Somalia’s President Suspends Prime Minister Amid Election Spat

Somalia’s President Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed says he has suspended Prime Minister Hussein Roble, sparking accusations of an “indirect coup” amid a protracted feud.

“The president decided to suspend prime minister Mohamed Hussein Roble and stop his powers since he was linked with corruption,” the office of the president said in a statement on Monday, accusing the premier of interfering with an investigation into a land grabbing case.

Roble’s office called the statement “outrageous” on Twitter, adding that the attempt to “militarily take over” the office of the prime minister was in breach of the law.

In a separate post, it said Roble remained “fully committed to fulfilling his national responsibility to conduct an acceptable electoral process that culminates in a peaceful transition of power.”

Assistant information minister Abdirahman Yusuf Omar Adala called the president’s decision an “indirect coup.”

“What is going on this morning is (an) indirect coup but it will not win,” Adala said on Facebook, adding that the deployment of security forces around Roble’s office would not prevent the prime minister from carrying out his duties.

President Mohamed’s move comes a day after trading accusations with Roble of holding up ongoing parliamentary elections.

The long-delayed elections began on November 1 and were supposed to be completed by December 24, but one newly elected legislator said that, as of Saturday, only 24 of 275 representatives had been elected.

In a statement on Sunday, the Presidential office said Prime Minister Roble was “posing a serious threat to the electoral process and overstepping his mandate”.

Roble’s office later put out its own statement saying the president had spent “so much time, energy and finances in frustrating the national elections” and was “derailing the electoral process”.

In the statement, Roble said he would hold meetings to find ways to speed up the election and agree “on a capable leadership to spearhead timely and transparent elections” without offering more details on how long the process might take.

Under Somalia’s complex indirect electoral process, regional councils are meant to choose a senate. Clan elders are then meant to pick members of the lower house, which then picks a new president.

The president’s move reopens a confrontation that had been resolved when the president put Roble in charge of security and of organising its first direct elections in more than 30 years.

Factions of the security forces allied to Mohamed and Roble in April had seized areas of the capital, as the prime minister and opposition opposed a move to extend the president’s four-year term by another two years.

Clashes between the two groups forced between 60,000 and 100,000 people to flee their homes.

Matt Bryden, analyst at the Sahan think tank, told Al Jazeera that “the prime minister was planning to convene a national conference today to chart the way forward. Now the president has once again intervened and created a situation of real uncertainty and danger.”

Bryden added that the electoral model was modified by Mohamed to favour his reelection and this change is now contributing to the impasse in the electoral process.

“The entire process has come down almost to cherry picking, where seat by seat we are seeing rigging, we are seeing appointees of the president being given seats, and these are the people who will choose the next president,” he said.

Somalia, which has had only a limited central government since 1991, is trying to reconstruct itself with the help of the United Nations and to fight the al Qaeda-linked group al Shabaab.

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