An open letter from Popular Front to citizens of Guinea Bissau
This open letter to the people of Guinea Bissau on 7th February, 2025, marks the end of Umaro Sissoco Embaló’s presidential term. With 24 days to go until this crucial date, no serious steps have been taken to prepare for the presidential elections. The date of the next elections is not yet known. These dangerous manoeuvres by Embaló and his dictatorial regime constitute a significant provocation for the people of Guinea Bissau, who are therefore urged to take a patriotic leap to defeat this attempted constitutional coup d’état.
In reality, the Guinean people have been taken in by a mafia led by a dictatorial regime that disrespects human dignity and the basic principles of a democratic state. Over the last five years, democracy has been orphaned and lost all meaning to the detriment of the cult of personality based on the systematic trivialisation of laws and republican institutions.
The will of the people has been supplanted by a single individual whose appetite for power has reduced Guinea Bissau to a circus of anarchy. The constitution of the republic, the Legal Charter, has been reduced to a textbook of a cruel dictatorship that has suppressed the fundamental freedoms enshrined in it, the fruit of a heroic struggle that cost the people of Guinea Bissau blood and sweat. While republican institutions are decapitated through the palace and institutional coups at the service of the extremist and dictatorial agenda and for the benefit of a handful of individuals, Guinean people are consumed by penury and misery.
The hallmark of this regime has been the confiscation of freedoms of thought, expression, assembly, demonstration, and choice through illegal measures taken in the corridors of impunity by the Ministry for the Interior in the name of hypothetical supreme orders. The attacks with firearms on the press and its professionals; the attacks on political commentators and analysts; the repression and brutality against peaceful demonstrators from the Popular Front on 18th May, 2024 in the cells of the Second Police Station; the spacing out and torture of party political figures including women and mothers during a simple march in Bissau; and the blackmail and intimidation of human rights activists are some of the countless cases of abuse that are engraved in the memory of the Guinean people.
The persecutions and beatings have become a hallmark of Sissoco Embaló’s autocratic regime in force in the country since 27th February, 2020, with dozens of victims identified inside and outside the country. In addition to annihilating republican institutions, destroying democracy and the democratic rule of law, the Sissoquist dictatorship also aimed to whitewash the history of the heroic people of Guinea Bissau through a pseudo-fundamentalist agenda aimed at dividing to rule in murky waters. This sectarian, divisive agenda has been the prominent emblem of this dictatorial regime and its leader over the last five years, characterised above all by the trivialisation of national symbols and the institutionalisation of lies as a method of dictatorship.
In this ferocious saga in the name of the principle l’etat c’est moi, the absolutist control of all the key institutions of the state, the Sissoco Embaló regime sponsored an armed invasion of the Supreme Court of Justice in October 2023, intending to depose the president of that body and, in his place, impose a warrant boy with the cloak of a judge adviser. Since then, the court has been transformed into a political bureau of conspiracies, adding acts of lawlessness and illegality never seen in the history of Guinea Bissau as a state. The disrespect for judicial decisions, the persecution of judges, lawyers, magistrates, inspectors, and judicial agents whose actions respect the law, and the installation of bicephalism in the party and union leaderships are all documented facts and known to national and international public opinion, despite the regime’s propaganda machine fed by the public purse.
The armed assault on the National People’s Assembly, the legislative body, and representatives of the people has transformed this supervisory body of government into an extension of the presidency of the republic, like the supreme court, making it impossible to fulfill the following functions:
a) Carrying out the institutional, political, and economic reforms that are essential for the country’s recovery;
b) The imperative election of a new Executive Secretariat for the National Electoral Commission;
c) The materialisation of the people’s will through the installation of a political scam government at the dictator’s service.
Mismanagement and palace coups have aggravated misrule, impunity, and hunger. They have led to the collapse of essential social services, particularly in the health and education sectors, and have made Guinea Bissau is more vulnerable to organised crime, drug trafficking and money laundering, widespread corruption and public debt at exponentially staggering levels.
Faced with this gloomy situation, aggravated by the galloping deterioration of citizens’ living conditions associated with the establishment of a climate of terror, the urgency of rescuing the republic, restoring constitutional and democratic order, and restoring dignity to the people becomes imperative for all Guinean patriots, regardless of party affiliation, ideological nature, or religious orientation.
Given this disastrous situation, and considering that the current presidential term ends unequivocally and unavoidably on 27th February, 2025, and that there is no date set for presidential elections as dictated by the Constitution, the vacancy in the presidential seat is no longer in doubt as of 00:00 on February 28;
Considering that the existence of a so-called plan for yet another palace coup by Mr Sissoco Embaló to remain in power for more than five years, outside the Constitution, the Electoral Law, and the Political Parties Framework Law constitutes the most significant provocation to the people of Guinea-Bissau; Bearing in mind that the imminent vacancy in the presidential office will put the entire state building on the road to vacancy and the interim period already in force in the supreme court, the ANP (unconstitutionally), the government and the National Electoral Commission;
Aware that the president of the republic refused to schedule the presidential elections by constitutional provisions as part of Sissoco Embaló’s delaying and dictatorial manoeuvres to avoid the popular verdict through the ballot box at all costs. It also indicated that the hypothetical controversy surrounding the end of the current presidential term is just another vain attempt at distraction financed by Sissoco and his accomplices in the dictatorship to distract the Guinean people who are shaken by the misery resulting from incompetence and misrule;
Given the above, the Popular Front, in harmony with all the patriotic forces of Guinea Bissau, deliberate as follows:
1. To call on the courageous people of Guinea Bissau to mobilise, fight, and resist to recover freedoms, dignity, democracy, and the rule of law;
2. To firmly call on the Guinean youths to take on, with determination and bravery, yet another mission to safeguard their future, which is today jeopardised by a group of unconfessed interests that are entirely unrelated to the legitimate aspirations of the Guinean people;
3. To warn the people of Guinea Bissau that the only way to put an end to hunger, the rampant and unjustified increase in essential products, institutionalised corruption, and organised crime is to mobilise and fight against the current dictatorial regime;
4. To once again repudiate the autocratic regime in force in the country, demanding that its leader immediately step down from power as of 00:00 on 2th February, 2025, if presidential elections are not held under the terms of the Constitution of the Republic;
5. To invite all the national patriotic forces to consult with a goal of broad national convergence for the period after February 27, the end of the current presidential term;
6. Alert international organisations based in the country, in particular Ecowas, to the risks that the stubbornness of the regime chaired by Umaro Sissoco Embaló could bring to the country and its negative impact on the West African region;
7. To warn the army and security forces about the consequences of using them for unconfessed objectives aimed at perpetuating illegalities and endorsing the destruction of the values and principles that shape democracy and the rule of law.
Long live the people of Guinea Bissau! Long live democracy! Long live national unity! Long live dignity! Republika i anos! (The Republic is ours!)
