I would like to extend to Mr. Dennis Francis the warm congratulations of the Guinean delegation on his outstanding election to the presidency of the General Assembly at its seventy-eighth session. Before this Assembly. I assure him of the support of my country.
At the same time. I pay a well-deserved tribute to his predecessor. Mr Csaba Korosi of Hungary.
I thank Secretary-General Antonio Guterres for the dedication with which he leads our Organization.
By coming to take part in the work of the seventy-eighth session. I would like to fulfil the duty of conveying the warm greetings of the sovereign people of Guinea. My country continues to place hope in the United Nations capacity to find appropriate solutions to the questions that our world continues to face. In that context, we believe that the fundamentals that underpinned the creation of our Organization must adapt to the profound changes in our society. The objective of the President’s watchwords for this session — peace, prosperity, progress and sustainability — is topical and evocative and deserves our particular attention.
I turn to the epidemic of coups d’etat in Africa. In the wake of the coronavirus disease pandemic, the continent has been struck by an epidemic of military putsches, particularly in the French-speaking countries south of the Sahara. Everyone condemns them. Who approves of them? Who is cheered by the sudden reappearance of a practice that we had every reason to think was over? I want to say. however, that the international community must have the honesty and correctness not to be content with merely denouncing the consequences, but also to take an interest in and address the causes.
While coups d’etat have increased in recent years in Africa, it is because there are very deep reasons, and to treat the problem we must look into its root causes. The putschist is not only he who takes up arms to overthrow a regime. I hope that we will remember that the real putschists, the most numerous, who are not subject to any condemnation, are also those who scheme, who use deceit, who cheat to manipulate the texts of the constitution in order to remain in power forever. It is those in white collar jobs who change the rules of the game while they are playing it in order to keep hold on the reins of the country. Those are the most numerous putschists.
I am one of those who. one morning, decided to shoulder our responsibilities to save our country from complete chaos. It was an insurrectional situation. None of the political stakeholders, all of which were completely neutralized at the time, had the courage or the means to put an end to the deception that we were enduring. The institutional rectification for which my brothers in arms and I assumed our responsibilities on 5 September 2021 was only a consequence of a chaotic situation that ultimately destroyed the social fabric and undermined coexistence.
Without going into exhaustive detail, we believe that the transitions under way in Africa are due to several factors, among which we can cite unkept promises, the somnolence of the people and the tinkering with Constitutions by leaders whose only concern is to maintain power indefinitely, to the detriment of collective well-being. Today Africans are more awake than ever and are deciding to take their destiny into their own hands. The unequal distribution of wealth creates endless inequalities, famine and poverty that make the daily lives of our populations increasingly difficult. Those inequalities are among the causes of events that, first and foremost, undermine coexistence. When the wealth of a country is in the hands of an elite while newborns die in hospitals due to lack of incubators, it is not surprising that in such conditions we are seeing transitions to respond to the deep aspirations of the people.
Africa suffers from a model of governance that has been imposed on it — a model that is certainly good and effective for the West, which has developed it over the course of its history, but that has difficulty adapting to our realities, customs and environment. Alas, the transplant did not take. I know that when I say this, many will immediately say to themselves. “Another idiot who wants to twist the neck of democracy”. “Another soldier who wants to impose his dictatorship”. However, let me say very clearly, without hypocrisy, without pretence and eye to eye that we are all aware that the mode of democracy that was so insidiously, skilfully and in a quasi-religious manner imposed on us after the Franco-African Summit held in La Baule. France, does not work. Various economic and social indices attest to that. This is not a value judgment on democracy itself, believe me. It is a balance sheet, an observation made over several decades of chaotic experimentation with that model in our environment at a time when the only game in town was the political game, to the detriment of the essential — the economy and the processing of our raw materials in our own countries.
Allow me to take this truth exercise a little further. With my brief but intense experience of managing a State. Guinea. I have come to better understand the extent to which that model has contributed above all to maintaining a system of exploitation, the plunder of our resources by others and the very active corruption of our elites — national leaders who have often been
granted democratic credentials based on their docility, their ability to sell off the resources and property of their people, or even their comfortable surrender to the pseudo-recommendations and injunctions of certain international institutions serving the great Powers. In that regard. I must confess that every challenge facing me is beyond all imagination. It is the same people who profess democracy, transparency and good governance and denounce corruption who dictate the rules. They are the ones who. behind the scenes, are very discreetly and slyly ramping up the pressure to make us cede our assets in one-sided contracts.
I now understand certain leaders, some of them my predecessors, who — because they were vulnerable, because they were under pressure, because they had their own baggage or especially because they had a political agenda — gave in to what was asked of them. I understand them without approving of them. Some have even reminded me that if I had a political agenda I would be less comfortable carrying out the reforms that my Government and I have instituted.
One thing is certain. We only have one concern—the well-being of the people and coexistence. That is our priority. It is why the transition that I lead has chosen to focus methodically by setting clear objectives in a precise order: the social, the economy and the political.
I place my uniform at the service of my people. I would be grateful if the international community would respect that oath and maintain a respectable distance from the divisions of all kinds that many try to fuel in our countries. The Sahel is enduring one of the most serious crises in its very long history, but it has the resources necessary to face it. Its legendary sense of diplomacy must be unleashed so that together we can speak without interference. That is why the Economic Community of West African State, whose purview is the economy, must stop involving itself in politics and favour dialogue.
We Africans are tired, exhausted of the categorizations into which everyone wants to confine us. Africa’s population is young. It did not experience the Cold War. It has not experienced the ideological wars that have shaped the world over the past 70 years. That is why we Africans are insulted by the boxes and classifications that sometimes place us under the influence of the Americans, sometimes under that of the English, the French, the Chinese, the Russians and even the Turks. We are neither pro- nor anti-American; neither pro- nor-anti Chinese; neither pro- nor anti-French; neither pro- nor anti-Russian; neither pro- nor anti-Turk. We are simply pro-African. That is all. Seeing us as under the control of this or that Power is an insult, a sign of contempt and racism towards a continent of more than 1.3 billion people.
It is important in this prestigious and influential Assembly that we understand clearly and definitively that daddy’s Africa, the old Africa, is over. With a population of more than a billion Africans, some 70 per cent of whom are totally uninhibited young people, young people open to the world and determined to take their destiny into their own hands, the time has come to realize that the structures and rules that arose in the post-Second World War era in the absence of our States, which did not yet exist, are obsolete. This is the end of an unbalanced, unfair era where we had no say in the matter. It is time to take our rights into account, to give us our rightful our place and. above all. to stop lecturing us. looking down on us and treating us like children.
The international community may rest assured that we are old enough to know what is good for us. We are mature enough to define our priorities and to design the model that corresponds to our identity, to the reality of our populations and to what we quite simply are. We would be very grateful to the international community for trusting us and letting us run our own business as it has allowed certain regions of the world — such as Asia and the Near and Middle East, to name but a few — to do. This infantilization has the worst effect on young Africans who have emancipated themselves.
In that context, we are all challenged and called on to undertake a better analysis of the situation with a view to initiating and pursuing new policies for the benefit of all. The international community must see Africa with new eyes. It must now undertake frank cooperation with it in a spirit of win-win partnership.