Africa News blog

Will Guinea accept Konate’s gift?

One of the first things you see when you arrive at the airport in Conakry is a poster of General Sekouba Konate, wearing fatigues, sunglasses and a red beret.

Drive into the city, and interspersed among the campaign billboards that cover the sides of major roadways, you’ll see more Konate posters – including one bearing the words “Sentinel de la Paix”, bringer of peace.

It seems appropriate to pay homage to the leader of Guinea’s military junta, who surprised many Guineans and much of the world for pushing hard to transfer his power to a civilian through free and fair elections – something the West African state has never experienced before.

“I don’t know of another soldier in Guinea who would have done that,” said General Ibrahim Balde, the head of Guinea’s national guard and election security forces during an interview last week. “What he has given the country is a real gift.”

Nearly five months after the first round of elections and more than a week after the run-off, Guinea’s electoral commission on Monday named veteran opposition leader Alpha Conde president-elect over rival Cellou Dalein Diallo, something the Supreme Court must now ratify.

But the process up to this point has been tortuous and turbulent, with clashes between rival political camps - including rioting in some neighbourhoods on Monday and overnight that security forces pushed back with live rounds.

Analysts are worried more trouble lies ahead.

Guinea’s election – press conferences or scrums?

It remains to be seen if either candidate in Guinea’s presidential election knows how to run a country.

But after Sunday’s run-off election, during which the candidates wanted to say a few words to journalists after casting their ballots, it is clear that neither knows how to run a press conference.

Both events were like 1990s grunge mosh pits, only without the band, and with heavily armed soldiers herding the cameramen, photographers and text journalists together into a sweating and nervous mass.

Cellou Dallein Diallo’s took the cake. First of all, he was four hours later than initially scheduled. That gave the press corps lots of time to quietly set up cameras and tripods around his polling station, everyone negotiating sensibly and amicably for position. But it was all for nothing.

The scene suddenly exploded upon his arrival, with bulky soldiers in red berets and carrying automatic weapons storming through the journalists to make way for Diallo. People fell over backwards into the neighbourhood kids, who were chanting and leaping, pushing the other way in a volatile mix.

At one point, a soldier started whacking someone with the antenna of his walkie-talkie, sending the victim stumbling backwards into a table.

For a small taste of what it was like in Guinea during the Nov. 7 vote, have a look at this video.

Ready for elections in Ivory Coast and Guinea?

Barring last-minute upsets, Ivory Coast will go to the polls on Sunday, marking the end of a five-year limbo in which the incumbent president has ruled without any real mandate and the country stagnated without a sense of identity or direction.

The following weekend, neighbouring Guinea may finally hold the serially delayed second-round of its presidential election, hoped to end nearly two years of military rule whose defining moment was a massacre of pro-democracy marchers by the security forces in a sports stadium.

It can only be a good thing if the elections allow Ivory Coast and Guinea to draw a line under their past and move on. But is either country actually ready for them?

In Guinea any semblance of voting on a candidate’s policy proposals or merits has been jettisoned after June’s first round which, to no great surprise, set the stage for a run-off between Cellou Dallein Diallo and Alpha Conde — representatives of the large Peul and Malinke communities respectively.

Instead of hearing a meaningful political debate before the decisive second round, Guinean voters have watched a struggle for control of the national election commission, with both sides afraid of it falling into the hands of the rival ethnic group.

The stand-off was only solved by appointing a Malian as the temporary president of the body.

Things are only marginally better in Ivory Coast. One candidate, ex-premier and former IMF deputy chief Alassane Ouattara, declared this week there is “no way” that President Laurent Gbagbo could win the election, effectively pre-empting the choice of the Ivorian voter.

Togo’s tension: democracy vs. stability

Maybe it was too early in the morning. Or perhaps their hearts just weren’t in it.

Whatever the case, a rally called by Togo ‘s opposition leaders for early Tuesday — meant to voice full-throated outrage over the March 4 election they say was rigged to favour the incumbent — was a near no-show.

Not even the opposition leaders turned up.

“It was a thousand or so youths, they burned a couple of tires and the police dispersed them,” said a Reuters witness. “The opposition leaders did not even come.”

Unclear if this was a good thing.

Togo’s March 4 election was seen as a test for democracy in Africa, a continent notorious for coups and flawed polls that have undermined efforts toward civilian rule. International observers have said the poll appeared fair.

But it was also seen as a test for Togo’s own ability to come through a presidential vote without bloodshed.

Guinea tests Western influence in Africa

Whether Guinea’s absent junta leader Moussa Dadis Camara makes it back to his home country or not will be the latest test of Western powers’ dwindling influence in Africa.

Ex-colonial power France and the United States — desperate to avoid a failed state in a region which is already attracting the interest of narco-traffickers and other criminals — have both made it clear Camara should be kept well away.

French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner warned Camara’s homecoming after treatment in Morocco following an assassination bid could spark an all-out civil war.

After talks with French and U.S. diplomats, caretaker junta leader Sekouba Konate announced last week that he would work with a prime minister from the opposition in a transition government that would hold democratic elections.

It all seemed to be going according to the script until Camara flew into Burkina Faso on Tuesday night, walking (with some help) and talking.

It seems Camara thought he was heading back to Conakry and was livid when he was told the Moroccan airplane had pitched up in the Burkinabe capital Ouagadougou.

A delegation of Camara allies immediately flew out to fetch him, but headed into a row with Konate. Guinea-watchers have been told to look out for some kind of statement from Burkina’s President Blaise Compaore on what happens next.

Guinea junta’s new democracy pledge

Guinea’s acting ruler has promised to restore civilian rule and made clear that military leader Moussa Dadis Camara will be out of action for some time after an assassination bid – raising questions over whether Camara will return from hospital in Morocco.

Although Sekouba Konate did not explicitly declare that he had taken over from Camara, his pledge to create a national unity government with opposition figures has effectively sidelined Camara and made him the key player in the junta for now.

The timing of the move is significant, coming little more than a day after Konate visited Camara in a Moroccan hospital and then went on to hold talks with U.S. and French diplomats in Rabat who encouraged him to begin a transition to civilian rule.

But a healthy slice of caution is required.

Although Konate is a professional soldier who has not shown any personal political ambition, he is a junta stalwart who has enjoyed the trappings of power and whose democratic credentials have yet to be tested.

He promised to retire from the scene if no longer needed – a pledge reminiscent of Camara’s early vows that his rule was only temporary.

The threat of a counter-coup from within Guinea’s unruly army can never be ruled out. The prospect of a return to civilian rule will in particular alarm those soldiers who took part in mass killings and rapes on September 28 last year and might face justice over the atrocities which brought down global condemnation on the junta.

Lessons for coup makers?

President Barack Obama’s decision to end trade benefits for Guinea, Madagascar and Niger shows some stiffening of Washington’s resolve to act against those seen to be moving in the opposite direction to demands for greater democracy in Africa.

But the fact that new benefits were simultaneously extended to Mauritania may also give a lesson in how would-be coup makers should best behave if they want to get away with it.

In the first three countries, there is no clear idea as to how they will return to a form of government more acceptable in the eyes of Western countries or those of their neighbours.

Guinea and Madagascar in particular both look in real danger of much greater turmoil.

In Mauritania, President Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz overthrew an elected president in 2008 – the country’s first freely elected president – but managed to get elections organised and himself voted into office by July, although the ballot was condemned by his opponents.

Perhaps crucially for the Western support, he also swiftly promised to cooperate in fighting al-Qaeda in the Sahara.

Uncertainty over transitions in both Guinea and Madagascar has stoked internal instability as well as costing foreign assistance.

Is the “wonga” running out for Africa’s mercenaries?

Africa’s infamous “dogs of war” may still be going strong, but it seems the rewards of the mercenary life aren’t quite what they used to be.  

Only this month, Britain’s Simon Mann won a pardon for his part in a foiled 2004 coup attempt on Equatorial Guinea, an old-style adventure whose glittering prize was the central African state’s multi-billion-dollar oil riches.

Contrast that to reports last week that a band of South African and other mercenaries had flown into the chaos of Guinea to train up a militia loyal to the incumbent junta leader — on a salary put at barely $3,500 a month. 

That’s not bad money in most parts of the world, and there were reports that the company involved would have won extra remuneration in the form of minerals from Guinea’s fecund soil.

But it would have been peanuts to Mann, whose Equatorial Guinea coup was known as the “Wonga Plot” after the English slang for the money they hoped to yield in buckets. 

While mercenaries are often seen as in the business of bringing governments down, it is not new that they should be trying to prop one up, as is happening in Guinea.

Mann himself is reported to have worked for the Angolan government in the 1990s to help it wrest back control of a key port from rebels, and again for Sierra Leonean authorities in the 2002 civil war there.

Unwinnable battles for West African political opposition?

Do Guinea’s dark days reveal junta’s colours?

In Guinea this week, at least 157 people were killed when security forces opened fire on a demonstration against military junta leader Captain Moussa Dadis Camara, according to a local rights group.

Much has changed since I visited the country in April and May this year. Then, the young Camara — or “Dadis” as most Guineans refer to him – did not look particularly dangerous despite his images staring out from walls, buildings and roundabouts all over Conakry, and cassettes of his speeches on sale in the markets.

“Long live peace” was the graffiti of choice, and if expectations of real improvements in living standards were low, at least soldiers were in the barracks rather than shooting in the streets.

What was clear then was that a certain degree of patience had been extended to Camara both domestically and internationally.

Relief that the power vacuum opened by the death of former President Lansana Conte had not collapsed into violence, and populist anti-corruption rhetoric carried most Guineans through the first uneasy months. At the same time the international community swallowed its distaste for a military regime with the sweetening promise of elections by the end of the year.

As long as peace and the election timetable held, and Camara himself wasn’t tempted into standing, Guineans and foreign partners would grit their teeth and give Camara and his National Council for Democracy and Development (CNDD) breathing space to manage the transition.

That patience, which had shown signs of strain in recent months, has now run out. International condemnation has been swift and harsh for the deaths at the demonstration.