An Expired Parliament Elects a Speaker While an Expired Presidency and Cabinet Carry On
A WDM Editorial
Somalia has apparently discovered a constitutional innovation unknown to political science: institutions can expire and still reproduce themselves.
The Federal Parliament’s four-year mandate ran out on April 14, 2026. The President’s term followed a month later. Yet Parliament kept sitting — and on this month elected a new Speaker, Abdulqadir Mohamed Nur Jama, to replace Adan Madobe, who left the chamber after being installed as President of South West State. The Presidency continues issuing decisions. The Cabinet continues governing.
This is not institutional renewal. It is expired institutions attempting to validate one another. That is not a constitutional government. It is political necromancy.
The Mandate Cannot Be Resurrected by a Vote
The question is elementary: if Parliament’s mandate has expired, from where does it derive the authority to elect a new Speaker?
Villa Somalia’s answer is that the mandate was never really gone — that parliament passed constitutional amendments extending both the legislative and presidential terms by a year, to 2027. That claim deserves to be stated plainly, because a fair accounting cannot ignore it. But it does not settle the matter. The amendments were pushed through without the buy-in of federal member states or former presidents, and opposition figures — including former President Sharif Sheikh Ahmed’s Somali Salvation Forum — argue a legislature cannot lawfully extend its own life by voting on itself. Electing a Speaker under a mandate of contested provenance does not cure the legitimacy question. It advertises it.
The Presidency Has Expired Too
Parliament is not alone. The President’s constitutional term, absent the disputed extension, closed in mid-May. That places the continued exercise of presidential authority under the same question. The Cabinet cannot float constitutionally above the institutions from which executive authority derives. If the government’s own extension is what’s keeping the calendar valid, then the entire federal executive’s legitimacy now rests on the same disputed hinge as the Speaker’s chair.
Everyone is nonetheless expected to behave as though nothing constitutionally significant has happened: ministers exercise powers, officials attend ceremonies, motorcades move through Mogadishu, and statements go out with seals and flags.
Expired Institutions Validating Expired Institutions
This is where the Speaker election becomes genuinely troubling. A parliament of disputed mandate elects a leadership; that leadership recognizes the executive; the executive recognizes the parliament. It is a circular-reference machine — you recognize me, I recognize you, therefore Somalia must recognize both of us. But legitimacy cannot be manufactured by officeholders validating one another. A government does not renew itself merely by continuing to govern, and a Speaker does not make a disputed parliament legitimate merely by occupying the chair.
To be fair, there is a counter-case worth naming: some commentators argue that a caretaker legislature filling a leadership vacancy is an act of institutional continuity, not usurpation — that the alternative, a total legislative vacuum, is worse than a procedurally imperfect Speaker election. That argument has some force. But continuity and legitimacy are not the same thing, and conflating them is precisely how “necessity” becomes the permanent excuse for staying in office.
The Dangerous Precedent
If a parliament of a contested mandate can elect its own leadership, what stops it from doing more? Amending fundamental laws. Approving governments. Redesigning elections. Manufacturing a new political calendar indefinitely, one extension at a time. Once expiration carries no practical consequence, constitutional terms stop being law and become polite suggestions — and Somalia, of all countries, knows what happens when political personalities outgrow institutions.
Federalism Pays the Price
Federal member states are expected to respect institutions emanating from Mogadishu, while Mogadishu treats its own mandates as negotiable through unilateral amendment. That arrangement cannot hold. Federalism depends on mutual constitutional confidence; when the centre manufactures authority through contested institutions, member states will keep asking why decisions from those institutions should bind them. That is not an attack on federalism — it is the predictable cost of exhausting federal legitimacy.
Somalia Does Not Need Another Political Fiction
There is still a Parliament building, still MPs, still a Speaker’s chair, still a President, a Cabinet, motorcades and flags. Everything looks wonderfully governmental. What’s missing is an undisputed mandate underneath it.
Somalia needs a lawful, broadly agreed political transition — credible elections and respect for constitutional timelines, negotiated with federal member states and opposition actors, not decreed by amendment. It does not need expired institutions appointing officials, recognizing one another, and asking the Somali people to applaud the exercise as democracy.
The constitutional clock does not stop because politicians dislike what happens when it reaches midnight. If constitutional terms mean anything, they must mean something precisely when those holding power would prefer them not to. Otherwise Somalia is no longer practicing government by mandate — it has invented something easier: rule until further notice.