MOGADISHU, SOMALIA – President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud removed Chief Justice Bashe Yusuf Ahmed on the evening of Wednesday 4 November and gave the Supreme Court to Ibrahim Idle Suleiman, who has served as legal affairs secretary of the president’s own Justice and Solidarity Party (JSP), and before midnight a video was circulating of the new chief justice campaigning for the party at its office in Guriceel. Sources quoted the same night tied the dismissal to the court’s annulment in August of a Galmudug vote that had favoured the JSP, and to a ruling Bashe Yusuf Ahmed was expected to deliver on Saturday 7 November in former President Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed’s challenge to the constitutional amendments. The presidency cited unnamed complaints from judges and legal professionals, announced a broad restructuring of the judiciary and invoked no legal provision for the removal.
Ibrahim Idle Suleiman Campaigning in Guriceel
Ibrahim Idle Suleiman stands under the JSP’s green emblem at the party’s district office in Guriceel in the video now circulating, microphone in hand, asking the crowd to vote for the Justice and Solidarity Party in Galmudug’s state elections. Guriceel lies in Galgaduud, and the JSP fought two state votes in Galmudug this year, the July poll the Supreme Court voided and the October rerun the party won after Towfiiq was barred from it. The man who campaigned for the president’s party in that contest now heads the court that ruled on it.
Ibrahim Idle Suleiman was named the president’s legal affairs secretary within the JSP, and he was described on Wednesday night as a member of the ruling party and a close associate of the president. Neither the presidency nor the new chief justice has said whether he has given up the party post, and the statement announcing his appointment did not mention it. He first held the chief justice’s post after President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud appointed him in 2016, during the president’s first term, and became the president’s special adviser on legal affairs after the 2022 election.
Ibrahim Idle Suleiman lost the post in May 2018, when a decree issued in the name of Mohamed Abdullahi Farmaajo, then president, removed him and installed Bashe Yusuf Ahmed. He said at the time that he was still the chief justice and that his removal was unlawful, and the court passed to his successor regardless. The JSP did not exist then; President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud launched it in 2024, six years after Ibrahim Idle Suleiman lost the bench. On Wednesday the same instrument, a presidential decree announced at night with no article of the constitution cited, returned the court to Ibrahim Idle Suleiman, and the judge it removed was abroad and has made no public comment.
The Galmudug Annulment Bashe Yusuf Ahmed Read
On Monday 24 August the Supreme Court annulled the results of the Galmudug vote held on 30 July for the state’s House of Representatives and regional councils, finding that it had been run outside both the constitution and the electoral law and citing “serious violations” that reached the declared results. The Towfiiq party brought that case, and the count the judges voided had favoured the JSP. Bashe Yusuf Ahmed read the decision himself in Mogadishu. Consequently, the electoral commission accepted the judgment within days, the Galmudug authorities complied, and the state went back to the polls under the court’s order.
Towfiiq was then barred from the rerun, and the Justice and Solidarity Party won it in early October with its principal challenger outside the race, and Ibrahim Idle Suleiman’s appointment arrives a month after that result. Sources quoted on Wednesday night said Bashe Yusuf Ahmed’s removal was not solely linked to the Galmudug annulment, naming it as one cause alongside the government’s wish to forestall the constitutional ruling, and separate unnamed sources have added his refusal of proposals put to him by the presidency, without saying what those proposals contained. The presidency’s statement makes no reference to Galmudug, and no official has addressed any of these accounts on the record.
Bashe Yusuf Ahmed is a native of Seylac in Somaliland. He had served as a director in Somaliland’s Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs under Ahmed Mohamed Mohamoud Silanyo and was running the central headquarters of the then opposition Waddani party when Mohamed Abdullahi Farmaajo appointed him in May 2018. Moreover, his court had certified the Southwest State results earlier in this cycle, after federal troops entered Baidoa on 30 March and Abdiaziz Hassan Mohamed Laftagareen resigned within hours. In August the same judges voided a count in which the governing party had come first, and ten weeks later the chief justice who read that judgment has been replaced by Ibrahim Idle Suleiman, a JSP office holder.
Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed’s Petition Changes Judges
Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed lodged his petition on Sunday 11 October, and the court under Bashe Yusuf Ahmed admitted it the following day, issuing a summons in case MS/DST/1/2026 on 14 October. The filing asks the judges to void every step taken to amend the Provisional Constitution and everything that followed from it, arguing that the changes Parliament adopted on 4 March, which President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud signed into law on 8 March, bypassed the procedure that protects the oversight committee and the review commission. “The constitutional amendments should have gone through the special procedure set out in Chapter 15,” the former president said in a statement on 15 October, in which he also called the electoral commission’s timetable one-sided and warned of parallel elections.
Judges set Thursday 22 October for the government’s reply. On 17 October Deputy Attorney General Abdirahman Mahmud Hirsi wrote to the Speakers of both chambers and to the Ministry of Justice and Constitutional Affairs demanding every record of the review and amendment process by 20 October. Afterwards the Attorney General’s office asked for fifteen more days, which would have moved the government’s deadline to Saturday 7 November. Whether the judges granted that extension has not been reported, nor has Ibrahim Idle Suleiman said whether the hearing will keep to the dates already set, and the presidency’s statement on Wednesday made no mention of the case.
Bashe Yusuf Ahmed was outside the country when the decree was issued. Sources quoted that night said he intended to fly back to Mogadishu on Friday and announce the court’s decision the next day, that the ruling would have gone against the government, and that Villa Somalia was weighing measures to stop him travelling. Neither Villa Somalia nor the Supreme Court has confirmed that a judgment was ready, and the removed chief justice has made no public comment. In practice, Ibrahim Idle Suleiman now presides over a petition whose respondent is the government he served as legal adviser and the president whose party named him its legal affairs secretary.
Ibrahim Idle Suleiman and the Grounds of 2018
The presidency’s statement on Wednesday said President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud had received complaints from judges, judicial staff and legal professionals about the need for a fair and just judiciary, and had therefore decided on a broad restructuring of judicial institutions so that citizens could receive justice they trust. It named no complaint, no complainant and no finding against the outgoing chief justice, and it cited no article of the constitution and no statute as the basis for the removal. Furthermore, it closed by wishing Ibrahim Idle Suleiman success and by stressing judicial independence, the rule of law and equal justice for all.
Public complaints and judicial reform were also the stated grounds in May 2018, when the decree removing Ibrahim Idle Suleiman installed Bashe Yusuf Ahmed in his place. Eight years later the same two phrases have carried the same two men across the same office in the opposite direction. Meanwhile, the judicial reform announced on Wednesday came with no programme, no timetable and no named body to carry it out, and the only measure announced with it is the change at the top of the court hearing the case against the government.
Parliament’s March amendments created the one-person one-vote framework, the multiparty system and the commission that set Somalia’s vote for 15 May 2027, a timetable the opposition rejected as soon as it was announced, and Puntland and Jubaland reject both the constitution and the schedule. President Said Abdullahi Deni told President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud to resign on 1 November, before the Future Council had answered the president’s invitation to talks. Contested results end up before the Supreme Court, as Towfiiq’s case showed in August, and any challenge to the May 2027 count would now be heard by a bench led by the JSP’s legal affairs secretary, ruling on a vote the JSP will contest under amendments the same bench is being asked to judge.
