With Alpha Conde, Guinea is at a crossroads again

The deadly crackdown on Guinea’s opposition movement has entered its second year, and the country is in the grip of a severe democratic backslide. With just over a fortnight until the October 18 presidential election, President Alpha Conde has pulled out all the stops to silence any pushback against his controversial bid for a third term, leaving little room for hope that the polls will be free and fair. In doing so, Conde is only cementing his fall from hero to villain over the last ten years.

At the core of the protests are constitutional changes that are giving Conde the ability to run for a third term – and, in theory, many more. This first sparked mass protests in October last year, but despite widespread opposition the president pushed through his revisions in March, effectively resetting the two-term presidential limit to zero. At least 50 people have been killed since then, and countless others arrested under Conde’s campaign of violent suppression.

Empty promises and broken dreams

The unfolding tale of Guinea’s constitutional crisis is, sadly, a familiar one on the African continent. In countries where bulwark institutions, including the parliament, judiciary and electoral bodies, typically serve to placate the president, bids to change the constitution to allow for extended stays in office can be made under the auspices of democracy.

The people of Guinea, however, have been less than accommodating. With decades of authoritarian rule still fresh in the national memory, citizens, civic groups and opposition parties took to the streets of Conakry last year to decry the revision. They were met with security forces armed to kill. Testimonies collated in a 63-page report by Amnesty International paint a brutal picture of “devastated families who described how their children lost their lives, shot in the back, chest, head or neck”.

On top of this, local mortuaries purportedly turned away the bodies of people killed during protests, leaving official accounts of demonstration deaths free to underreport the scale of the violence. According to Amnesty, the Guinea government is predictably refusing to investigate the slayings and bring justice to the perpetrators.

The ongoing crisis is a hard fall from grace for Conde, who was himself a former opposition figure jailed under previous regimes. In 2010, he became the first democratically elected president of Guinea amid great hopes that he would transform the beleaguered country after half a century of military coups and turmoil. Consequently, Conde’s election was cause for optimism for many, with the charismatic leader giving his word that things would change for the better under his presidency.

Promising to turn Guinea into an economic and democratic powerhouse, Conde did nothing to minimise expectations. He described himself as “the Mandela and the Obama of Guinea” for his commitment to freedom fighting and the hope he inspired. But a decade after his ascent, Conde’s promises have turned out to be hollow, his actions have become increasingly authoritarian and swathes of anti-democratic laws have been enacted.

The spectre of electoral fraud

A predictable victim of this democratic corrosion is the electoral process itself. Ten years of Conde’s toxic rule have left the electoral roll in a dismal condition and the electoral commission largely feckless. The use of repression tactics against opposition actors is rife – not surprising, but a marked escalation to his re-election in 2015, which had already been challenged as a fraudulent win.

This experience, coupled with that of the last two years, makes fraud in the upcoming elections virtually a certainty. A devastating blow on Guinean hopes for a democratic future, Conde’s actions since 2015 are hardly reassuring that free and fair elections are on the table this month – the institutional framework originally designed to ensure this has been too thoroughly undermined. A particularly strong shock to the system was the removal of the head of Guinea’s Constitutional Court, Kelefa Sall, a vocal critic of the president, in March 2018. Seven months later, the Minister of Justice stepped down in protest of the move, leaving a vacuum Conde was only too happy to exploit for his own benefit.

Tensions over constitutional reform have only heightened since then, and the constitutional referendum in March 2020 did little to assuage Guinean fears, with less than one-third of the population turning out amid an opposition boycott. Of those that did make it to the polls, some had their voter cards confiscated, while others told of being forced to vote yes. Media outlets reported an insufficient supply of “No” ballots at some stations. Additionally, the referendum sparked ethnic violence in the Nzérékoré region, with security forces reportedly standing by and letting people kill each other.

Opposition remains undeterred

Even so, the movement opposing Conde shows no signs of standing down. On the contrary, one of the movement’s leaders, Abdourahmane Sanoh, declared that more citizen marches will follow and urged massive, country-wide mobilizations as a civic responsibility for Alpha Conde to be removed from office.

The opposition movement has given rise to the National Front for the Defence of the Constitution (FNDC), an umbrella group of political parties, labour unions and civic groups campaigning against Conde’s “constitutional coup.” While a dozen presidential candidates have filed bids to contest the presidency against the 82-year-old Conde, the group remains divided over whether or not to boycott the election entirely.

In the meantime, major international stakeholders such as the UN Office in West Africa and the Sahel (UNOWAS), the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), the European Union (EU), France and the US have al repeatedly voiced serious concern over the credibility of Conde’s constitutional campaign and the conditions under which the elections are being organized.

All of this means that Guinea, once again, is at a crossroads and that the democratic rebirth promised by Conde a decade ago is far out of reach. As Guinea’s woes go from bad to worse, one thing is abundantly clear: the adage that you either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain has never been truer than in the case of Conde.

This article does not necessarily reflect the opinions of the editors or management of EconoTimes