By Farah Mire
Somalia is now trapped in a crisis of dual sovereignty. There are two rival legal claims to federal authority. On 5 November 2026 the Supreme Court ruled that President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud’s constitutional mandate ended on 15 May 2026 and that Parliament’s expired on 14 April 2026. The Presidency insists that the March constitutional amendments extend its mandate through the April/May 2027 elections. The morning after the ruling the government did not submit. The Office of the State Attorney General issued a formal legal opinion dated 6 November declaring the Supreme Court’s judgment to have “no legal effect.”
The Attorney General’s document is a calculated legal counter-offensive. It argues that the ruling is void for five procedural failures: the court ignored the government’s preliminary objections to jurisdiction; it failed to hold a proper adversarial hearing in violation of Articles 69 and 88 of the Provisional Constitution; and it allegedly created a new case regarding the constitutional amendment process. Most importantly, the Attorney General claims a fatal flaw in the court’s composition—that the panel was illegally formed because it was not chaired by the Chief Justice in accordance with Law No. 23 of 2016. This is circular logic of a high order. The President dismissed the Chief Justice on 4 November; the court voided the dismissal; and the government now uses the Chief Justice’s absence to declare the court’s ruling illegitimate. The same day President Mohamud called on the opposition to attend national consultations scheduled for 14–18 November. It is a calculated act of defiance. The President is fighting on two fronts: weaponising the law offices to paralyse the judiciary, and buying time with political talks.
Yet the crisis runs far deeper than a courtroom standoff. Within hours of the ruling, security forces deployed more than thirty military vehicles to the Supreme Court complex and forced the Chief Justice from the premises. On the same day the Court declared the federal mandate expired, the President was in Dhusamareb inaugurating a new Galmudug leader who publicly pledged to help defend Southwest State against the forces of the ousted regional president. The federal centre is simultaneously ignoring the judiciary and actively reshaping the map of state power. This is not merely legal defiance. It is a multi-level contest in which constitutional arguments, military force, clan balances, parliamentary seat arithmetic and foreign partnerships are all being played at once.
The Two Chambers and the Speaker’s Voided Chair
While the Supreme Court categorically voided the mandate of both chambers on 14 April 2026, the legal fallout for the House of the People and the Senate is profoundly different.
The Lower House is elected through a nationally managed clan-delegate system. Because the court ruled the March amendments invalid for retrospective application, the Lower House has been legally dead since April. This creates an immediate constitutional crisis regarding the election of Speaker Jamaac. His election took place after 15 May 2026 and was therefore conducted by an expired chamber.
A Speaker derives authority from the body that elects him. Since the Lower House had no constitutional authority on the day of his election, the Speaker’s chair is legally void. Every ruling he has made from the chair, every bill he has certified, and every procedural manoeuvre he has executed lacks a valid legal foundation. If the opposition enforces the court’s ruling, Speaker Jamaac is presiding over a phantom parliament. The contamination runs deeper still: if the Speaker’s election is void, then every subsequent act of the House—including any new electoral legislation, confidence votes or budget approvals—carries the same taint.
The Upper House faces a different but equally serious collapse. Senators are selected by the Federal Member State parliaments. The legitimacy of the Senate is therefore tied directly to the legitimacy of the state governments. This is where the legal landscape fractures according to dates—and where the claim that any single state stands on unassailable ground requires careful correction.
Southwest State: Two Elections, One Forced Exit, and No Clean Lineage
The narrative that Southwest elections simply “predate the 15 May 2026 cut-off” and therefore confer clean legal lineage is incomplete and, in its strongest form, inaccurate. Southwest has experienced two distinct electoral processes that sit on either side of the critical date, and the federal government itself forcibly interrupted the first.
Abdiaziz Hassan Mohamed Laftagareen was first elected in December 2018 under circumstances that already carried the imprint of federal force. The 2018 process involved the arrest of the popular former Al-Shabaab commander Mukhtar Robow and the deployment of Ethiopian troops to suppress dissent in Baidoa. Laftagareen’s original four-year term long since expired; successive extensions and political bargains kept him in office.
On 28 March 2026 still within the federal government’s original constitutional term—Laftagareen organised a rapid indirect re-election. Regional lawmakers returned him to office with 66 votes against 13 for his challenger. The federal government immediately rejected the process as unconstitutional, a self-appointment, and a violation of National Consultative Council agreements.
Two days later, on 30 March, federal forces entered Baidoa. Laftagareen resigned under pressure and left the city. He has since maintained that the March re-election remains valid and that he is the legitimate president of Southwest State.What followed was a federally steered succession. Direct elections for the regional House of Representatives and local councils were held on or around 10–14 May 2026—almost exactly on the federal cut-off date of 15 May. On 10–13 June 2026, after rival candidates withdrew denouncing a “one-man election,” Sheikh Aden Mohamed Nur Madobe, the former Speaker of the federal House of the People, was elected Southwest president by a vote of 88 to 2. Madobe’s administration is the one currently recognised by Mogadishu. Fighting between federal-aligned forces and Laftagareen loyalists has continued in the Bay region into November. Madobe’s camp and federal allies have publicly accused Laftagareen’s forces of acting as Al-Shabaab spokesmen or of having merged with the group—a classic securitisation move that reframes a political dispute as counter-terrorism and makes negotiated settlement more difficult.
Which process is constitutionally valid? Under the Provisional Constitution and the logic of the Supreme Court’s 5 November ruling, the answer is contested and carries direct consequences for the federal case. Laftagareen’s 28 March re-election occurred while the federal government still possessed a valid four-year mandate. It was conducted by the existing regional parliament under the then-prevailing federal framework. The federal government’s subsequent military intervention therefore occurred before the Supreme Court later declared the federal executive a caretaker. If the March process is treated as valid, the forced removal of an elected state president by a still-legitimate federal government raises questions of federal overreach. Conversely, if the March process is treated as illegitimate (as Mogadishu insisted at the time), then the subsequent May–June processes that installed Madobe took place after, or astride, the 15 May cut-off and were supervised or validated by a federal government that had already lost the authority to launch major political initiatives.
Either reading undermines the claim of a “clean legal lineage.” Southwest is not the sole state that can negotiate from unassailable legal strength. Its current federal-recognised government is the product of a post-cut-off or near-cut-off process that followed the military ouster of a pre-cut-off re-election. Its Senators sitting in the Upper House therefore inherit the same dual-defect risk that attaches to Hirshabelle and Galmudug. The only material difference is political alignment, not legal purity. Consistency with the Supreme Court’s ruling requires treating Southwest with the same sceptical scrutiny applied to the other states.
Farah Mire
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