Abdinassir Buni, official spokesperson of the Republic of Somaliland’s ruling party, today, dismissed the likelihood of the presidential election slated for November 13 next year happening as scheduled.
“The current ten-year term of the three national parties is due to expire in December 2022. None of them can go to the polls on an expiring license,” he stated at the sixth general assembly of the Somaliland Non-state Actors Forum opening, Sunday.
“The political associations will be dealt with first only then can we conduct a presidential election”, he added.
What this meant is that since the mandated term of the parties were about to end, none of them could form a government since it was possible that one or more of the existing parties could be outsmarted and defeated at the political associations run.
The political parties law which had recently been incorporated with the political associations law dictates that the screening election of political associations must come six months before a presidential election.
The statement, though, took everyone by surprise as neither the government nor any of the other national stakeholders in the elections slated for next year have ever brought the matter to the open before.
This time around, there seems to be a number of legal and ethical bottlenecks that need to be cleared before the presidential election can be tackled.
For one, the term of the Guurti – the upper house of the Somaliland bicameral parliament – is going to expire at end of May 2022 as it is mandated to function a year after the House of Representatives is elected.
The President’s term is due to end a month after his government holds elections for his office in November 2022.
The mandate of the three national parties of Kulmiye, Waddani and UCID is going to run out in December 2022.
But none of the stakeholders has thus far openly ventured to raise the question of how these three elections are going to be held or what temporal priorities – if any – are to be set regarding their conduct.
It is not clear whether President Musa Bihi, the chairman of the ruling party, had prior knowledge of the bombshell his spokesperson has pulled the pin out of at the assembly.
If what Mr Buni said is taken on face value, Somaliland is looking at a presidential extension to be announced sometime in early or mid-2022 whose extent remains to be seen.
Mr Buni has of late become notorious for gunning off-the-cuff statements that seldom failed to raise a political furore in the country.
This Sunday statement of Mr Buni’s has all the trappings that can trigger yet another acrimonious lip-war between the government and the opposition eventually pulling in critics, observers, and the general public into the vortex.
