Polling for the Banadir Regional Local Council kicked off on Thursday morning across Mogadishu’s 16 districts, ushering in the capital’s first one-person, one-vote local elections in more than five decades.
From the early hours of the day, long queues formed at polling centers as thousands of residents turned out to take part in the landmark exercise.
According to the Chairman of the National Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (NIEBC), Abdikarin Ahmed Hassan, around 480,000 Mogadishu residents have already been issued with voter registration cards, qualifying them to cast their ballots.
He noted that the commission has deployed 5,200 trained election officials to over 500 polling stations across the Banadir region to facilitate the voting process and maintain orderly conduct.
However, Somalia’s main opposition groups had previously announced a boycott of the elections, arguing that the process was initiated by the government without sufficient political consensus.
Several opposition figures have also questioned the timing of implementing a one-person, one-vote system, pointing to unresolved political tensions between the Federal Government and some federal member states, including Puntland and Jubbaland.
