Hassan Sheikh Mohamud Promised His Own Mother's Clan the Presidency of Hirshabelle. He Just Told Them He Changed His Mind.

Abstract: Hirshabelle Vice President Yusuf Ahmed Hagar Dabageed told a gathering of Hawadle politicians and elders in Mogadishu on 11 September 2026 that President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud had reneged on a personal assurance that Hirshabelle's presidency would finally return to the Hawadle clan after six years under an Abgaal incumbent. Dabageed said a Hawadle committee led by traditional leader Ugaas Yusuf Ugaas Hassan Ugaas Khalif met Mohamud roughly three months earlier and received his assurance that the presidency would go to a Hawadle candidate, honouring a 2016 power-sharing arrangement that created Hirshabelle by allocating the presidency to the Hawadle, the deputy presidency to the Abgaal and other Hawiye sub-clans, and the interior and finance portfolios to the minority Shidle. Weeks later, in a private meeting, Mohamud told Dabageed and other Hawadle politicians that he had changed his mind and would instead back incumbent president Ali Abdullahi Hussein, widely known as Ali Gudlawe, an Abgaal politician whose 2020 election to the presidency itself broke the same 2016 arrangement. The reversal was not a sudden improvisation: Mohamud and Gudlawe had already signed a deal on 23 April 2026, guaranteeing Gudlawe the ruling Justice and Solidarity Party's ticket for re-election, months before the president's own August outreach to Hawadle elders about who should represent their community. Dabageed, whose mother's clan Mohamud shares, said the Hawadle had "fully participated" in the president's military campaigns against al-Shabaab and expressed dismay that Mohamud would "turn his back on his maternal uncles" after they had sacrificed for him to consolidate power. He warned that elections in Hiiraan region could not proceed "even in a single village" without a political settlement acceptable to all sides, and that anyone who tried would bear responsibility for the consequences. Somalia's National Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (NIEBC) announced a revised timetable for simultaneous local council and House of Representatives elections in Hirshabelle regardless, setting polling day for 30 September, the same legislature that will later vote on the presidency Dabageed says was already decided in Mogadishu.

What Dabageed said, and where

Dabageed's remarks came at a gathering of Hawadle politicians and elders in Mogadishu, convened to discuss the community's response to the president's decision. He said Mohamud had met individually with him and other Hawadle politicians and told them directly that he had reneged on the assurance given three months earlier to the Ugaas Yusuf-led committee, and had instead awarded the Hirshabelle presidency to Gudlawe. Dabageed called the reversal "a surprise and a shock," particularly given the role his own community had played in the president's counter-insurgency campaigns, and warned that the Hirshabelle electoral process "could not continue in its present form." His most concrete threat was procedural rather than rhetorical: elections could not be held anywhere in Hiiraan region, he said, "even in a single village," without a political agreement acceptable to the parties involved, and whoever tried to hold them regardless "would bear responsibility for the consequences." Multiple Somali outlets, including Hiiraan Online, Somali Guardian, Somali Dispatch and Axadle, reported the remarks the same week, and none reported any public rebuttal from Villa Somalia or from Gudlawe's office as of this writing.

The 2016 deal that Gudlawe's own 2020 election already broke

Hirshabelle was created in 2016 through a federally mediated merger of the Hawiye-majority Hiiraan and Middle Shabelle regions, built on an informal power-sharing arrangement that allocated the state presidency to the Hawadle sub-clan, the deputy presidency to the Abgaal and other Hawiye sub-clans, and the interior and finance ministries to the Shidle, a marginalised Jarerweyn community. That arrangement already failed to survive its first real test: on 11 November 2020, Hirshabelle's regional assembly elected Ali Abdullahi Hussein, an Abgaal politician then serving as vice president, to the presidency by a vote of 86 to 13, a result Hawadle communities saw as a breach of the 2016 settlement. Gudlawe's own supporters in Middle Shabelle's Abgaal community argued the original arrangement had only ever been intended to last a single term. That unresolved dispute over whether the 2016 deal was a one-time settlement or a standing rotation is precisely what Dabageed's account now reopens: if Mohamud's own three-months-earlier assurance to Hawadle elders meant anything, it was an acknowledgment that the presidency was, in fact, supposed to come back to the Hawadle after Gudlawe's term, an acknowledgment the president's own reversal has now withdrawn.

Two tracks running at once: April's guarantee, August's consultation

The sequence of events suggests Mohamud was running two separate, contradictory processes simultaneously rather than simply changing course once. On 23 April 2026, Mohamud and Gudlawe met in Mogadishu and signed a deal, described by Hirshabelle's presidential communications director Mohamed Shuuriye Noor as an agreement that Gudlawe would run on the JSP ticket to "boost his re-election chances," a deal that functioned as a guarantee of the ruling party's nomination months before campaigning had even begun. Yet in late July, by Hiiraan Online's reporting, Mohamud separately asked Hawadle leaders to agree on a single candidate from their own community to contest the Hirshabelle presidency, and on 4 August a Hawadle delegation led by Ugaas Yusuf Ugaas Hassan Ugaas Khalif met the president in Mogadishu, at which the leaders, rather than naming their own candidate, agreed to authorise Mohamud himself to choose the community's nominee. Whether that August meeting was a genuine reopening of a decision effectively closed in April, or simply theatre staged for a community the president had no intention of empowering, the practical result was identical either way: Hawadle leaders ceded to Mohamud the very authority he used, weeks later, to hand the presidency back to the Abgaal incumbent he had already committed to in the spring.

The "maternal uncles" line

What sharpens this dispute beyond an ordinary federal-state patronage fight is Dabageed's specific framing of the betrayal: Hassan Sheikh Mohamud's own mother is Hawadle, making the clan he says he has now sidelined not a distant political constituency but his own maternal lineage. Dabageed invoked that relationship directly, saying the Hawadle had gone so far as to fully participate in the president's military campaigns against al-Shabaab, sacrifices he said Mohamud repaid by "turning his back on his maternal uncles" at the moment it mattered to their own community's standing in Hirshabelle. The line does not change the legal or institutional stakes of the dispute, but it explains why Dabageed, a sitting vice president whose office depends on the same federal patronage network he is now criticising, chose to make the accusation publicly rather than negotiate quietly, and why Hawadle elders' organisations rather than opposition parties are the ones driving the current pressure campaign.

The same pattern, a third time this year

Hirshabelle is not the first Somali federal member state where a competitive-looking process has produced a result Villa Somalia settled beforehand. FIKIR Institute documented in August how President Mohamud's Justice and Solidarity Party crowned Liban Ahmed Hassan, known as Liban Shuluq, as its sole candidate for Galmudug's presidency before the state legislature empowered to elect a president had even been voted into existence, and how Somalia's own Federal Supreme Court later nullified the local and legislative election that preceded it, a ruling JSP's own members publicly split over. In South West State, Somalia's federal parliament speaker, Adan Mohamed Nur "Madobe," was elected the state's president on 10 June 2026 with 88 of 90 votes cast, after his predecessor boycotted the vote entirely, calling the outcome predetermined, and a lone rival candidate withdrew before balloting. Hirshabelle's own 2020 result, an 86-13 landslide for Gudlawe, fits the same template, and Horn Observer's analysis of the pattern across all three states concluded plainly that in each case "the ruling party had already chosen who ended up in charge" before the relevant vote took place. What distinguishes Hirshabelle's 2026 cycle is not the mechanism, which is now a familiar one, but the fact that the pre-decided outcome directly contradicts a specific promise the president made to his own extended family's clan, on the record, three months before reversing it.

What to watch

Three signals will show how far this dispute goes. First, whether NIEBC's 30 September date for Hirshabelle's local council and House of Representatives elections holds, given Dabageed's explicit warning that voting cannot proceed in Hiiraan "even in a single village" without a political settlement Mohamud has, by Dabageed's own account, just made harder to reach. Second, whether Hawadle elders escalate beyond public criticism toward an active boycott or obstruction of the vote, a step with real precedent in Hirshabelle's own history given how narrowly the 2020 result already split the state along clan lines. Third, whether Dabageed's position as vice president under the president he is now criticising becomes untenable, since a sitting vice president publicly accusing the federal president of reneging on a clan-based promise, while continuing to serve under the very state government that promise was meant to reshape, is a more direct challenge to Villa Somalia's authority than the opposition-party complaints that followed Galmudug's and South West's elections.

Policy implications

For Somalia's federal government, a third federal member state in a single year where the ruling party's preferred outcome was settled before the relevant vote is no longer an isolated controversy but a pattern that FIKIR Institute has now documented in Galmudug, South West and Hirshabelle alike, and each new instance makes it harder for Mogadishu to credibly frame federal member state elections as genuine contests rather than ratification exercises. For Hirshabelle specifically, a presidency built twice in a row on a broken clan settlement, first Gudlawe's 2020 break from the 2016 deal, now Mohamud's own reported reversal of a promised correction, leaves the state's underlying power-sharing arrangement with less legitimacy than it had after either individual episode. For the Hawadle community, the test of Dabageed's public break is whether it produces any actual renegotiation or simply becomes another grievance absorbed into a federal patronage system that has, on this account, already shown it will make and unmake clan-based promises as political convenience requires. For outside observers of Somalia's federalism, Dabageed's willingness to describe the reversal in personal, familial terms, a president turning on his own maternal clan, is a sharper illustration than any opposition party's complaint of how thoroughly Somalia's federal member state elections now run through Villa Somalia's own calculations rather than through the state-level institutions notionally responsible for them.