By Mukhtar H. Qoransay
There is a country in the Horn of Africa where the president’s term expired in May, and the president responded the way a man responds to an expired gym membership: he kept using the equipment and dared anyone to say something.
Welcome to Somalia, 2026.
President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud’s mandate ran out on 15 May; parliament’s a month earlier. There has been no election. Instead there was a rewrite, and the timing is the whole story. On 4 March 2026, with weeks remaining before its own term expired, parliament approved a revised constitution stretching the mandates of federal institutions from four years to five. The president signed it on 8 March and discovered, to what I assume was his complete surprise, that he was now entitled to an extra year in office. Imagine writing yourself a permission slip a few weeks before the deadline, signing it, grading it, then framing it.
Start with the ground, because in the prank state even the earth is for sale. The Coalition of Somalia Human Rights Defenders has documented substantial tracts of public land sold to tycoons with the complicity of senior officials, including, it says, the president. Since 2022 dozens of public properties, among them markets, military camps and government buildings, have passed from the Somali people to the well-connected, and the poor sheltering there were cleared to make room. When security forces emptied the Horseed and Tarabuunka plots in Mogadishu, four people died. The government blamed “militias”; the men in the gunfight wore uniforms.
Eviction of IDPs from public
land with no prior notice nor support plan
And how did the president answer the outrage? With a joke. “The Somali mother,” he told a gathering, “shouldn’t care whether I own a high-rise building or a small one; that’s not her business.” The Somali mother, Mr President, buried the four who died at Tarabuunka. It is precisely her business.
The liquidation has gone international. Foreign Ministry correspondence seen by this author shows the government put the ambassador’s residence in Le Vésinet, one of the wealthiest suburbs of Paris, on the market in December 2024 for €2,500,000. A second letter, dated 5 July 2026, weeks after the president’s mandate expired, instructs the embassy to accept €1,800,000: seven hundred thousand below its own asking price, rushed to closing by an administration racing a clock only it can see. When a government whose term has run out discounts the state’s house in Paris, the question is no longer whether the state is being looted. It is what will be left by the time someone turns off the lights.
And who holds what remains? In my years in Somali public service I watched the revenue points of the state quietly become a family estate. I name no private individuals, but the arrangement is known to everyone in Mogadishu who has tried to do business: the national quality-control and standards bureau, headed by one of the president’s in-laws; the airport, administered by a close relative; the seaport, by a relative of that relative; the VIP and cargo terminals, where traders report being squeezed for payments they never agreed to, under the son of the president’s second wife; the immigration and visa-entry contract, held by the president’s wife and her family; the airport bus terminal, run by the president’s brother; the airport cleaning contract, awarded to a company belonging to the member of parliament who serves as the president’s own chief of security.
Every one of those is a point where money enters the Somali state, or fails to. People say this government cannot collect revenue. It collects revenue beautifully; the revenue simply arrives somewhere other than the treasury, which is why soldiers and civil servants wait months for salaries in a country whose private money-transfer firms move billions flawlessly. The Somali state cannot do what a Somali teenager with a phone and a hawala account does before breakfast. This is no longer corruption within a state. It is a state reorganised as a household. What we have now is a prank state built on institutionalised nepotism.
Watch, then, how the prank state manufactures leaders. In Galmudug the ruling party has decreed a single candidate. Not nominated after a contest: decreed. He is a khat trader and former militia commander whom the president appointed to oversee military logistics in the region, a portfolio one of his own associates called “a huge project with a lot of profit. Millions of dollars.” The incumbent was eased aside with what the Somali press openly calls a golden handshake. Galmudug votes on 30 July, and in Mogadishu nobody needs the result to know the outcome.
Baidoa perfected the method first. In March, South West State’s lawmakers re-elected Abdiaziz Laftagareen. Mogadishu called that vote unconstitutional, a word this government deploys exclusively against other people’s elections, and sent in the national army. Laftagareen resigned, later saying he was forced out, or bought off. In June the man raised in his place won 88 of 90 votes after his rival withdrew citing irregularities; on voting day the winner was still Speaker of the federal parliament. Hirshabelle is next, and nobody expects the third performance to deviate from the script. This is not a series of elections but an assembly line, and it assembles regional presidents who owe their chairs to Villa Somalia rather than to the people they govern. Captured regions are not trophies; they are revenue.
And the men who run this machinery? On Sunday, the Kenyan press reported, Somalia’s State Minister at the Presidency was refused entry at Nairobi’s airport over the Kenyan passport he was travelling with, and placed on a flight back to Mogadishu. He was not the first. A month earlier the Deputy Prime Minister, the same man who served as interim leader of South West State and handed power to its new president in Baidoa, was stopped there over a Kenyan passport he was alleged to have obtained fraudulently and, per sources cited by the Kenyan press, admitted possessing it but refused to surrender it, proposing the courts settle the matter. He made that argument from the VIP lounge, where he waited until they walked him onto a flight home. He has since publicly denied wrongdoing, saying he never acted against the security or sovereignty of either country. It is a denial that answers a question nobody had asked. Mogadishu’s response was to summon Kenya’s ambassador for an explanation: a sovereign republic demanding to know why its ministers cannot enter a neighbour on that neighbour’s passports.
Now set that beside this. On 12 April, intelligence officers arrested Sadia Moalim Ali, known across Mogadishu as “Sadia Bajaj”, a 27-year-old tuktuk driver whose crime was saying on Facebook and TikTok what this article says in print: that corruption is eating the state, that the young have no work, that fuel and taxes crush the poor while officials feast. On 25 June, after nearly three months in detention, the Banadir Regional Court sentenced her to three years in prison. Her lawyer argued the prosecution had produced insufficient evidence; the judges convicted her anyway. Amnesty International, which is still demanding her immediate and unconditional release, calls the detention arbitrary and tied solely to the peaceful expression of her views. In one video she had said that if any harm came to her, responsibility would lie with the president. A tuktuk driver showed more courage on a phone screen than the entire cabinet has shown in office, and drew three years for it, in a country where nobody has been charged over the sale of the state’s house in Paris. She is in a cell for describing the prank; the men who perform it are in the departure lounge on another country’s passport.
Understand this much: Somalis are not a broken people attached to a broken state. They are an unbreakable people attached to a broken political class, and I include the opposition grandees now rediscovering their love of constitutions they ignored when the microphone was theirs. The presidency circulates among a small circle of men who pass it like a wedding microphone, each convinced the last singer ruined the song; eighteen million Somalis were never consulted about the playlist. This is a nation that lost its government in 1991 and answered by building one of the world’s most sophisticated informal economies. Families rebuilt Mogadishu’s skyline with remittances while their leaders rebuilt their compounds with the national budget.
This week the question moved abroad. In Kampala, the African countries whose soldiers have held Somalia together for two decades met to decide the future of the African Union mission, at a moment when its funding is collapsing. Somalia’s opposition coalition wrote to those governments formally, noting that the president’s mandate expired on 15 May and asking them to weigh that fact before committing anything further. It is a reasonable request. States that send their own soldiers to die in another country are entitled to know who they are dying for.
So, to the international community that funds this theatre and attends its performances: stop reviewing the play and start auditing the theatre. Who sold which land, and to whom. Why the state’s house in Paris was discounted €700,000 by a government with an expired mandate. Which relatives hold which contracts, and which terminals collect which fees. And while the auditors work, open the cell in Mogadishu Central Prison: a government that jails a tuktuk driver for describing corruption while its ministers are turned back at foreign borders on other countries’ passports has already confessed what any investigation would find.
The president says the new constitution is the law of the land. Very well. Let him be the first man in Somali history governed by the document he wrote. The rest of us are done being the punchline: the taxpayers, the diaspora, the mothers of Tarabuunka whose business it very much is, the driver in her cell who told the truth for free.
Mukhtar H. Qoransay
Email: qoransay@gmail.com
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Mukhtar is the former Director of Somalia’s National Identification and Registration Authority (NIRA). He is also a Senior Strategist & Geopolitics Analyst.
