By Anait Miridzhanian
BISSAU (Reuters) -Umaro Sissoco Embalo is aiming this month to become the first incumbent president to win re-election in Guinea-Bissau in three decades, but his time in office so far has hardly brought stability to the putsch-prone country.
His government has reported multiple attempts to oust him since he took office in 2020, including a coup attempt in 2022 in which gunfire rang out for hours near the compound where he was holding a cabinet meeting.
The cocaine trade in the West African nation appears to be booming, with one recent report by a civil society group describing it as potentially more profitable than ever before.
And the 53-year-old former army general has faced non-stop challenges to his legitimacy, with opponents insisting he did not actually win the 2019 election and, more recently, that he has overstayed his constitutional mandate by several months.
Nevertheless, Embalo is in a strong position to win a second term when the country of roughly 2 million goes to the polls on November 23 for presidential and legislative elections.
OPPONENT BARRED FROM RUNNING
That is partly because the man widely seen as his top challenger, former prime minister Domingos Simoes Pereira, has been barred from contesting.
If he does win, Embalo will continue to face long odds in delivering on his professed goals of tackling poverty and significantly improving health and education in the former Portuguese colony, which remains largely reliant on cashew exports, for which prices are volatile.
“Embalo has put a lot of effort into hardware, public works and so on. The situation seems to have improved in terms of electricity,” said Vincent Foucher, senior research fellow at the National Centre for Scientific Research in France.
“But running an efficient state is not just about hardware. It’s about governing.”
TURBULENT POLITICAL RISE
Embalo served as a presidential adviser and minister in previous administrations before President Jose Mario Vaz appointed him prime minister in 2016.
He lasted just over a year before being sacked, one of seven prime ministers Vaz ultimately cycled through. Both Embalo and Pereira ran for the presidency in 2019, facing each other in a run-off that Embalo won with 54% of the vote.
But his promised new era of stability never materialised.
Pereira petitioned for the election to be annulled. The 2022 coup attempt was followed by clashes in the capital the following year, which Embalo said was another attempt to oust him. He dissolved parliament in response, and the country has gone without a functioning lawmaking body since.
Just last month, the army announced yet another coup attempt, leading to the arrests of a group of senior officers.
COCAINE TRADE THRIVES
Embalo said last year that his wife had dissuaded him from seeking a second term, but in March confirmed he would in fact be a candidate.
The lead-up to the vote has been fraught, with the opposition arguing that Embalo has already overstayed his term.
Amid the political turbulence, the cocaine trade continues to flourish, with Guinea-Bissau, like other West African countries, a transit point for smugglers shipping drugs from South America to Europe.
In September last year, the judicial police announced they had seized 2.63 tons of cocaine from a plane that landed in Bissau from Venezuela.
“Bissau’s cocaine market is booming once again, and has arguably become more profitable than at any point in the country’s history,” the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime said in a report in August.
Guinea-Bissau’s projected GDP growth for this year is 5.1%, according to the International Monetary Fund, and Embalo has talked up mineral assets, including bauxite and phosphate.
U.S. oil major Chevron recently struck a deal to explore two offshore blocks, evidence that “in the next two or three years, the lives of Bissau-Guineans will truly change”, Embalo said in a recent interview with Jeune Afrique.
He added: “Now that stability has been achieved, all these projects can begin.”
(Reporting by Alberto Dabo and Anait Miridzhanian; Editing by Robbie Corey-Boulet and Ros Russell)
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