BISSAU (Reuters) – Guinea-Bissau’s opposition has vowed to bring the West African country to a standstill on Thursday in a dispute over when the five-year mandate of President Umaro Sissoco Embalo expires.
Opposition leaders say Embalo’s term runs out on Thursday, while Guinea-Bissau’s Supreme Court of Justice has ruled that it ends on September 4.
Embalo said on Sunday that presidential and legislative elections would not be held until November 30, heightening tensions over the electoral calendar that risk unrest in a nation with a history of military coups.
“We are going to paralyse the country completely on February 27 … Bissau will be a dead city,” said a statement issued on Tuesday by the PAI Terra Ranka coalition, led by the former ruling PAIGC party, and the Cabaz Garandi coalition.
Parliamentary elections scheduled for November 2024 were indefinitely postponed by the government, which cited technical and financial obstacles, scrambling the electoral calendar.
Embalo, a 52-year-old former army general, inherited a long-running political impasse in a country where coups and unrest have been common since independence from Portugal in 1974.
He has said there have been two attempts to overthrow him during his presidency, the latest in December 2023.
Embalo dissolved the opposition-controlled parliament after that last incident which involved gunfire and clashes in the capital, accusing it of passivity.
Embalo, who was in Moscow on Wednesday for talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin, said last year his wife had dissuaded him from running for a second term in elections.
The West African regional bloc ECOWAS plans to deploy a mission to Guinea-Bissau to try to resolve the dispute over the political calendar, it said in a statement last week.
However, the opposition refused to meet ECOWAS representatives during its visit, accusing the mission of bias, the PAI Terra Ranka coalition said on Monday.
(Reporting by Alberto Dabo; Writing by Anait Miridzhanian; Editing by Robbie Corey-Boulet and Mark Heinrich)
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