By Mohamed Abdi - Reporter
Somalia, July 31 2026 - In an exclusive account from inside Thursday's Council of Ministers meeting, President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud tells dual-national ministers to stop traveling on foreign passports, after Kenya turned away two senior Somali officials this month.
Somali President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud has warned ministers in his own cabinet that they will be removed from office if they are caught traveling on foreign passports instead of their Somali ones, in a pointed rebuke delivered behind closed doors at Thursday's Council of Ministers meeting, Dawan Media has learned exclusively.
Chairing the session, the President addressed his ministers sharply, questioning why any of them would need to travel on a foreign passport when they already hold diplomatic passports affording them privileges abroad.
According to a Dawan Media source who was present at the meeting and asked not to be named, the President said any minister found doing so again would lose their position.
“Any government official who is holding and locks up another country's passport, at that same time, I will remove them from office,” President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud said.
“Holding another government's passport and presenting yourself as one of their citizens is a personal choice, but the Somali government will not accept a senior official who represents the nation being humiliated in another country, when legally we cannot defend them, since in that other country's eyes he is just an ordinary citizen,” he added.
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Why now: two Kenya incidents in one month
The President's warning follows two separate cases in which Kenyan immigration authorities denied entry to senior Somali officials over questions about Kenyan passports they were allegedly carrying.
Somalia's State Minister at the Presidency, Abshir Bukhaari, was reportedly turned away at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport in Nairobi on Sunday, July 26, and returned to Mogadishu. Weeks earlier, Somalia's Second Deputy Prime Minister, Jibril Abdirashid Haji, had also been denied entry despite arriving on a valid Somali diplomatic passport and the required visa, after officials suspected he was also carrying a fraudulently obtained Kenyan passport. Haji reportedly acknowledged holding the document but declined to surrender it, insisting the matter be settled in court.
Both cases strained ties between Mogadishu and Nairobi. Somalia's government summoned Kenya's ambassador for an explanation, and Foreign Affairs Minister Abdisalam Ali met his Kenyan counterpart, Musalia Mudavadi, on the sidelines of an African Union summit in Addis Ababa to address the fallout. Neither government has officially confirmed the exact circumstances of either passport dispute.
The bigger picture
Somalia and Kenya have long balanced cooperation on security and trade against periodic friction over border security, immigration, and regional politics. The President's warning signals that Mogadishu wants to close off a recurring source of diplomatic embarrassment before it happens again.