With neither elections nor a promised new constitution in sight, Gen. Mamadi Doumbouya's three-year junta is tightening its grip on power - even as its foreign friends salivate at the prospect of juicy mineral deals.
West Africa has seen a series of successful coups in recent years. In Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso, they took place in countries weakened by jihadist movements. Military officers took power, alleging their frustration with the performance of civilian regimes and international partners. They quickly broke with France and, more broadly, with Western countries.
Guinea offers a very different context: jihadism is still only a potential threat, and the junta is rather close to France. On the domestic scene, however, three years after taking power, the Comité national du rassemblement pour le développement (CNRD), the junta led by General Mamadi Doumbouya, is nonetheless taking an increasingly authoritarian turn. The approach of the scheduled end of the transition (end 2024) is raising tensions. The process of returning to constitutional order has made very little headway, the socio-economic situation is poor, tensions in the army persist, protests are mounting and repression is increasingly brutal. The latest and most striking episode was the disappearance in early July of Oumar Sylla alias "Foniké Menguè" and Mamadou Billo Bah, two leading figures in civil society. They were arrested in the middle of the night, outside any legal proceedings. The government claims they were abducted by unknown assailants, and it is not known whether they are still alive. Yet the junta's seizure of power was almost unanimously applauded by Guineans. How did it come to this?
After the 2021 coup
Although the coup d'état of September 5, 2021, led by the Groupement des forces spéciales (GFS), an elite military unit, was initially the result of rivalries within the army and regime of President Alpha Condé (2010-2021), it was well-received by critics. Both Cellou Dalein Diallo, president of the Union des forces démocratiques de Guinée (UFDG), the main opposition political party to Condé, and the Front national pour la défense de la Constitution (FNDC), a citizens' movement that had led the fight against Condé's political maneuvers, welcomed the coup. Guineans took to the streets en masse to celebrate Colonel Doumbouya, their "liberator". Indeed, in 2020, Alpha Condé had authorized himself a third term in office by amending the Constitution in what his critics had described as a "constitutional coup". He had won the ensuing election, organized under highly questionable conditions. Huge demonstrations organized by the FNDC and the UFDG had not been enough to make him back down, and repression had resulted in around a hundred deaths over the years.
With the junta, things had seemed to get off to a good start: the new regime released the opposition politicians and FNDC leaders imprisoned under Condé, allowed the return of exiles and made fine speeches denouncing the authoritarianism, corruption and instrumentalization of justice under the Condé regime. Doumbouya promised to organise elections, not stand in them, and return power to a civilian government. An agreement seemed possible.
Cellou Dalein Diallo and the leaders of the FNDC had pleaded with the heads of state of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) not to subject the new Guinean authorities to sanctions. They argued that the military coup d'état "corrected" Condé's constitutional coup, and wanted to believe in the junta's good faith. ECOWAS agreed to their request, merely suspending Guinea from its various bodies and adopting a few individual sanctions against certain CNRD figures (Guinea was finally reinstated in all ECOWAS bodies at the beginning of 2024).
However, the junta did not involve the core political and civil opposition to Condé in the management of the transition. The FNDC, which demanded the presidency of the National Transitional Council (CNT), the transitional legislative assembly, in order to influence the course of events, was offered only the Ministry of Youth, which it declined. In the end, the CNRD appointed as head of the CNT a civil society figure with a reputation for opportunism, and allocated only very few seats to political parties, in an obvious attempt to marginalise them. In addition, the CNRD sought to co-opt certain leaders of the UFDG and FNDC, in order to weaken these structures. It succeeded in winning back a few individuals, often of little importance or dissident within these groups.
As for the civilian government the junta appointed, it serves at its pleasure - the junta has already gone through three Prime Ministers. The ministers are mostly technocrats from Guinea's "civil society" or from the diaspora, or second-rate politicians (the government includes two generals, who retired in order to take over two strategic portfolios: Defense and Security). The government enjoys limited room for manoeuvre and is under the close control of the CNRD, which directly oversees the most sensitive issues, such as the controversial iron-ore mining project in Mount Simandou, worth billions of dollars and still not operational a decade after initial deals were struck.
Territorial administration has also come under direct military control. Military officers were appointed as governors, prefects and sub-prefects. In the municipalities, communal councils were replaced by government-appointed delegations, a way of removing what little power political parties still held. These details are important because the administration and municipalities play an important role in the organisation of elections.
Protest and repression
The leaders of the Rassemblement du Peuple de Guinée (RPG), the deposed president's party, immediately came under heavy pressure. The most prominent were charged with "corruption" and remanded in custody. One died of illness in prison, others were released, but the real heavyweights remain in detention. The junta seems to fear that they still possess levers of influence through the RPG militants and soldiers still loyal to them and through their financial resources. As for Alpha Condé, he was eventually allowed out, officially on account of his health problems. He is now based in Turkey; Guinea and Turkey grew very close during his presidency.
The CNRD is especially keen to crush the RPG because, in a country where political affiliations are largely based on ethnicity, they are competing to establish their pre-eminence on the same social base: the Malinké, one of the country's two largest ethnic groups. The CNRD is made up of former confidants of the Condé regime, often Malinké themselves (within the government, on the other hand, the CNRD has taken care to represent all ethnic groups, in classic Guinean fashion).
Cellou Dalein Diallo and his powerful, organized party, which is dominant in the Peul community, is one of the main obstacles to the junta staying in power, which is why they too were quickly targeted. In the early months of 2022, the CNRD seized one of Diallo's houses, accusing him of an unlawful acquisition, and the courts opened a corruption investigation against Diallo in another case dating back 20 years, when he was a minister. Diallo has been in exile in Senegal ever since. The junta has appointed Ousmane Gaoual Diallo, a UFDG figure known for his differences with Cellou Dalein Diallo, as government spokesman. Gaoual has declared his rival illegitimate to lead the party, and claims the party's presidency. The CNRD's aim seems to be to take control of the party or, at the very least, to cause it to implode.
In July 2022, noting that the process of returning to constitutional order was making no progress, the FNDC resumed its activities, organising a first demonstration. However, the junta had forbidden any demonstrations until the elections at the end of the transition period. Five young protesters were killed on this occasion by the defense and security forces. Since then, with subsequent demonstrations, the death toll has risen to 47. Two days after this first demonstration, two FNDC leaders were arrested and arbitrarily detained for ten months until May 2023.
The junta has also worked to tighten its control over the media and non-governmental organisations (NGO) and associations. At the beginning of 2023, the country's main private news radio and television stations began to experience "technical problems". Then, in November 2023, they saw their signal cut off by the authorities, a decision endorsed by the Prime Minister in May 2024. He accused them of spreading hate speech, going so far as to compare them to the infamous Radio Mille Collines, which had encouraged the genocide of the Tutsi in Rwanda in 1994. The internet and social networks were also cut off or restricted several times. In early September, as political parties and civil society organisations were calling for demonstrations against the junta to mark the third anniversary of the coup, the government suspended the issuance of licences to NGOs and associations, and withdrew some from those deemed to 'disturb public order'.
The hardening of the junta became even more pronounced at the end of 2023, as two major events occurred. In December, Conakry's main fuel depot exploded - paranoia or not, the authorities have not ruled out sabotage. A month earlier, a commando made of current and former soldiers, led by the son of Claude Pivi, a figure of the 2008-2010 junta, attacked Conakry's main prison and enabled Pivi to escape. Pivi is influential in the army, particularly among soldiers who hail from communities from Forest Guinea. Under Condé, he was charged in connection with a highly sensitive trial, that of the September 28, 2009 massacre. At the time, defence and security forces had attacked citizens protesting the junta at a rally in a Conakry stadium, killing more than 150 people; at least a hundred women were raped - an episode which a United Nations report qualified as a crime against humanity.
In 2023, just as the trial was finally moving forward, Pivi managed to escape in an operation that reportedly cost the lives of several GFS members. These two events shook the junta to its core. Since then, Mamadi Doumbouya has hardly left the presidential palace, whose protection has been considerably reinforced, and repression has been stepped up a notch.
A poorly controlled military
If the CNRD is on the alert, it is because it does not have full control of the military. Doumbouya led the coup d'état as head of the GFS alone - it is possible it had negotiated the neutrality of certain units beforehand, but the coup itself was perpetrated by the GFS alone. Right after the coup, Doumbouya moved to co-opt officers from other segments of the armed forces to form the CNRD.
As soon as it took power, the CNRD carried out purges, retiring all the generals (some of whom were eventually sent abroad to neutralise them thoroughly) as well as around 100 other members of the defence and security forces. The CNRD thus made room, promoting a good number of its members, who were colonels, to the rank of general.
The CNRD quickly reorganised the army's elite units. It disbanded several of them, then created a new one, the Groupement des forces d'intervention rapide (GFIR). As a result, only two elite units seem to remain: the GFS, which is a de facto presidential guard, and the GFIR, which was sent to the north-east of the country, on the border with Mali, with a mission to fight off the risk of "terrorism". This also seems like a way of keeping seasoned soldiers of uncertain loyalties away from Conakry.
What's more, the GFS, already the best-equipped and most powerful unit in the Guinean army, has been further reinforced. With a strength of around 500 men by 2021, it has since benefited from at least two waves of recruitment, each involving around 100 members.
Two episodes show the persistence of tensions within the army however. The first, mentioned above, was the escape of Claude Pivi. Pivi seems to have benefited from the support of an important unit, the Bataillon autonome des troupes aéroportées (BATA). Many of its members are from the so-called Forestiers ethnic group, originally from the south-east of the country - the same ethnic group as Claude Pivi and the bulk of the defendants in the September 28 massacre trial. These Forestiers had been recruited on the basis of ethnicity and clientelism by previous regimes. Today, many Forestiers are defiant towards the CNRD because of the trial, which Alpha Condé had prudently postponed sine die to avoid alienating them. In the days following Pivi's escape, the BATA underwent a purge: the commander and his deputy were replaced, along with a dozen other officers.
The second episode concerns the death of General Sadiba Koulibaly. A colonel at the time of the coup, he was appointed Chief of the General Staff of the Armed Forces and promoted to general, but he suddenly fell from grace in May 2023, apparently due to a rivalry with the powerful Minister of Defense, Aboubacar Sidiki Camara alias "Idi Amin". The latter appears to be Doumbouya's "godfather" within the Guinean army - it was he who had had him appointed head of the GFS in 2018. By 2023, the government had removed General Koulibaly from his command, appointing him to the Guinean embassy in Cuba. He returned to Guinea at the end of May 2024 under unclear circumstances, was arrested, sentenced and then it was announced by the authorities that he had died in custody as a result of "severe psycho-trauma" and "prolonged stress", which had led to "cardiac arrest". Rumours circulated that the CNRD suspected Koulibaly of plotting a coup, in conjunction with Alpha Condé or even the FNDC. Soon after his arrest, the CNRD carried out a new purge within the army, disbarring some forty officers.
A lack of international pressure
To date, the CNRD has been subjected to very little international pressure, in contrast to the juntas that took over Sahelian countries in the same period. Significantly, France has so far made no statement on the enforced disappearance of Foniké Menguè and Mamadou Billo Bah, and the United States have only made minimal comments.
It has to be said that the CNRD's main international sponsor is France. Cooperation in defense and security is important, and many public contracts have been awarded to French companies. General Doumbouya is a former member of the French Foreign Legion, married to a French gendarme, his children go to school in France and he holds French nationality. France, happy to see relations with Guinea improve after a deterioration in the final years of the Condé presidency and traumatised by the break-up with Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso, dares not openly criticise the CNRD's hardening.
On the other hand, the CNRD is not locked into an exclusive relationship with Paris. It has inherited a diversified diplomatic portfolio, with Guinea maintaining important economic, military and political/diplomatic relations with the United States, Russia, China, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates and Rwanda. This is due in no small part to the country's exceptionally rich mineral wealth in bauxite, gold and iron, exploited by companies from these countries. This enables whichever regime in Conakry to play one partner off against another, and to ensure that Western criticism is tempered.
The huge Simandou iron ore mine project, for example, involving the Anglo-Australian multinational, Rio Tinto and Chinese giants, Baowu and Chinalco, is attracting a great deal of interest. The sums involved are colossal: initial investments are estimated at around $15 billion, including the construction of a 600-kilometre railway. The French company Egis has been appointed as the government's consulting engineer for this project, and the American company Wabtec has won a contract worth over 250 million dollars for locomotives. However, the recent fall in iron prices resulting from tensions in the Chinese real estate market could compromise the project's profitability, and therefore its completion.
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At sub-regional level, the junta benefits from the tensions between the countries of the Alliance of Sahel States and ECOWAS. Each time ECOWAS has sought - timidly - to put pressure on the CNRD to return to constitutional order, the CNRD has made a move towards the Sahelian juntas, immediately obtaining a more conciliatory stance from ECOWAS.
Finally, the CNRD took advantage of having revived the long-awaited trial of the September 28, 2009 massacre to counter criticism on the theme of human rights and try to reinforce its international credibility. Just after the verdict, on August 1, the government spokesman took the opportunity to celebrate Doumbouya's commitment to "strengthening judicial institutions and promoting the rule of law".
No elections in sight but domestic pressure builds
This context allows the CNRD to carry out a severe crackdown without coming under any real international pressure. Instead, the pressure could come from within. In February 2024, the trade unions successfully staged a three-day general strike to secure the release of an imprisoned union leader. In addition, the economic situation is deteriorating, all the more so after the explosion of the fuel depot. Guineans are complaining about the high cost of living and about power cuts, while public finances are in the red. Protests against the high cost of living were planned by members of the FNDC and their allies, but the kidnapping of their leaders in July 2024 put them on hold.
Last June, the Prime Minister announced that, contrary to the CNRD's commitment, the presidential election would not take place at the end of 2024, but possibly in 2025. He did also say that the referendum to adopt the new Constitution would take place at the end of 2024, but that too seems unlikely, given that while the government presented only recently a "preliminary draft" of the Constitution to the CNT, and that it also intends to complete a population census and the production of a new electoral roll before the election, processes which have barely begun.
There is in fact no indication that the junta wants to hand over power. Although Mamadi Doumbouya himself remains discreet, those close to him are multiplying promotional campaigns and soccer tournaments in his name, some noted popular singers have been releasing praise-songs calling him to remain in power, and Karamo Solo, Doumbouya's own marabout has made a statement to this effect, suggesting that he is not without ambitions. Most recently, the President of the CNT maintained that the Constitution could not "individualise" - meaning that it could not prohibit figures associated with the transitional regime from taking part in future elections, contrary to the provisions of the Transition Charter.
These sequences are familiar to those who followed Guinea at the time of Captain Dadis Camara's junta. It all ended with a massive mobilisation of the opposition - and the September 28 massacre.
Vincent Foucher is a research fellow at Les Afriques dans le Monde, a research unit of the French National Centre for Science Research based at the Institut d'études politiques in Bordeaux. He holds a PhD in political science from the School of Oriental and African Studies. He was a senior analyst at the West Africa office of the International Crisis Group in Dakar from 2011 to 2017. He has done research on the separatist insurgency in Casamance, southern Senegal, on the politics of transition in Guinea and Guinea-Bissau and on the Boko Haram insurgencies in the Lake Chad Basin. Joseph Petit is a journalist who has been reporting on Guinea for several years.
