Stop treating Africa with condescension - Guineas Junta leader

Colonel Mamady Doumbouya, Guinea’s junta leader, has cautioned world leaders to stop treating Africa with condescension like children and understand that the continent has been suffering.

According to him, the suffering was borne out of the model of governance that has been imposed on Africans by the West and “is difficult to adapt to our realities, our customs and environment.”

Delivering a speech at the United Nations General Assembly in New York on Thursday, he noted that Africa is having trouble adapting to the Western model of democracy as it fails to conform to the reality of Africa.

Col Doumbouya who took power in a coup in 2021 by ousting President Alpha Condé has defended the use of military intervention as he emphasised that it was necessary to save his country from complete chaos.

Guinea is among a number of countries in West and Central Africa that have had their fair share of coup d’etats in recent years.

Last year, Col Doumbouya did give a timetable for a transition to elected government after talks with Ecowas but there has been little progress in organising a vote, the Reuters news agency reports.

At the time, news of the coup was greeted by excited crowds in the capital, Conakry, as many were relieved that President Condé had been deposed.

But the country was suspended from the regional group, Ecowas, in the wake of the military takeover, with regional leaders calling for a return to civilian rule.

Doumbouya said that African countries were being unfairly placed into boxes and forced to take sides in an ideological battle from the Cold War era, which was not relevant to their current-day relations as Africans are neither pro- nor anti-American, Chinese, French, Russian or Turkish, but were "simply pro-African".

"Placing us under the influence of this or that power is an insult. It is contempt and racism towards a continent of more than 1.3 billion people," he explained.