By Dawan Africa - -
There is an old principle in the architecture of states: an election is not a moment, it is a law in motion. It is the law that decides who may stand, when citizens may vote, and how the contest itself unfolds. Strip the law away, and what remains is not democracy. It is theatre.
That is the show Somalia keeps staging. Cycle after cycle, federal and state, the script repeats: the statute is published, the timelines are printed, and then, when the calendar grows inconvenient, the timelines are quietly set aside. The current vote in Southwest State is not the disease. It is the latest, clearest symptom.
Consider the rules every Somali election is meant to obey. Article 42(1) of the Electoral Law is unambiguous: parties must submit their candidate lists 120 days before polling day. Article 45(2) requires that campaigning begin 45 days before the vote. Article 18(3) demands that the date of any state-level election be announced 90 days in advance. These are not bureaucratic decorations. They are guardrails — so that voters can scrutinise those asking for their mandate, so that opposition parties have time to mobilise, and so that electoral commissions work under public oversight rather than under cover of haste.
In Southwest, with fewer than ten days left before polling, the parties have not yet submitted their lists. The campaign has, in practice, only just begun. The date itself was fixed without the legally required notice. Three deadlines, three breaches — in plain sight, and greeted with a national shrug. Anyone who has watched the federal contest, or the state-level processes before it, has seen this pattern. The articles change. The disregard is constant.
This is not a procedural complaint. It is a constitutional one.
Ask why, and the answer is the familiar Mogadishu shrug — the assumption that law in Somalia is a suggestion, that timelines are aspirations, that what matters is the result and not the road to it. We should name this philosophy plainly: it is the philosophy that has hollowed out every Somali political process for thirty years. It treats the law as scaffolding to be discarded once power is in hand. It mistakes expedience for legitimacy.
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The first duty of any Electoral Commission — federal or state — is not to deliver an election. It is to deliver a lawful election. Where the statute proves unworkable, the remedy is to return to Parliament and ask for amendment, openly and on the record, before the clock runs out. What no Commission may do is improvise around the law and present the public with a fait accompli. That is not management. That is institutional surrender.
And the consequences compound across the federation. Every cycle that breaches the timelines without sanction becomes precedent for the next. Jubaland watches Southwest. The federal centre watches the states, and the states watch the centre. Each draws the reasonable conclusion: the Electoral Law is a menu, not a code. Once that habit is national, no Somali election can claim a clean democratic title.
There is a Somali saying for what an unlawful election becomes: shimbirayahow heesa — the singing bird. Pretty to listen to, signifying nothing. A vote conducted outside the law produces no winners worth the name.
And the deficit does not stay theoretical. When the rules are bent, the losing side is handed, free of charge, the most powerful argument in politics: that the contest was illegitimate to begin with. They will refuse to concede. Their supporters will refuse to accept the outcome. Disputes that ought to end at the ballot box will migrate to the streets, the clan rooms, and — as Somalia has learned at terrible cost before — to the barrel of the gun. Every breached deadline is a future grievance pre-loaded into the system. We have seen this film. We know how it ends.
The question, then, is not whether elections can be held on the announced dates. They almost certainly can. The question is whether the votes we hold will be worth holding — and whether the country can absorb another contested result without paying for it in blood.
That question has a legal answer. We are simply choosing not to read it.