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Guinea: Legislative elections to be held Sept. 29
Guinea’s opposition and ruling parties reached an agreement to hold the country’s long-delayed legislative elections in September, the opposition said Wednesday.
Aboubacar Sylla, a spokesman for a coalition of opposition parties, said the opposition had agreed to several issues that had earlier been sticking points, including the use of a South African-based vendor – Waymark, to create the voter IDs.
Earlier the opposition had claimed that the vendor was in cahoots with the ruling party, and was planning to use the voting software to rig the elections.
“We have agreed on a realistic chronogram which could open the way for us to hold legislative elections on September 29,” he said.
The accord calls for elections on September 29 and will be signed Wednesday afternoon under the guidance of United Nations special envoy Said Djinnit, who has undertaken his own version of shuttle diplomacy in Conakry, trying to get the estranged sides to agree.
Guinea held its first democratic election in 2010. The vote was deemed be transparent overall, however, it revealed the deep ethnic between the country’s Malinke and Peul groups.
The Malinke, who represent about 40 percent of the population, backed the Malinke politician in the race, and the Peul, who represent roughly the same share of the electorate, backed Peul politician, Cellou Dalein Diallo.
The squabble over the legislative election started soon after the presidential race, with the opposition vowing they will never allow the ruling party to “steal” the race again.
Decades of unrest in Guinea had turned it into one of Africa’s poorest countries. That is a source of deep frustration to Guinea’s 11.4 million people, whose country is not only rich in gold, diamonds and timber but also has the world’s largest reserves of bauxite, the raw ingredient used to make aluminum.
Copyright 2013 The Associated Press