News Desk
FIHLADHOO — On a fine morning in one of Haa Alif Atoll’s quieter islands, something happened that may never have happened quite like this before in the Maldives, and perhaps anywhere.
Aishath Fareeda, Chief Magistrate of Fihladhoo Court, stood before a room decorated with national flags and administered the oath of office to the newly elected president of the Fihladhoo Island Council. The man she was swearing in was her husband, Mohamed Hamid.
Both of them are graduates of Sharia and Law. They live on the island with their three children. On Tuesday, they stood on opposite sides of the most formal moment in local democratic life, one administering the oath, one receiving it, and then went home together.
Fihladhoo is a small island. Its registered population is 559, of whom 250 are male and 279 female. The median age is 33. There are eight degree holders on the island and 30 people with diplomas. Like most Maldivian islands, it functions as an extended family in the truest sense. Most people know each other. Many are related. News travels fast and stays long.
That is why the moment landed the way it did. The people who packed the court that morning knew both Farida and Hamid well. They had watched them grow up, study, return and build a life on the island. Seeing one swear in the other was not just a legal formality. It was personal. Several residents described it as the most memorable thing they had witnessed in the island’s recent history.
Aishath Farida took over as Chief Magistrate of Fihladhoo Court in October last year. Her appointment to the bench on the same island where her husband would later contest the council election was coincidence, not design. But it produced a moment that no one had planned for and that no one present seemed to want to forget.
Hamid came to the council presidency on the back of a clean sweep. He received 382 votes. His team’s campaign platform, focused on social and economic change for the island, was accepted so completely by residents that the ruling PNC took every council seat and three seats on the Women’s Development Committee. It is the first time in Fihladhoo’s history that a single party has won all available seats in one election.
The swearing-in ceremony was attended by MP Abdullah Shareef, the parliamentary representative for the constituency and himself a son of Fihladhoo.
Fihladhoo has five percent foreign workers in its population, an unemployment count of seven men and five women, and a sex ratio of 90 males to every 100 females. It is, by the numbers, an ordinary small Maldivian island navigating the same pressures every outer island faces. But on this morning it had an extraordinary day, and the people there knew it.
A husband and wife, both lawyers, both public servants, both from the same small island. She administered the oath. He took it. Then the curtains came down and the work began.
