There was a time, it was 2010, when Alpha Condé embodied the dreams, the hope of an entire country. He had just become the first democratically elected president in the history of Guinea, the one who was supposed to lead her by the hand out of her misery. Eleven years, three re-elections and an Ebola outbreak later, his star has gone out of business. For some time now the accusations of corruption and nepotism had breached the population, now even the army is said to be enough. On September 5, 2021, the president was deposed, the military took power. «Liberté!», The cry that echoes on the covered streets of the capital Conakry, while the tanks parade to announce the new course. The leader of the coup special forces is Colonel Mamady Doumboya, a former French legionary of Malinkè ethnicity. At noon he shows up in front of the cameras of the Rtg State TV, wearing a camouflage uniform, the national flag behind him. And speak to the nation as a leader in pectoris: «The institutions are dissolved. The personalism of political life is over, now we will entrust the power to all the people. The embezzlement of the socio-economic situation of the country has led the republican army to take responsibility towards the Guinean people ”. The Constitution is dissolved, the borders closed. The former president “is fine, we have not wronged him a hair,” continue the insurgents.
???????????? INFO ALERT | Coup in progress #Guinea : a video shows President Alpha #Condé with some #putschists.
(The Parisian) #Rebellionpic.twitter.com/pSK4YxdB6k– Conflicts France (@ConflitsFrance) September 5, 2021
Thus vanishes the dream of former president Condé to establish the primacy of longevity in power: after changing the Constitution he could have remained at the top of the institutions until 2032, when he would have turned 94. A record that not even Robert Mugabe has managed to reach: the former father-master of Zimbabwe was ousted in 2017, when he was “only” 93 years old, denying his predictions according to which “only God could have dismissed him”. With the former Zimbabwean dictator Condé he shares much of the biography: the political struggle, the detention, the rise to power that coincided with the hope of a nation. Misplaced hopes. Like many of the dinosaurs that passed to the African thrones, Condé did nothing to improve the living conditions of the population, keeping for itself the resources coming from the exports of bauxite, of which Guinea is the main supplier of China together with Australia.
The African state ranks one hundred and seventy-eighth on the human development index, and more than half of the population lives on less than a dollar a day. To make matters even worse, in 2014 came Ebola: an epidemic that has definitively brought the country to its knees, with more than 3,000 deaths in two years. A scenario that led the military to take matters into their own hands: it had already happened in 1984, when General Lansana Conté rose to the top of the institutions after the death of the first president, Sekou Touré, who in 1958 dared to tell General Charles de Gaulle that Guinea would break away – first among the colonies – from the French motherland, becoming independent. Conté ruled for 26 years, before the “democratic revolution” of the almost namesake Condé. On balance, a Gattopardesque revolution. Now the army. Again.