By Joshua Tasie
Following Guinea’s coup d’etat on 5 September led by Mamady Doumbouya, the regional bloc ECOWAS has just announced its suspension.
A high-level mission will be sent over to evaluate the situation before any further decisions are made.
But in the aftermath of the coup, there are questions that stand out: Why was it so easy to capture President Alpha Condé? Why did he ignore everyone’s warnings about Doumbouya?
And where does Conakry’s new master really come from?
Why was Alpha Condé so easily captured?
In principle, the presidential palace of Sékhoutouréya – located on the peninsula of Kaloum, in Conakry – was surrounded by a triple security cordon consisting of soldiers from the Bataillon Autonome de Sécurité Présidentiel (BASP), which was based at Camp Makambo, in the Boulbinet district, only a few kilometres away.
But in the early morning of 5 September, the small detachments, who were sporting red berets and managing the three checkpoints along the avenue leading to the palace’s entrance gate, were still sleeping.
The BASP soldiers were loyal to the President – some of them came from within the ranks of the ruling Rassemblement du Peuple de Guinée (RPG) – but were neither properly trained nor armed.
French General Bruno Clément-Bollée, who worked hard to restructure the Guinean army as per Condé’s request, said that Sékhoutouréya was “one of the worst guarded palaces in West Africa.”
Compared to how well protected the Plateau Palace in Abidjan is, “it’s night and day,” he adds.
Lieutenant-Colonel Mamady Doumbouya came down from his base at Kaleya in Forécariah, in Lower Guinea, which is about 85km away.
He headed a column made up of about 50 trucks and pick-ups armed with 12.7mm machine guns and went straight to Kaloum, where he made his entrance at around 8am on the day of the coup.
The lieutenant-colonel deployed almost the entire Groupement des Forces Spéciales (GFS), around 500 men, to the mission.
Some of these soldiers, who were heavily armed, took up positions in front of the Makambo camp to prevent the Presidential Guard reinforcements from leaving.
Meanwhile, the others – including special unit 8602, who were trained by the French and Israelis – headed for Sékhoutouréya, along with an armoured vehicle and several mortars.
Condé, a notorious insomniac, had finally fallen asleep at the first light of dawn. He had just returned a few days earlier from Sardinia (a stay which, it should be noted, was not a medical one). While there, the President had visited his friend, the Italian-Eritrean entrepreneur Makonnen Asmaron, with whom he was preparing for President Isaias Afwerki’s official visit to Conakry, scheduled for 9 September.
83-year-old Condé lives alone in an icy palace that was built by the Chinese during the time of Lansana Conté.
Djene Kaba, the first lady, resides elsewhere and his only child, Mohamed, lives in San José, Costa Rica.
At most, five or six plainclothes bodyguards are stationed on the ground floor and in front of the bay window that serves as the front door.
Upstairs is his office and bedroom, where Lieutenant-Colonel Mamadou Alpha Kaloko – head of the BASP, who had rushed to Sékhoutouréya with a handful of men as soon as the first shots were fired – came to inform him of the situation. He was also captured there.
Outside, the confrontation was brief but deadly. According to our information, about 20 presidential guards were killed, including Colonel Yemoiba Camara, commander of the head of state’s bodyguards, and at least two members of the GFS.
Guided by a BASP defector who was a regular visitor, the coup plotters blew up the glass window and rushed up the stairs to the first floor.
They tackled Kaloko to the ground, seized the President, handcuffed him after threatening him (“If you move, we’ll shoot!”), and then took him down to a ground-floor lounge where they filmed and photographed him, stunned, distraught and full of contained anger.
These images, reminiscent of those of the haggard Gbagbo couple when he was captured in April 2011, were shared around the world, along with the rather degrading pictures of Condé being paraded by his captors in the back of a 4×4 with all the windows open through the streets of Conakry.
During this time, if we are to believe a witness’s account who looked in on the scene, Doumbouya’s men “visited” the whole palace and no doubt took the bags of cash that, like most of his counterparts on the continent, Condé had kept in his room and office.
All over the capital, but particularly in the districts that favour the opposition, scenes of jubilation followed after the first photos appeared on mobile phones.
As predicted, the Ministry of Communication, the headquarters of Radio Rurale, the government newspaper Horoya and the former ruling party, the RPG, as well as those of the electoral commission were attacked and vandalised.
This mixture of certainty and leniency is directly responsible for Condé’s error of judgement, and even his near blindness towards Doumbouya.
For a few hours on 5 September, defence minister Mohamed Diané, who is very close to Condé, believed that it would be possible to launch a counter-attack and return to power with help from the regiments – presumably loyal – of the army, paratroopers and gendarmerie.
But the President’s arrest and immediate dissemination of the images on social media, a 3.0 strategy obviously thought out in advance, took the high military hierarchy by surprise and left it paralysed.
One after the other, the camps in Conakry and then in the interior of the country rallied to the coup – all the more easily because Doumbouya is a Malinke from Kankan, thus of the same ethnicity as the President, his defence minister and most of the senior army officers. Therefore, the sectarian divide played no role.
