The second round of the presidential elections is once again postponed. Disappointing but inevitable.

by Bram Posthumus in Conakry

Wednesday morning, at the prime minister’s office in a calm leafy part of downtown Conakry. The motorcade of the interim president, general Sékouba Konaté bursts out of the driveway, two dozen open trucks, overloaded with heavily armed red berets, guns and cannons at the ready. The scene is a daily occurrence, as frantic negotiations are going on between all relevant political players with one question in mind: what are we going to do on Sunday September 19th?

That is the day the second round of Guinea’s first ever open presidential election must take place. The two candidates have very different backgrounds and ideological positions – but their priorities are the same: restore all basic services to a population exasperated by inept, corrupt, incompetent and disinterested governments. But they differ in two important ways. The favourite, Cellou Dalein Diallo, is a technocrat who has served as minister and prime minister; he is also a liberal, a free marketeer. Alpha Condé, his challenger, is a veteran opposition leader with socialist sympathies, many times jailed and exiled from his country. They were supposed to go head to head on September 19th. But then a few things happened.

"Back of and go home"
The last weekend before the elections, young militants of both sides clashed in one of Conakry’s many suburbs, leaving one dead and scores injured. The interim government of prime minister Jean-Marie Doré stepped in, suspended all campaigning and told the hotheads to back off and go home. Then, on Tuesday, the head of the Independent National Electoral Commission (Ceni) died in Paris. This, however, did not change Ceni’s determination to go ahead, as its interim head Hadja Aminata Mame Camara told me. ‘We must organise these elections and we have taken adequate measures to solve all the problems related to these elections. What remains are technical issues.’

Such as the arrival of new voters’ cards, to be flown in from South Africa and expected to arrive on...Monday September 20th. Alpha Condé burst out laughing during a televised meeting about the second round when he mentioned this. His party is convinced they were swindled out of tens of thousands of votes and wants the second round postponed. His adversary wants to go ahead. And so, on Wednesday, general Konaté’s cavalcade continued to smash its way through Conakry’s congested streets and highways as frantic negotiations carried on.

"Technical issues" 
Was the date of September 19th becoming a political football? Not really. As we watched the interim head of state leave the prime minister’s office, one colleague told me: ‘Nothing will happen on Sunday. Everyone knows it; Ceni is not ready, nothing is in place. They are using last week’s violence as a pretext to call the thing off, trust me.’ An exaggeration, certainly, but the point is that years of malign neglect by the state have left everything in tatters: the streets, the electricity grid, the water systems – and the voters’ roll. The one in use is hugely unreliable; it has not been checked and verified. And even when Ceni’s head can say that the “découpage” problem has been solved and that almost 10,000 voting stations have been spread out throughout the country, there is no way anyone can independently verify this. Moreover, when some “technical issues” still need to be solved a few days before the elections, the message should be: forget it. You do not, for instance, get a whole set of new voters’ cards delivered in a country with hardly any infrastructure.

Candidate Celou Dalein Diallo is unhappy about the postponement. ‘We were already too far away from the official announcement of the first round results. We agreed that the second round had to be postponed because the system in place had to be improved. And now we are told that it will again not take place, this Sunday. We are disappointed.’ It is the disappointment of a man who has to wait a few more weeks for his victory. He strenuously denies that his election is a project for his own ethnic group. ‘I have collected votes in every part of the country, you can check that yourself.’ Both he and Alpha Condé implore all citizens to define themselves as Guineans first and member of whatever ethnic group second, while accusing each other of doing the exact opposite.

Meanwhile the country awaits the announcement, yet again, of the second round. It does so very calmly. The campaign suspension is working; no violence has been reported. As he drives me from Alpha Condé’s campaign headquarters to Cellou Dalein Diallo’s home, Ibrahim Camara remains philosophical: ‘These elections will never be perfect. But let’s have them now and get it right next time.’ Sums it up pretty well.