Somalia’s Elections, including the 2022 Presidential Election, are completely a sham
MOGADISHU, Somalia — Every month, Abdow Omar, who runs a business importing flour and sugar, gets a call from the Somali militant group Al Shabab reminding him that it’s time to pay them taxes — or risk losing his business, or even his life.
After more than 16 years, the Shabab, a terrorist group linked to Al Qaeda, now has a firm grip on much of Somalia — extorting taxes, judging court cases, forcibly recruiting minors into its forces and carrying out suicide bombings.
The country is about to get its next leader on Sunday in an election that has been delayed for almost two years. No less than 38 candidates, including one woman, registered to vie and unseat the incumbent president. But many residents, observing the government’s infighting and paralysis, are asking whether a new administration will make a difference at all.
“While the government is busy with itself, we are suffering,” Mr. Omar said. “The Shabab are like a mafia group. You either have to obey them or close your business. There’s no freedom.”
Somalia, a nation of 16 million people strategically located in the Horn of Africa, has suffered for decades from civil war, weak governance and terrorism. Its central government has been bolstered by United Nations peacekeepers and Western aid, including billions of dollars in humanitarian aid and security assistance from the United States, which sought to keep the country from becoming a safe haven for international terrorism.
Now, inflation is climbing, and food prices are sharply on the rise because of a biting drought and the loss of wheat imports from Ukraine.
The candidates, who include former presidents and prime ministers, are looking to unseat the current president, Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed, who has served for five years. Critics accused Mr. Mohamed — a former U.S. citizen and bureaucrat — of trying to illegally stay in power, cracking down on the opposition and journalists, fomenting a rift with neighboring Kenya and undercutting the power-sharing model that buttressed the country’s federal system.
Al Shabab exploited the political instability, and the bitter divisions among security forces, to grow its tentacles. In the weeks and months before the vote, the group killed civilians including at beachside restaurants, mounted a major offensive on an African Union base — killing at least 10 peacekeepers from Burundi — and dispatched suicide bombers to jump on the cars of government officials.
In interviews with more than two dozen Somali citizens, lawmakers, analysts, diplomats and aid workers before Sunday’s vote, many expressed concern at how the deteriorating political, security and humanitarian situation has reversed the few years of stability the nation achieved after Al Shabab was kicked out of the capital in 2011.
“These were five lost years, ones in which we lost the cohesion of the country,” said Hussein Sheikh-Ali, a former national security adviser to President Mohamed and the chairman of the Hiraal Institute, a research center in Mogadishu.
