Somalia’s electoral bodies lauded for their efforts to ensure credible, legitimate polls

Somalia’s electoral bodies have been praised for their efforts to ensure a credible and legitimate electoral process and supported the bodies’ decisions to disqualify candidates who engaged in corruption, intimidation and manipulation in the ongoing parliamentary elections.

The Federal Indirect Electoral Implementation Team (FIEIT), the State-Level Indirect Electoral Implementation Teams and the Independent Electoral Dispute Resolution Mechanism (IEDRM) are making efforts to ensure credibility and legitimacy of the electoral process in the African country.

In a joint press statement issued yesterday, the UN, African Union, Inter-Governmental Authority on Development, Ethiopia, Italy, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States complimented on the successful efforts of these bodies.

They welcomed the determination of the bodies to enforce the rules of the 2016 electoral process as stipulated by the National Leadership Forum (NLF), particularly their resolve to sanction efforts to influence the election results through corruption, intimidation, manipulation or other malpractices.

“The international community will firmly support decisions by the FIEIT and the IEDRM to nullify election results that have been rigged through such misconduct and to disqualify candidates who have engaged in such malpractices,” the statement said.

The statement said as for allegations that some clans that have been assigned three or more seats in the federal parliament’s House of the People are refusing to comply with the NLF requirement that one of every three seats be reserved exclusively for women candidates, the international community recalled that the NLF had decided that the seats of any clan failing to fulfill this requirement will be suspended, pending a decision by the relevant State-Level Indirect Electoral Implementation Team and regional administration on the status of those seats.

Finally, the international community called on all parties to scrupulously comply with the rules and the code of conduct governing Somalia’s electoral process in order to safeguard its credibility and the legitimacy of its results.