Guinea-Bissau: New president to be sworn in on Thursday despite court challenge

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Guinea-Bissau: New president to be sworn in on Thursday despite court challenge

5:28 CAT | 24 Feb 2020

Umaro Sissoco Embaló, who has been declared the winner of the recent presidential elections in Guinea-Bissau, has confirmed that he will take office on Thursday, saying that the ceremony will be a low-key one to keep costs down.

In comments to journalists moments after arriving at Bissau’s Osvaldo Vieira Airport from Dakar, Senegal, Sissoco Embaló – a major-general whom results published by the National Electoral Commission (CNE) show as the winner of the 29 December second round of the presidential elections – confirmed that Thursday would be inauguration day.

Asked by reporters whether he intended to take office even without outstanding legal challenges relating to the vote count having been dealth with, Sissoco Embaló said the Supreme Court “will have time” to do its work.

“I’ll let the Supreme Court do its job and I’ll do my political work,” he said. “There will be two phases to this. There is one symbolic thing – as I have always said, my taking office would not cost the state coffers.”

The Supreme Court, which in Guinea-Bissau also serves as the electoral court, has ordered the CNE to start the process of verifying the national consolidation of regional results from December’s elections – a process that has not yet been undertaken.

On Friday, the standing committee of the Movement for Democratic Alternation (Madem-G15), the party that supported Sissoco Embaló for president, instructed its parliamentary group to request with “urgency” a session for him to take office.

The CNE, which published results handing victory to Sissoco Embaló, with 53.55% of the vote against 46.45% for Domingos Simões Pereira of the PAIGC, the largest party in the current parliament, has said that it has concluded all its duties with regard to the electoral process.

In his comments to journalists, Embaló stressed that the country must have “priorities” and that instead of thinking about “taking office and spending more money”, it must “pay the teachers, because the children have to study.”

Guinea-Bissau’s society, he argued, is “like this for lack of school”. He pledged that the motto of his term in office will be “book in hand”, meaning that “we have to put books in the hands of children.”

Sissoco Embaló said that in the last few weeks he has been in Ethiopia, where an African Union summit took place as well as an extraordinary summit of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS).

Source: Lusa