With a bang on the desk, the President of the Constitutional Council proclaimed on Sunday March 24 the final list of candidates for the Chadian presidential election set for May 6. Among the ten candidates selected, the president of the transition Mahamat Idriss Déby, brought to power by a group of generals following the death of his father three years ago, has all the cards in hand to win the election and remain in power. head of state for as long as he wishes.

A series of measures discreetly introduced into the new Constitution allow him to follow, if he wishes, in the footsteps of his father who ruled Chad undividedly for more than thirty years. Changes that went unnoticed at the time of the adoption of the new fundamental law by referendum on December 17, 2023 at the end of a hotly contested process.

“At that time, the debate was monopolized by the form of the State, unitary or federal,” explains Brice Mbaïmon, an opponent and member of the National Transitional Council (CNT), which serves as a substitute Parliament. He had not then noticed the “detail in which the devil was hidden”.

It was only when studying the draft law on the electoral code a few months later to prepare his candidacy for the presidential election that his attention was drawn to article 145: “the President of the Republic is elected for one mandate five years of direct universal suffrage. He is eligible for re-election once for a consecutive term. »

“In other words, power for life! »

The parliamentarian is then certain to discover the term “consecutive” for the first time. “The initial text stipulated that the president can be re-elected only once to prevent him from remaining in power indefinitely,” he recalls. Initially believing in a typo, he discovered with amazement when opening the Constitution that, not only was the term “consecutive” present, but also that the “lock” preventing, in article 282, any constitutional modification affecting the number of presidential mandates has disappeared. “In other words, power for life! », worries the opponent.

To find the origin of this change, he searches his archives and goes back to the resolutions of the inclusive and sovereign national dialogue of 2022, the major conference which laid down the founding principles of the transition despite the boycott of part of civil society and of the opposition. The text does recommend: “A five-year mandate renewable only once without the possibility of constitutional revision for the President of the Republic. »

An ad hoc committee then drafts a first version of the new basic law where the president is “re-electable only once,” according to the resolution. “There was no ambiguity about that,” confirm several members of the committee. “However, the final version violates the recommendations of the dialogue,” notes opposition councilor Nobo N’Djibo with bitterness. Other advisers suspect a “sleight of hand”, which occurred on the very day of the CNT vote.

An accusation that the president of the law commission, Jacques Laouhingamaye Dingaomaibé, firmly rejects. “The two versions are identical on this point,” he assures. The text is the fruit of scientific work which should not suffer from any unnecessary controversy, even less more than six months after its adoption! »

“The Constitution has been manipulated for the benefit of the powers that be.”

Between the committee and the CNT, the text was submitted to the Council of Ministers. According to an anonymous source who followed the entire process, it is at this level that the text would have been modified. The minister secretary general of the government at the time, Mahamat Haliki Choua, responsible for transporting the text, however claims to have “no memory” of it.

The text adopted by referendum is not subject to any appeal and many opponents are now biting their fingers for not having paid more attention to the text they were voting for. “Our amendments to improve the bills are never taken into account, so we get tired, we intervene less and less, leading the population to believe that the CNT is just a simple recording chamber,” adds Nobo N’Djibo.

“In Chad, as elsewhere in Africa, the Constitution has never been sacralized but rather manipulated at will and for the benefit of the powers in place,” believes the jurist and political scientist Eugène Ngartebaye. In 2005, 2008 and 2020, President Idriss Déby had already had the Constitution modified in the same direction and, on the eve of his death, was re-elected for a sixth term. “Twenty years later, we are back to square one and the hopes raised by the transition are dashed,” he sighs.

On March 2, 2024, despite his initial promise to return power to civilians at the end of the transition, Mahamat Idriss Déby was nominated as candidate by the Patriotic Salvation Movement, the party founded by his father in 1990 and which did not not lost a single election since then. The party’s former spokesperson, Jean-Bernard Padaré, now chairs the Constitutional Council and its members are largely in the majority within the National Election Management Agency.

“Masquerade”

The young 39-year-old general will face his prime minister at the polls, the former opponent Succès Masra, suspected by his former comrades in the struggle of having made an agreement with those in power to let the head of state win. He will also face former Prime Minister Albert Pahimi Padacké who is trying his luck for the fourth time.

But in N’Djamena, this presidential election still arouses little interest and many Chadians share the feeling of an election with a result known in advance. Under these conditions, the civil society platform Wakit Tama calls for a boycott of the presidential election to “contest the legitimacy of this charade”, according to its spokesperson Soumaine Adoum. Brice Mbaïmon, for his part, chose to go anyway: “Defeatism is not my hobby,” he explains. As long as the supporters of the regime perpetuate their predatory system we will taunt them with our presence. »