MOGADISHU, SOMALIA – Somalia’s Federal Supreme Court annulled the Galmudug election results on Monday, finding that the 30 July vote was conducted outside the constitution and the electoral law, and ordering the national commission to run the ballot again. Chief Justice Bashe Yusuf Ahmed delivered the decision in Mogadishu, telling the court the elections had not been administered in line with either instrument, and the judges concluded that the defects were beyond repair and had reached the declared results themselves. The vote they erased was the one that handed President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud’s party roughly seventy percent of the ballots cast in Galmudug three weeks ago, and the court that erased it is the same bench that certified the Southwest result earlier this year.
What the Court Struck Down in Galmudug
The ruling is unusually complete for a Somali electoral judgment. Judges heard the case, reviewed the evidence and decided that the irregularities could not be cured by correcting particular districts or particular returns, because the damage ran to the integrity of the exercise and therefore to the final tally. On that reasoning they voided the whole result instead of ordering a partial remedy, which is the harder of the two findings for the commission to absorb, and the harder for any official to characterise afterwards as a technicality that tidy administration will fix.
The court then issued instructions to the body that ran the ballot, directing the National Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission to organise a fresh vote in Galmudug, telling it to move quickly, and requiring that the rerun comply with the constitution, the electoral law and the subsidiary rules. It set no date of its own, which leaves the timetable in the hands of the same commission whose conduct produced the judgment. Until that vote happens the annulled results carry no legal effect, and the councils and assembly seats declared on 3 August exist only as a set of numbers the state’s own supreme court has disowned.
One provision keeps Galmudug functioning while the argument continues. The officials currently holding local government posts stay where they are, so that no administrative vacuum opens while the commission prepares, and they will give way when lawfully elected successors emerge. That is a sensible piece of judicial housekeeping and also an awkward one, since it leaves a set of officeholders running eleven districts across the Mudug and Galgaduud regions on the authority of a ballot the same court has just declared void. Nothing in the judgment explains how those officials should behave in the interval, what decisions they may lawfully take, or what happens to the ones they have already taken since 3 August.
The Result That Has Now Been Erased
The scale of what has been struck out is worth setting down plainly. When the commission announced the returns on 3 August, the Justice and Solidarity Party took 135,247 of 193,451 valid votes and 63 of the 189 seats contested. Towfiiq followed with 26,003 votes and twelve seats, Sincad with 12,862 and six, Karaamo with 10,668 and five. Against a register of 215,860 that produced an implied turnout close to ninety percent, a figure that would be remarkable in a consolidated democracy and was startling in a state where campaigning had been curtailed and polling day itself had slipped from 25 to 30 July.
Those numbers were disputed from the moment they were read out. Towfiiq formally rejected the results of both the council and assembly ballots, and the Galmudug administration had already refused to accept representatives the ruling party appointed for Galkayo and Cadaado. Federal officials and the state government spent months disagreeing about how the process should be run, and the independence of the electoral body was questioned throughout by people who then watched it certify a landslide for the party of the president who appoints its budget. Objections of that kind are routine from losing parties and are usually worth little, which is what makes the court’s decision to uphold the substance of them unusual.
The political prize sat above the councils and the assembly seats. A compliant chamber in Galmudug was the mechanism through which Liban Ahmed Hassan, the former militia commander known as Shuluq whom Villa Somalia had positioned for the state presidency, would have reached that office without a contest anyone could lose. The annulment removes the assembly that was to elect him and leaves the presidential timetable, already unscheduled and already overdue, resting on a ballot that has yet to be held and a commission that has yet to be rehabilitated. His path to office ran through the councils, and the councils are gone.
The Court That Ratified Baidoa
The same Federal Supreme Court certified the Southwest State results amid open tension, after federal troops entered Baidoa on 30 March, Abdiaziz Hassan Mohamed Laftagareen resigned within hours, and Aden Madobe moved from the speaker’s chair in the federal parliament to the state presidency through a managed vote in June. That sequence had three steps, which were force on the ground, a controlled ballot, and a judicial signature, and the court supplied the third one without visible difficulty at the time, over the objections of a state administration that had been removed by soldiers before any judge examined the paperwork.
Galmudug was to be the second application of the same method, and it is the third step that has failed. Whatever moved the judges, the practical effect is that the mechanism Villa Somalia has used to convert member states into extensions of the presidency has been interrupted by an institution the federal government had every reason to consider reliable. An administration that has spent two years arranging courts, commissions and chambers around its own requirements has now been told by the highest of those courts that one of the arrangements was unlawful.
Two readings are available and neither is comfortable for Mogadishu. The court may have decided that an implied ninety percent turnout in a contested state was more than it was prepared to put its name to, which would make the judgment an act of institutional self-preservation by judges who expect to outlast this presidency. Alternatively the annulment serves a purpose inside the federal government that is not yet visible, in which case the rerun in Galmudug deserves closer attention than the original vote ever received. Judges published a legal finding on Monday and said nothing whatever about motive, and nobody in Mogadishu has yet offered an account of how a process the government defended in August became unconstitutional in the same month.
A State Run by Officials the Court Has Unelected
Galmudug now occupies an unusual constitutional position. Its local government is staffed by people whose mandate has been withdrawn and whose tenure continues only because the alternative is a vacuum, its assembly does not lawfully exist, its presidency has no date, and the body responsible for repairing all of this is the commission whose conduct the court has just condemned. The state was the second in the federation to attempt one person one vote, and the experiment has produced the first annulled result of the direct-voting era. Every subsequent state that is asked to hold one will now negotiate in the knowledge that a result can be taken away after it has been declared.
The consequences reach well past Galgaduud and Mudug. Federal ministers have been presenting the state ballots as proof that a national direct election is achievable on schedule, and the strongest single piece of evidence for that claim has now been struck down by the judiciary on constitutional grounds. Galmudug has also refused federally imposed electoral arrangements before, with armed civilians turning out at Cabudwaaq, and the state sits along the Galkayo fault line where Puntland has kept its forces on alert through a summer of presidential touring.
So the ruling lands on a state with no settled administration, an unfinished argument with Mogadishu about who runs its elections, and al-Shabaab and Islamic State fighters operating within reach of both its regions. A court has restored a rule and removed a government in the same judgment, which is a novel experience for the federation and a costly one for the party that won. Somalia will learn over the coming weeks whether the commission can produce a second Galmudug result that survives contact with the law, and whether anyone in the state will accept it when the same body delivers it. A commission that has been told its work was unconstitutional is now the only institution authorised to repeat it.
