MOGADISHU, SOMALIA – President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud has told the vice president of Hirshabelle that the state presidency he was promised is going to President Ali Gudlawe, who will stand on 30 September as the only candidate of the ruling Justice and Solidarity Party. Yusuf Ahmed Hagar Dabageed gave that account on Friday 11 September to a gathering of Hawadle elders and politicians in Mogadishu, saying the president had made the promise years earlier and had summoned him recently to withdraw it. Ten days before that meeting, Macawisley fighters who had taken over a voter registration centre in Beledweyne said the party card was already President Ali Gudlawe’s. Polling centres for the 30 September vote were not due to be designated until 15 September.
The Promise Villa Somalia Withdrew
Dabageed said President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud had promised him years earlier that he would make him the leader of Hirshabelle, then called him in for a meeting and told him the choice had gone to President Ali Gudlawe. He described the decision as a surprise and a shock, and framed it around the Hawadle, his own clan, whom he called the president’s maternal uncles. A delegation led by the Hawadle traditional leader Ugas Yusuf Ugas Hassan had put the question to the president several months earlier, and the clan agreed then to back the federal government and stay out of opposition in exchange for a Hawadle candidate being considered for the state presidency. Dabageed said he was astonished that a Somali head of state would go back on such an undertaking and turn away from his maternal uncles after what they had given him.
On Thursday 10 September, President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud received at Villa Somalia a group of politicians from the Harti Abgaal community, to which President Ali Gudlawe belongs. Several of them wanted the Hirshabelle presidency for themselves. The president told them Villa Somalia was behind President Ali Gudlawe and would carry him through the Justice and Solidarity Party, and he urged them to give up their own ambitions. Villa Somalia would state its position formally within days. A meeting with the Ugaas of the Hawadle was expected to follow, carrying the same message to the clan that had been told the office was theirs. Neither Villa Somalia nor the Hirshabelle administration has published anything confirming the nomination, and the president has not answered the accusation.
President Ali Gudlawe has held the Hirshabelle presidency since 2020 and had already declared that he wanted another term. He and President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud come from the same clan, which is why critics in Beledweyne read the endorsement as preference dressed as party procedure. The party itself began life as the National Consultative Council, the forum of federal and state leaders that was converted into an electoral vehicle for the president’s re-election bid in May 2025. Its card now decides who may contest a federal member state presidency, and the one President Ali Gudlawe will carry into the 30 September vote was issued in Mogadishu.
What the Hawadle Were Promised for the Offensive
The Hawadle took full part in the federal campaign against al-Shabaab, Dabageed said, carrying a heavy burden and suffering major reverses, with most of the clan’s constituencies recaptured by the insurgents. That is an account of the 2022 offensive given by the sitting vice president of the state the offensive was supposed to secure, and it describes an exchange that both sides understood at the time. Hiiraan supplied the Macawisley fighters who cleared the ground that the army could not hold, and the political return was expected to arrive when Hirshabelle next chose a president. President Ali Gudlawe held the office throughout that campaign, and he has now been named to hold it through the next one.
Al-Shabaab took Teedaan at the start of August, one of a series of Hiiraan positions that have gone back to the insurgents since the offensive stalled. Ceelbaraf, on the road between Mahaday and Adan Yabaal, was cleared largely by Hawadle militia and has since become a place where soldiers on leave are stopped and killed by armed men from the district. Adan Yabaal was taken in December 2022 and lost again in April 2025, and Moqokori and Mahaas, both of them in Hiiraan, went the same way inside the same cycle. Moreover, the army chief spent August asking Ali Jeyte Osman to bring his fighters back into Hiiraan, which is an admission of where the manpower actually sits.
Consequently, the clan that absorbed the casualties now finds the political settlement being written without it. Dabageed’s complaint is narrow and personal in its telling, and it rests on a wider calculation that every clan militia in central Somalia has been asked to make since 2022. Mogadishu’s answer this month is that the fighting was a service to the state and the presidency is a matter for the party. President Ali Gudlawe spent those four years in Jowhar, and the districts that changed hands were not his to defend. Furthermore, the same federal government that needs those militias for the next phase of the war has just demonstrated what their cooperation is worth when an office falls vacant.
The Card President Ali Gudlawe Already Holds
On Tuesday 1 September heavily armed Macawisley fighters took over the sites set aside for voter registration in Beledweyne, among them Iskuul Mujamac, the largest centre designated in the city. They said they would permit no vote that serves President Ali Gudlawe, whom they called a president whose term has expired, or the political blocs standing with him. “We are the armed people of this area. We have taken the place designated for the election,” their spokesman said. “We would go to war before a so-called election is held in Beledweyne. We know Hassan Sheikh has given the card to Ali Gudlawe.”
Beledweyne’s district commissioner, Omar Osman Alasow, denied that the centres had been seized and said the city was calm, that registration was running to plan and that the security branches were protecting people as they registered. The people of Beledweyne want an election, he said, and are ready to take part in one. The national electoral commission had announced the timetable the previous day, setting 30 September for the joint House of Representatives and local council vote and publishing a preliminary voter register on 2 September. Voter cards are due to go out on 16 September, candidate lists are to be verified on 17 September and the final register published on 19 September, which leaves eleven days between the closing of the roll and the poll. Twelve districts had already been named as polling locations in August, before any of the disputes now running in Beledweyne had been settled.
Police left several of the registration centres on Friday 11 September with no official explanation, while the argument in the city turned on who is permitted to obtain and use a Justice and Solidarity Party card. Two demonstrations were held in Beledweyne on Saturday 12 September, one on the eastern side of the river against holding the vote in the city at all and one on the western side in favour of it. Dabageed had said the day before that no election could be held anywhere in Hiiraan without a prior political agreement, not even in a single village, and that whoever tried to organise one without a settlement would answer for what followed.
A Bargain Broken Twice in Ten Years
Hirshabelle was assembled in October 2016 from Hiiraan and Middle Shabelle under federal mediation, and the settlement that created it put the capital at Jowhar and the presidency with a Hawadle leader from Hiiraan. That allocation lasted until 2020, when an Abgaal candidate won the state presidency and Jowhar kept the capital. A parallel conference ran in Beledweyne throughout the formation process and elders boycotted the Jowhar proceedings, so the state has carried two claims to legitimacy from the day it was declared.
By March 2024 the quarrel had produced a rival administration, and the Hiiraan authorities pushed Hirshabelle out of Beledweyne altogether, leaving the state government to run from Jowhar over a region it does not administer. Ten years after the merger, the presidency has never left Middle Shabelle, the capital has never moved, and the argument in Beledweyne this week is about the same two questions the 2016 conference failed to answer. President Ali Gudlawe has spent most of his term governing a state whose largest city runs its own affairs, and his visits to the Hiiraan districts have been treated as diplomacy. Dabageed’s account adds a third breach to a record that already had two.
Galmudug went to the polls on 30 July and the Supreme Court annulled the result in August, and the electoral commission accepted the ruling without setting a new date. Southwest was taken by force and handed to a loyalist through a managed vote that the courts then validated. Hirshabelle is being done more quietly, with a nomination settled in Mogadishu before the polling centres were named. The same sequence ran through the August voter registration exercise, which enrolled Hirshabelle while the presidency was being decided elsewhere. President Ali Gudlawe will win on 30 September because there is nobody else the party will let stand, and the men holding the registration centres in Beledweyne have already said what they intend to do about it.
