An icy political game leaves an island stranded
The Muizzu administration is facing criticism for the forced administrative relocation of Hirimaradhoo residents to Hanimaadhoo. By dissolving the local council before infrastructure was ready, the government has left the community without essential services or local leadership. Allegations suggest the move was a political tactic to influence elections, leaving citizens stranded on their home island while their future housing remains uninhabitable swampland.
During President Muizzu's meeting with HDh. Hirimaradhoo Council and ATSC Committee members. | Presidents Office
The grand promise behind decentralizing administrative divisions across the Maldives was supposed to be about bringing public services directly to the communities and giving locals a real voice in shaping their islands.
Instead, what we are observing are cold and calculated decisions engineered to serve narrow political agendas, with absolute contempt for how actual citizens feel.
The single most agonizing proof of this administrative cruelty is the nightmare currently forced upon the local population of HDh. Hirimaradhoo.
Midnight erasure of a living community
In a baffling move on 30 December 2025, President Dr. Mohamed Muizzu officially reclassified the inhabitants of Hirimaradhoo as residents of HDh. Hanimaadhoo, despite the glaring fact that these people were still physically living in their own homes on their own island. Following that bureaucratic decree, the Hirimaradhoo Council was formally wiped out of existence on 18 May 2026.
For a tight-knit community of roughly 300 people, that local council was not just a building, it was the vital organ keeping the island running by managing the preschool, organizing local Quran classes and handling the essential distribution of cooking gas.
By killing off the council, the state stripped the island of any leadership figure or official body to oversee daily survival, essentially evaporating the entire island from the official administrative map of the nation.
Votes extracted and people discarded
The whisper networks are loud with allegations that this forced relocation scheme was entirely driven by political greed.
Providing some heavy weight to these claims, the president of the Hanimaadhoo Council, Ali Ibrahim, pointed out that the regime re-registered Hirimaradhoo’s population to rig the scales of the Local Council Elections.
The master plan was simple, hijack the votes of Hirimaradhoo to manufacture an artificial majority within the Hanimaadhoo Council.
However, when the ballot boxes did not yield the exact victories the political puppet masters craved, the leaders who engineered this demographic chess move simply walked away, leaving the abandoned population to rot in their current misery.
Trading solid infrastructure for open seas
The irony is thick when you consider that the previous administration under former President Ibrahim Mohamed Solih actually did the work on Hirimaradhoo, successfully completing major infrastructure projects including a state-of-the-art mosque alongside functional water and sewerage networks.
Under President Muizzu's regime, however, those triumphs mean nothing. These abandoned citizens are now forced to navigate the dangerous open ocean all the way to Hanimaadhoo just to procure basic necessities or track down a single dose of basic medication.
To top off the administrative chaos, the government failed to set aside any proper budget for Hirimaradhoo, throwing the Hanimaadhoo Council into a state of severe financial panic.
A five-year wait on uninhabitable ground
While human rights and citizen emotions are casually burned for political leverage, the actual timeline for when the displaced people can even step foot permanently on Hanimaadhoo is an absolute mystery.
The plots of land supposedly earmarked for their new housing are nothing but uninhabitable swamplands right now, with estimates suggesting it will drag on for four to five long years before the ground is even fit for human survival.
It stands as a shocking display of criminal negligence that the Muizzu administration would throw the lives of an entire constituency into such dangerous limbo without putting a single basic facility in place first.
Population relocation should only happen when a community gives its genuine consent and after premium facilities are ready to receive them.
In this tragic theater, no fair vote was ever offered to find out if the population of Hirimaradhoo even wanted to migrate to Hanimaadhoo.
So today, the residents sit trapped on their native soil, systematically starved of essential services and progress, watching their entire existence grind to a complete halt.
