“We cannot allow silence or fear to dictate the future of Guinea-Bissau. Every citizen must be an actor in this process, vigilant and committed to change,” reads an open letter to the Guinean people written by the political movement Firkidja di Pubis, composed of activists, students, and workers who are said to be committed to democratic freedoms in Guinea-Bissau.
For the signatories of the letter, the country deserves “a new direction, deserves stability, institutional respect, peace, and progress. It deserves to dream of freedom and a future of justice once more.”
“Dictatorship offers nothing to the people; it only serves the interests of those who maintain it,” continue the authors, noting that during the last six years of the regime led by Umaro Sissoco Embaló, “the Guinean people were forced to live in a permanent climate of fear.”
“The instrumentalization of judicial institutions to persecute opponents, kidnappings, beatings, and intimidations have become routine. Citizens who dared to denounce abuses were violently repressed. We witnessed armed attacks on political party headquarters, media outlets, and residences of political leaders and commentators who did not align with the narrative of power,” the letter states.
The Firkidja di Pubis movement believes that the Guinean Constitution “has been continuously violated.”
“The country witnessed the accelerated degradation of state institutions. The Presidency of the Republic began behaving as the sole sovereign body, trampling all other state institutions through arbitrary and violent actions. The Parliament was dissolved without legal grounds; ministers and magistrates were affronted; judicial decisions were manipulated; and the separation of powers, the essence of current Democratic Rule of Law States, was destroyed,” they argue.
Regarding Sunday’s general elections, the signatories of the open letter recall that they were organized “by a regime that has shown fear of its political opponents, to the point of unjustly excluding some from the electoral process, which undermines the fairness of the process, in addition to being conducted in a context where the main institutions for organizing and overseeing the elections, namely the Government, the Supreme Court of Justice (STJ), and the National Election Commission (CNE), are at the service of the ‘sissoquista’ dictatorship.”
The Supreme Court of Justice rejected the candidacy of the individual pointed out as the main opponent, Domingos Simões Pereira, leader of the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC) and the coalition he led, the PAI-Terra Ranka – which won the 2023 legislative elections and was ousted from power with the dissolution of parliament in the same year.
Nevertheless, Firkidja di Pubis calls for voting, believing that it can “put an end to the cycle of fear, instability, and violence.”
For Sunday’s elections in Guinea-Bissau, 966,152 voters are registered to choose the President of the Republic and the composition of the National Assembly.
The race for the Presidency of Guinea-Bissau includes a total of 12 candidates, notably the current President, Umaro Sissoco Embaló, who is running for a second term.
There are 14 candidates and a single coalition, the Republican Platform “Nô kumpu Guiné,” supporting Embaló’s second term, competing in the legislative elections.
