The head of the Guinean junta, Colonel Mamady Doumbouya, engaged, on Thursday September 21, at the UN in an ardent defense of the intervention of the military in politics after a succession of putsches in Africa, and proclaimed the failure of the Western democratic model on the continent.
“Africa suffers from a model of governance that has been imposed on us, a model that is certainly good and effective for the West, which designed it throughout its history, but which has difficulty moving on and becoming adapt to our reality,” he told the United Nations General Assembly. “Alas, I would like to say that the transplant did not take,” he added.
Through his own experience since 2021, he has “better measured the extent to which this model has above all contributed to maintaining a system of exploitation and pillaging of our resources by others, and a very active corruption of our elites,” he said. -he argued.
Colonel Doumbouya led the military coup that overthrew civilian President Alpha Condé on September 5, 2021. He has since been inaugurated president for a supposedly transitional period.
“Stop treating us like children.”
This military coup is one of many that Africa has experienced since 2020, with Mali, Burkina Faso, and, in 2023, Niger and Gabon. Colonel Doumbouya is a priori the only one of the leaders of these coups to speak this year at the UN. Exceptionally abandoning the uniform and beret for a large white boubou and a hat, he defended himself from being “another scumbag who wants to twist the neck of democracy, another soldier who wants to impose his dictatorship.”
“The putschist is not only the one who takes up arms, who overthrows a regime,” he argued, referring to the situation in different countries: “The real putschists, the most numerous, who do not subject of no condemnation, it is also those who scheme, who use deceit, who cheat to manipulate the texts of the Constitution in order to remain eternally in power. »
He himself says he took action in Guinea “to prevent our country from complete chaos.” Guinea then experienced months of protest against the modification of the Constitution by President Condé, his candidacy and his re-election to a third term.
He invoked both the maturity and youth of Africa to call for a break with the old world order while defending non-alignment. “Daddy’s Africa, old Africa, it’s over,” he said. It’s time to take our rights into account, to give ourselves our place. But also and above all the time to stop lecturing us, to look down on us, to stop treating us like children. »
