Condé Is an Enemy of Constitutional Democracy

As was to be perfunctorily expected, Ghana’s President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, who also doubles as Chairman of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), was reported to have roundly condemned the Sunday, Sept. 5, military overthrow of Guinea’s President Alpha Condé, a university professor who was popularly and democratically elected to the Guinean Presidency in 2010, but having served out his constitutionally stipulated two five-year terms of office decided to amend his country’s Republican Constitution in order to enable him to serve an unconstitutional third term (See “Akufo-Addo Condemns Military Overthrow of Guinea President Alpha Condé” Modernghana.com 9/6/21).

It is rather odd that Nana Akufo-Addo would be condemning the perfectly legitimate ousting of the 83-year-old President Condé – some reliable sources claim Mr. Condé to be 87 years old – and be calling on the military leaders who overthrew this “constitutional scofflaw” to lay down their weapons and return to the barracks. Well, for starters, once Prof. Condé illegally violated the terms of his legitimacy and the long and fiercely fought and won Guinean Republican Constitution, the President immediately lost his legitimacy and credibility. This is what all progressive African leaders ought to be talking about and condemning, rather than cynically and cavalierly presuming the Guinean people to genuflecting toadies perpetually at the beck and call of insufferable pathological megalomaniacs like Prof. Condé.

Indeed, had Nana Akufo-Addo paid sedulous heed to the spontaneous jubilation that greeted the coup among Guinea’s civilian population on the streets of Conakry, that nation’s capital, and elsewhere around that country, he would have been far more careful and measured with his call for the coup-plotters, led by Col. Mamadi Doumbouya, the former Condé-appointed Head of the elite Guinean Special Forces, to hand over power and beat a retreat to the barracks. In his address to the nation, following the long-expected landmark and auspicious ousting of President Condé, Col. Doumbouya rightly noted that the deposed leader had scandalously morphed into a sinisterly self-serving civilian dictator, perhaps in the incarnation of the late President Ahmed Sekou Touré, Guinea’s first postcolonial leader, and come to envisage the Presidency and the Sovereign Democratic Republic of Guinea as his private and personal property.

What is even more significant for Ghana’s President Akufo-Addo – some of my Guinean friends call him “Kofi Addo” – to have strictly underscored in his address to both the coup-plotters and the people of Guinea is the fact that in Ghana, any dastardly attempt by any democratically elected President to brazenly and egregiously amend the Constitution so as to enable him/her to overstay his/her tenure, would very likely have ended in massive bloodshed. You see, in Ghana, elections are known to be routinely rigged in favor of the President or Leader of the ruling political party, but not in favor of a President who has served out his constitutionally stipulated two, four-year terms in office. In other Francophone West African countries, namely, Niger and Chad, for only two of the most striking examples, the sort of megalomaniacal mischief rigged up by President Condé has been fiercely met with the prompt ouster of the key political barbarians involved.

This is very healthy for the growth and development of the civilized culture of constitutional democracy that has already firmly taken roots in the West African Subregion and ought to be emulated elsewhere on the African Continent, especially in places like Uganda, Cameroon, Rwanda and Burundi, for just a handful of ready examples, and the entire West African Subregion itself, of course. Ultimately, however, there is a deleterious downside to military putsches. And it is, of course, the long-proved fact that soldiers, by the very nature of their profession, do not good politicians or democrats make. And this is fundamentally because the institution of the army or the military does not operate on democratic principles. Which is why Col. Doumbouya’s coup d’état could only come as cold comfort to the Guinean people, once the proverbial dirt settles and the stark reality of autocratic military culture or “discipline” sinks into the minds of the Guinean civilian populace.

Now, therefore, what needs to happen, and promptly so, is for the Doumbouya Gang to promptly roll out a precise and definitive timetable for a credible and feasible return to civilian rule and political culture. You see, we have been there before, once upon a time. Coups, irrespective of publicly stated rationale or intention of their leaders, can be very infectious, although military rule is not widely known to have served any productive or positive long-term purpose anywhere in the world.

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By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD

English Department, SUNY-Nassau

Garden City, New York

Sept. 6, 2021

E-mail: [email protected]