With its presidential elections just over a month away, Guinea is moving quickly to a day of reckoning. The elections will either consolidate the major advance for democracy in Africa achieved earlier this year, when the continent’s most populous country and largest economy, Nigeria, had a peaceful transfer of power following the first-ever electoral defeat of an incumbent president in its history, or, conversely, deal a devastating setback to a fragile West African subregion just emerging from long years of conflict and still reeling from last year’s Ebola epidemic.
Guinea’s Alpha Condé won a five-year mandate as President in 2010 following polls which, while bitterly disputed amid allegations of vote-rigging by foreign intelligence services, were undeniably the freest in the country’s history. His ambitions—and the lengths to which the regime will go to secure them for him—lie at the heart of the potential crisis in this country. Even before the outbreak of Ebola, which started in the forest region of Guinea in late 2013 before spreading to neighboring countries, Condé was having a pretty tough time making a case for a second (and final) presidential term: Not only have gross domestic product growth and poverty reduction rates lagged behind even the sclerotic numbers under the dictators who preceded him (in fact, real GDP is expected to contract in 2015); the rates of urban and rural poverty both increased under the current regime, while access to basic services, including water and electricity, has declined.
While the anemic socio-economic picture is often blamed on the impact of Ebola (it undoubtedly exacerbated the situation), the fact is most of the problems predated the emergence of the disease. Lengthy legal battles waged by the government to strip the mining rights to the world-class iron-ore deposits in Simandou caused the country to miss the global commodities boom a few years ago, leading to substantial harm not just to the country’s economy but to the people. Plans for major infrastructure improvements as part of the project have been shelved while the legal battles are waged. Experts now question if the mineral wealth can even be developed at all, given depressed prices and markets awash in supplies of the steelmaking component. The tragedy is that while Guinea’s extraordinary natural resources (among other things, it holds two-thirds of the world’s largest reserve of bauxite, and prodigious amounts of gold, diamonds, iron ore, graphite, manganese, and other mineral resources) make the country potentially one of the richest in Africa, the bulk of the resources have gone undeveloped, and most Guineans still live on less than a dollar a day. In the most recent edition of the United Nations Development Programme’s Human Development Index, Guinea ranks an abysmal 179 out the 187 countries surveyed.
Moreover, this past year, in a major blow to the country’s reputation with desperately needed foreign investors, the Common Court of Justice and Arbitration, the highest tribunal of the 16-member African regional body on commercial law to which Guinea belongs, ruled that the Condé regime illegally ripped up a 25-year port management contract with a Paris-based cargo company, Getma International. The damage from the ruling goes well beyond the nearly €38.5 million judgment, coming as it does on top of the country’s score of only 25 out of 100 points on Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index; this is hardly the stuff to inspire investor confidence. (And antics like those of the President, a leftist former professor who preened for a Washington Post style section piece and sent flower tributes to North Korea’s late dictator Kim Jong-il three years after the latter’s unlamented demise, don’t help either.)
All of these factors meant that the current situation is that much more volatile—and this even as tensions continued to mount throughout this year.
In February, Condé invoked the Ebola epidemic and the supposed need to “strengthen the mobilization of local authorities” more than a year after the disease outbreak to replace the civilian Minister of Territorial Administration with an army general considered one of his closest allies in uniform. As it happens, as Minister of Territorial Administration, General Bourema Condé (no direct relation) will also be responsible for providing the logistical and technical infrastructure for the country’s Independent National Electoral Commission (CENI), which is supposed to run the polls.
Then, in March, the CENI announced that the presidential election would be held on October 11, but also that local elections, which have not been held since 2002 and have been postponed on one pretext or another throughout Condé’s presidency—notwithstanding an agreement brokered by United Nations envoy Said Djinnit in 2013 that guaranteed that the elections would take place within the first three months of 2014—would be pushed off again, this time until 2016. The problem with this delay is threefold. First, there is no basis in the Guinean constitution for these repeated delays and, consequently, as both opposition politicians and civil society leaders have pointed out in an appeal last year to French President François Hollande, none of those occupying local government offices actually possesses a legal mandate. Second, as many observers have noted, the criteria for which local officials have been retained without electoral mandate and which have been let go seem to have more to do with their perceived loyalty (or lack thereof) with respect to the incumbent central authorities than any juridical principle. Third, these same unelected local officials beholden to the incumbent for their livelihoods will be the very people—under the supervision of the newly ensconced praetorian minister of territorial administration—who will conduct the upcoming presidential vote.
In April and May, protesters supporting opposition demands for free, fair, and transparent elections in conformity with Guinea’s constitution as well as the repeated commitments made by President Condé himself have been met by force, including tear gas and live bullets. Accordingly to an Amnesty International report just released, six people were killed and more than 100 others, including children, were wounded by security services. Other observers like Human Rights Watch, for example, have more broadly denounced the country’s security services for “having used excessive lethal force, engaged in abusive conduct, and displayed a lack of political neutrality.” Adding to the tension are the blatant appeals, especially by backers of the incumbent, to ethnic divisions, notably by stoking other groups’ fears of the country’s largest tribal group, the Peul, who generally back former Prime Minister Cellou Dalein Diallo, who suspiciously lost the 2010 runoff to Condé despite beating him by more than 25 percent in the first round. A number of analysts who, like me, have lived in or worked in Guinea over the years are in agreement that we have never seen ethnic tensions as high as they are today.
Thus, it is no wonder that, in June, the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index rated Guinea’s government an “authoritarian regime,” ranking it 143 out of 167 countries scored, placing it in 36th place out of 44 countries in sub-Saharan Africa surveyed.
Despite all of this, there has been a faint glimmer of hope that the country might just pull back from the precipice. Following two months of intense negotiations, the government agreed on August 20 to give opposition parties representation in the local governments of roughly one-third of the country’s districts as well as appoint members of the opposition to two vacancies on the CENI and that the latter would clean up the voter rolls. However, two weeks later, the accord has yet to be implemented amid disputes about the details of which local governments would be affected and who would have to make way for whom. And if the promised appointments are not made immediately, there is little chance that the newly minted officials will have much scope to impact the conduct of the polls—which may well be the intention behind the foot-dragging.
However, time is running short. The international community not only did so much to bring about the elections that brought Condé to power (in 2011, President Obama even invited his Guinea counterpart to the White House as one of four African leaders representing the continent’s democratic progress), but has also kept the country afloat through the recent economic downturns and Ebola crisis with generous funding. But unless it steps up quickly to pressure the regime to meet the demands of the political opposition and civil society regarding some of the most basic conditions necessary for peaceful and credible polls, the ensuing crisis of legitimacy and very real threat of violence will constitute a giant step backwards for the country, the surrounding West Africa region, and, indeed, the entire continent.