Somalia: Cabinet Officials Brace to Relinquish Kenyan Passports After Presidential Ultimatum

What the report says

A number of senior Somali officials are expected to give up Kenyan passports and identity documents after President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud reportedly told cabinet members with dual citizenship that they must renounce foreign nationality or leave office. The account comes from Radio Dalsan, as republished by AllAfrica, and centers on ministers and state ministers in Somalia’s executive branch.

The first confirmed move described in the report involved Deputy Prime Minister Jibril Abdirashid Haji, who said he had already handed his Kenyan passport to the Kenyan Embassy in Mogadishu earlier this week. The article says his decision has encouraged other officials to prepare similar handovers in the coming days, with some moving quickly to avoid appearing to resist the president’s instruction.

According to unnamed sources quoted in the report, the ultimatum was first raised during a closed cabinet meeting last Thursday. The wider issue is Somalia’s long-running debate over dual citizenship among public officials, a subject that has often been politically sensitive. The article notes that Somalia’s provisional constitution does not clearly ban dual nationality for officeholders, but the president’s directive appears to set a new expectation for cabinet-level appointments.

The report also says some officials have recently faced scrutiny at Kenyan border posts, though it is not clear whether that played a direct role in the presidential order. Neither the Somali presidency nor the Kenyan government had publicly detailed the issue at the time of the report.