Guinea: Alpha Condé plays same game as Alassane Ouattara for the presidential election

Despite a wave of protests, delegates of the ruling party in Guinea on Thursday pleaded for the outgoing president, Alpha Condé, to be their candidate in the presidential election.

The choice could stir up new tensions in Guinea. The party of the Guinean president Alpha Condé asked him, Thursday, August 6, to be its candidate for the presidential election of October and thus to seek a third term, despite the wave of protests that this prospect has raised for months in the country.

“It emerges from the speeches a plea to President Alpha Condé to accept the will of the people to be the RPG’s sole candidate in the presidential election,” the deputy in charge of the synthesis of the convention’s work, Diakagbé Kaba, told delegates of the Rassemblement du peuple de Guinée (RPG).
“I take note, you have heard, I take note”, replied Alpha Condé to them at the end of the afternoon.

“If you want me to accept your proposal, you have to commit to returning the RPG to what it was, a party that leaves no one behind,” he added, citing women, the young and the most disadvantaged.

Some 350 cadres of the RPG, gathered since Wednesday in the People’s Palace compound, have multiplied the praises to the head of state, 82 years old, absent from the convention. Alpha Condé, elected in 2010 and re-elected in 2015, has not yet formally stood for a third term, repeating for months: “It is my party that will decide”.