By Dawan Africa - Editorial
Somalia is moving toward what officials describe as a return to direct elections, the first in more than half a century. The political class talks about the vote constantly. The institutions responsible for explaining it to the public have said almost nothing.
There are three bodies whose job is to ensure ordinary Somalis understand how this election will work, why it matters, and what their role is. The National Independent Electoral Commission, the political parties competing for power, and civil society.
All three are failing, and the cost will be paid by voters who walk into polling stations without the basic information needed to cast a meaningful ballot.
“We keep being told to go and vote — that this is the message of an outgoing government,” says Hussein Abdi Adam, Dawan’s Elections Editor. “But who do we vote for, how do we vote, and how is a winner decided? These are questions that should have been answered by now. They have not been.”
Start with the commission. Voter education is not an optional activity to be picked up when budgets allow. It is a constitutional function and the single most important task in a country where most citizens have never voted in a competitive election.
Somalis do not need the commission to tell them politics is contested. They need it to explain how a ballot is structured, how candidates are nominated, how disputes are resolved, and how votes are counted.
None of this is happening at the scale required. The commission is treating voter education as an afterthought, and the silence is being filled by rumour, partisan messaging, and confusion.
Political parties are no better. In any functioning democracy, parties are the most aggressive voter educators because their survival depends on it. They knock on doors, hold rallies, and explain the ballot to their base — because a confused supporter is one who stays home.
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Somali parties have largely skipped this work. They are competing for elite endorsements, not for votes. That tells the public everything it needs to know about how seriously they take this election, and it leaves a vacuum where mass political mobilisation should be.
Civil society is the third missing actor, and arguably the most troubling absence. Teachers, clerics, women’s networks, youth organisations, and professional associations are the voices Somalis trust most. They carry a credibility no commissioner or party leader can match.
“The civic groups carry a trust the parties simply do not have,” Hussein notes. “When a teacher or a sheikh explains something, people listen in a way they will never listen to a politician. That is the asset Somalia is wasting right now.”
These networks remain largely silent, waiting for funding cycles, international partners, or someone else to begin. Their credibility is not in question. Their absence is.
The result is a population being asked to participate in a process it has not been equipped to understand. That is not a minor failure.
An election without an informed electorate is not democratic — it is procedural. Ballots are cast, results declared, and the public is told the outcome reflects their will, when in reality many voters were never given the tools to form one.There is still time to fix this, but the window is narrowing.
The commission must move voter education to the centre of its operations and stop treating it as a communications exercise. Parties must be pressured — by media and donors — to do the basic political work of explaining the vote.
Civil society must stop waiting for permission and start using the credibility it has built over years of community engagement.
If this does not change, Somalia risks holding an election whose legitimacy is undermined the moment it ends. A vote cast in confusion is not the same as a vote cast in conviction. The institutions that understand this best are, at present, doing the least about it.