Kismaayo (PP Information Desk) — In 2022, throughout the number of MPs and Senators to characterize Jubaland State within the bicameral federal legislature of Somalia, the President of Jubaland State, Ahmed Mohamed Islam, handpicked two people: Hamsa Abdi Barre as an MP and Ilyaas Bedel Gaboose as a Senator. Hamsa was the Chairman of the Jubaland Electoral Fee, the physique that oversaw the election of the Jubaland President in 2019. Ilyaas was a candidate for the place of second deputy speaker of the Higher Home however withdrew his candidacy resulting from strain from the Jubaland Administration.
Unbeknownst to Ilyaas, there was a secret deal between the Jubaland President and Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, who was a presidential candidate on the time. Upon successful the election, President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud appointed Hamsa as his Prime Minister.
In 2024, when the Jubaland President fell out with President Mohamud over a one-year time period extension for the Jubaland Administration to delay the federal member state’s presidential election in November 2024, Hamsa urged Senator Ilyaas Bedel Gaboose to run for the Jubaland Presidency. Ilyaas was reportedly instructed by Villa Somalia to assert to have been elected President of Jubaland State in the future earlier than the Jubaland presidential election would happen. Ilyaas briefly declared himself the winner of the Jubaland presidential election earlier than surrendering to Jubaland Safety Forces in Kismaayo.
The Federal Authorities of Somalia seen Ilyaas’s declare as a possibility to model the election as contested. Final evening, Hamsa issued a press release by his council of ministers, alleging that the Jubaland President reneged on agreements he signed throughout the Nationwide Consultative Council summits and that the Jubaland Administration violated the federal member state’s structure, which “bars a president from serving greater than two phrases.” The Federal Authorities of Somalia had not raised objections to amendments to the Jubaland Structure that lifted limits on presidential phrases. Villa Somalia was relying on the vote of the Jubaland President to expedite its impractical imaginative and prescient of one-person, one-vote elections in 2026.
The playbook utilized by Villa Somalia in 2024 is just like the one employed by President Mohamed Abdullahi Farmaajo in 2019 to organise a parallel presidential election in Kismaayo. Each makes an attempt pushed Jubaland additional into Kenya’s safety area. Kenya, which liberated Kismaayo from Al-Shabaab in September 2012, maintains peacekeepers inside ATMIS.
Hamsa and Senator Bedel failed of their goal to destabilise the Jubaland electoral system. Nonetheless, the Jubaland President could also be reflecting on his 2022 choices to pick out two people who later challenged his authority illegally and violently.
© Puntland Publish, 2024
