Thank you very much, honourable members.
Thank you for your support for Somalia. In 2016 and 2017, as you rightly said, we had an election process, which resulted in the election of the Parliament, the lower house. For the first time we have put together an upper house, which is the equivalent of the Senate here. We had the election of a president, the appointment of the Prime Minister and the approval of the cabinet. It has been a long process.
Going forward, we have decided to move beyond the process we chose the last time and go for “one person, one vote” in 2020. If you look at 2016-17, you see that we used a system called “4.5”, whereby we shared the parliamentary seats based on clan constituents from different regions of the country, with different groups appointing or selecting their members of Parliament through a clan balance. We had 135 clan elders who were selected based on their leadership within their communities. Those 135 elders then selected the 275 members of Parliament who elected the Speaker and then the President. It was a traditional system that we used to elect our leadership.
Going forward, we're going to go for universal suffrage: one person, one vote. We have put together a national independent electoral committee, which is now in the process of finalizing the electoral law. There are more than 20 associations, which, as soon as we have this bill passed by Parliament, will qualify to register as political parties. We're in the process. We have two years to go, but we feel we're in the right place to make sure that by 2020 we have the systems in place to go for one-person, one-vote elections.