The military coup on Wednesday, 26 November that swept away President Umaro Sissoco Embaló did not come as a surprise. Embalo, a retired general who camouflaged as an elected president, was a lawless leader who consistently trampled the country’s constitution under his feet. He had a sense of entitlement and a culture of impunity.
In my 9 February 2024 column titled, “The civilian coups in Senegal, Guinea Bissau and ECOWAS ambivalence,” I pointed out that: “There are civilian or constitutional coups in Guinea Bissau and Senegal, yet the regional body, the Economic Community of West African States, ECOWAS, is pretending otherwise. It appears interested only in military coups, not those carried out by its bosses in the Heads of State Summit.”
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I complained against Embalo’s lawlessness and the complicity of his colleagues in the region: “In May, 2022, President Embalo carried out a constitutional coup by dissolving parliament, citing ‘persistent and unresolvable differences’ with the parliament. Rather than ECOWAS sanctioning him, it elected Embalo, two months later, as the Chair of the Authority of Heads of State and Government of ECOWAS!”
When the parliament was restored after new elections on 4 June, 2023, Embalo again refused to allow it function.
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On 4 December, 2023 he carried out another civilian coup by sacking the parliament under the unsubstantiated pretext that Speaker Domingos Simoes wants to overthrow him. He also forced the Supreme Court President to resign, and put the court itself under armed siege.
I had written that: “Despite these civilian coups by a man who was the sitting Chairman of ECOWAS, the regional body has kept mute in cold complicity. But ECOWAS will yell if there is a military coup.” This, exactly, is what is going on now with bodies like ECOWAS, the African Union and the West African Elders Forum condemning the coup as “a blatant attempt to disrupt the democratic process”. Seriously? Was Guinea Bissau under Embalo a democracy?
Nigeria, the regional power house, was even more dramatic. The statement from its Foreign Ministry threatened thus: “We warn that the perpetrators of this act will be held accountable for their actions, which threaten to plunge the nation into chaos and reverse the hard-won gains of its democracy”. The fact is that the so-called “hard-won” gains of democracy are neither felt nor visible in that country, which is one of the ten poorest in the world.
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The Nigerian government also urged “all actors involved to exercise utmost restraint, prioritise peaceful dialogue, and respect the will of the people of Guinea-Bissau as expressed through their ballots and the peaceful conclusion of the election with the announcement of results by the electoral management body.” The issue is that the will of the people expressed through elections, especially into parliament, has not been allowed to hold sway. Embalo was, in fact, a danger to democracy in Guinea Bissau just as Cote d’Ivoire’s President Alassane Outtara. The latter is on an illegal and unconstitutional fourth term in office where the constitution that brought him to power dictated a maximum two-term. If Nigeria were to have a more appreciative understanding of democracy and those who endanger it, the Tinubu administration would have asked Embalo to step down, and can still demand that Outarra and Togo’s Faure Gnassingbe, who rape their countries’ constitutions, should step aside and allow democracy to thrive.
So, the fact is that Embalo’s cup was full. His last gamble was to conduct so-called elections on Sunday, 23 November. In embarking on this, he had barred the main opposition party, the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde, PAIGC, and its candidate, former Prime Minister Domingos Pereira, from the elections. He might have hoped with that to have an easy return to the Presidency. But when the PAIGC swung support to a rival candidate, Fernando Dias, and over 65 per cent of registered voters turned out, Embalo panicked. As the election results tumbled in, he was not sure of the outcome. So on Tuesday, he unilaterally declared himself as the winner of the polls. He might have assumed that, once again, he had executed a successful civilian coup against the people.
But the next day, soldiers, led by General Denis N’Canha, head of the military presidential guard, picked him up in the Presidential office and placed him under detention. Also detained are opposition leaders Dias and Pereira, Interior Minister Botché Candé, Army Chief General Biague Na Ntan and Deputy Chief, General Mamadou Touré. The coup leaders claimed there was a plot by unnamed politicians, in collaboration with a notorious drug baron, to destabilise the country. They closed borders, imposed a night-time curfew and stopped the electoral process. They proclaimed the establishment of a “High Military Command for the Restoration of National Security and Public Order.” Equally, they announced that a General Horta Nta would lead a military transition government over a one-year period. Effectively, this week’s coup that ended Embalo’s five-year reign, has ushered in the country’s tenth coup.
Guinea Bissau, along with its sister island of Cape Verde, was an African promise which turned into a nightmare due partly to the crudity of the Portuguese colonisers. In order to destroy the future country, the Portuguese secret service, the Policia International e de Defesa do Estand, PIDE, decided to assassinate the brain box of the liberation movement, Amilcar Cabral. Employing renegades of the movement, Cabral was on 20 January, 1973, assassinated in Guinea-Conakry. A purge of the movement followed. It was therefore a partly broken liberation movement that took over the country under the leadership of Luis Cabral in 1974. Unfortunately, internal crisis persisted and in 1980, President Luis Cabral was overthrown in a coup. The Cape Verde part of the country, where the Cabrals come from, protested against the coup by breaking away to establish a separate country.
So, when this week, Portugal in reaction to the coup asked for a return to constitutional order, and urged “all those involved to refrain from any act of institutional or civic violence”, my mind raced back to how Portugal had contributed in wrecking the country. For me, there should be no tears for President Embalo but that is not to say the aims of the coup plotters are clear. Also unclear are those behind it.
This coup again shows the poor state of the African continent and calls to question the effectiveness of the African Union. In West Africa alone, there are now five countries under military rule: Niger, Burkina Faso, Guinea, Guinea Bissau and Mali. There are explosions in countries like Sudan, Somalia and hitherto peaceful and cultured Tanzania. Insecurity is so rife that Nigeria, this week, declared a state of emergency on security. Indeed, Africa needs a state of emergency.
Owei Lakemfa, a former secretary general of African workers, is a human rights activist, journalist and author.
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