[dropcap]O[/dropcap]PPOSITION parties and constitutional experts have slammed President Umaro Sissoco Embalo’s decision to dissolve parliament. The move has heightened fears in the coup-prone West African nation.
The Union for Change, one of the six parties with parliamentary seats, said it does not recognise Embalo’s decision on Monday to send lawmaker’s home and to call for snap parliamentary elections in December.
‘Neither authorities nor the people accept the acts of this president as legitimate,’ said the Union for Change’s permanent secretary Armindo Handem as reported by news outlet Deutsche Welle (DW).
‘He is not a president vested with authority by the People’s National Assembly,’ Handem told reporters in the capital Bissau.
The West African nation of about two million people has been in a political deadlock for months because of divisions between parliament and the presidency.
Handem also said parliament, which he underlined was a ‘a legally and constitutionally valid authority,’ needed to decide whether it would accept its dissolution by the president.
President Embalo said his decision to dissolve parliament and hold elections two years early was prompted by alleged corruption among some parliamentarians.
‘The National People’s Assembly has defended and protected, under the guise of parliamentary immunity, deputies heavily indicted for crimes of corruption, harmful administration and embezzlement,’ Embalo said in a statement released on Monday.
Fode Caramba Sanha, the head of the National Civil Society Movement called on officials to do ‘everything possible to ensure that the elections take place’ on December 18, 2022 and allow eligible voters to register.
The next elections were originally scheduled for December 2024.
But holding the elections two years early means the Election Commission has its work cut out for it.
It says the country needs to update its electoral rolls allow voters to register
Because of ‘problems in past elections,’ it is of course understandable that we should complete a new electoral roll, the acting president of the National Election Commission, N’pabi Cabi, told DW.
‘Our internal financial machine is now working to see what the amount will be needed [to do this],’ he said.
Dictatorial tendencies?
Some political observers see President Embalo as exhibiting tendencies associated with authoritarian rulers.
One of them is the constitutional lawyer Jorge Miranda, a professor at the University of Lisbon who helped draft the Guinea-Bissau constitution.
He said that under Guinea-Bissau’s constitution, the president can only dissolve parliament when there is a valid reason for doing so. But that isn’t the case here, Miranda says.
‘[Embalo] simply wants to impose constitutional amendments and thus expand his powers and concentrate his power,’ Miranda said.
‘This is a practice we see time and again with dictators.’
Embalo, 49, has served as president since February 27, 2020. His presidency was the first to come to power peacefully through the ballot since Guinea-Bissau’s independence from Portugal in 1974.
In February, Embalo said he had survived an assassination during a failed coup attempt.
Unconstitutional power grabs
Since independence, Guinea-Bissau has seen four military coups, most recently in 2012, a civil war in 1998-99, and the assassination of a president, Joao Bernardo Vieira, in 2009.
Guinea-Bissau is one of the world’s poorest and least developed countries, ranking 175 out of 189 countries on the UN’s Human Development Index.
The UN Office and Drugs and Crime say Guinea-Bissau’s porous borders and uninhabited islands are a hub for cocaine trafficking from Latin America into Africa and beyond.
