanded that public funds not be misused for partisan purposes and that security agencies, civil servants, and military officers be kept strictly neutral and excluded from electoral involvement.

These demands were ignored. Instead, the President amended or violated the election law more than ten times without parliamentary approval. He refused to include election funding in the national budget for parliamentary oversight, declined to neutralize the security forces and civil service, and maintained direct control over every critical lever of the process.

This was not an election. It was a contest in which the player also acted as referee.

The Illusion of Democracy

For decades, Somalis have waited for a moment when power would genuinely return to the people—a long-deferred aspiration meant to mark a decisive break with elite capture, corruption, and impunity. What unfolded in Mogadishu, however, was not that moment. It was a carefully staged image of progress that masks a far harsher reality.

Rather than advancing democratic renewal, this exercise risks extinguishing what little hope remains for a genuine one-person, one-vote election. An electoral process designed to deliver a predetermined outcome—effectively one person, one result—cannot address the daily hardships faced by the city’s residents. It preserves the very structures that created those hardships, substituting the appearance of participation for meaningful reform. When choreography replaces choice, democracy becomes performance.

Power Without Accountability

The real architecture of authority in Mogadishu remains unchanged. The mayor, regional governor, and district commissioners—the true centers of decision-making—remain in place. Corruption, land grabbing, forced evictions, and abuse of power continue unchecked. A judiciary too often beholden to wealth and influence will not suddenly become independent. Arbitrary detentions, repression, and extortionate taxation will persist, while public services remain absent and public funds flow into private hands.

A hollow election cannot produce accountability, oversight, or effective checks and balances. It cannot empower communities or build independent institutions. Its implicit message to citizens is clear: remain where you are—nothing will change.

The process also threatens to deepen social divisions. The creation of 390 district council seats—many reportedly reserved for individuals aligned with the ruling circle—and the allocation of positions along clan lines risk inflaming tensions within Mogadishu’s diverse communities. These councillors will wield no real authority: no budgets, no salaries, no offices, and no clear legal mandate. Operating under an appointed and unelected mayor, their role is largely symbolic—representation without power.

This raises an unavoidable question: what was the purpose of this election? It was not to solve Mogadishu’s problems or to empower its people. Rather, it appears designed to launder and rebrand a regime widely associated with land dispossession, mass evictions, entrenched corruption, nepotism, abuse of power, and the deliberate manipulation of clan divisions.

The Language of Reform, the Reality of Decline

President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud has presented his early years in office as a campaign against corruption and terrorism. Highly visible gestures—frontline visits and symbolic acts of resolve—have projected determination. Yet under this banner, thousands of internally displaced people were forcibly evicted, public land was sold without due process, and the proceeds reportedly enriched a narrow circle of relatives and allies.

The Banadir election represents the second phase of this strategy: placing a democratic veneer over an increasingly discredited system.

To support such a process would be an act of dishonesty. Somalia’s crisis is sustained not only by those who wield power, but also by those who enable it—politicians who trade principle for proximity, elites who confuse spectacle with statecraft, and media figures who profit from outrage and division. Today, it is not the most capable who rise, but the least scrupulous; not the most virtuous, but the most brazen. Politics has become theater, and governance an afterthought.

Moral Courage as the Only Way Forward

This system cannot be challenged by adopting its language or mimicking its methods. Any credible alternative must be rooted in justice, freedom, the rule of law, and genuine democracy—not in power for its own sake or profit without conscience.

Somalia has not failed for lack of talent or resources, but for lack of moral courage. Years of war, hunger, and broken promises have exhausted the public. Trust in politicians, the media, the courts, and even elections themselves is collapsing. This vacuum is dangerous. When faith in peaceful change disappears, extremism finds fertile ground—not because it convinces, but because all other options appear discredited.

History offers both warning and hope. Societies that abandon principle invite darker outcomes, yet time and again, small groups of serious and principled people have shifted the course toward justice.

Somalia’s task is to be serious—to rethink politics itself. A destructive political culture cannot be cured by new faces behaving in old ways. The country must tell the truth, confront uncomfortable realities, and rebuild public life on honesty, patriotism, and the primacy of the national interest over personal, clan, or regional gain.

What is needed is leadership defined by ability, integrity, clarity, conviction, consistency, courage, and the capacity to deliver.

Anything less is not an election.

It is deception..