GUINEA-BISSAU’s ruling junta, which seized power last month, has said that its leading general will not be allowed to run for president after handing power back to civilians.
After ousting outgoing leader Umaro Sissoco Embalo on November 26 in the wake of the presidential vote, the army suspended the electoral process and announced it was taking control of the coup-prone west African country for a period of one year.
The junta then raised suspicions that Embalo had orchestrated the coup to keep himself in power by appointing his ally General Horta N’Tam as interim president.
In a “charter of the transition” published by the presidency late on Monday, which is intended to provide a legal framework for the period under military rule, both N’Tam and the junta’s prime minister “are not eligible to stand as candidates in the presidential and legislative elections at the end of the transition period”.
Under the framework, neither will also be able to head a political party.
The charter does, however, provide for the adoption of a law offering amnesty to those who committed “acts of subversion of the constitutional order on November 26, 2025”.
It is set to be approved at a later date by a legislative body appointed by the junta.
The reasons for the coup have remained unclear, with observers and the opposition raising the possibility that Embalo engineered the takeover to halt the electoral process as he was losing at the ballot box.
After first pointing to the threat of a plot by the cocaine-trafficking hotspot’s powerful drug barons to destabilise the country, the junta last week argued that the threat of ethnic civil war justified its intervention.
“There is room for doubt about the length of the transitional period because, when it comes to the military, caution is needed when interpreting their statements,” Paulino Quade, a lawyer and professor at the Amilcar Cabral University law school, told AFP on Tuesday.
Before November’s coup, Guinea-Bissau had already undergone four military takeovers and a litany of attempted insurrections since gaining independence from Portugal in 1974.
