The leader of the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC), said on Thursday that the situation in Guinea-Bissau is “catastrophic” and that the country is in danger of becoming a failed state
“The situation in the country is catastrophic. Today, it is not only the PAIGC that says so. I think that today all political and social actors come to that understanding. The situation is catastrophic,” Simões Pereira said, speaking to journalists at the party’s headquarters in Bissau.
According to the former prime-minister, Guinea-Bissau is getting “dangerously close to a situation of a failed state”.
“The situation of no state is a situation of anarchy because nobody guarantees anyone security,” he said, stressing that it is a “physical and practical” anarchy in which survival “accepts that all methods can be used so that people can satisfy their interests.
The leader of the PAIGC, the party that won the 2019 legislative elections but is not in power, exemplified this with the plane that was held up at Bissau international airport on the orders of the Guinean prime minister, Nuno Gomes Nabiam, and which is said to have landed in the country at the request of the Guinean presidency.
Nuno Gomes Nabiam decided to stop the plane from leaving the country and announced an external investigation into the case, calling for support from the international community.
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“We have a foreign plane at Osvaldo Vieira international airport, and we have sovereign bodies and the Guinean population travelling to and from the airport as if it were nothing. Our sovereignty is violated, but we have to pretend that we are living in a framework of normality. This happens concerning our maritime borders, land borders”, said Domingos Simões Pereira.
The former Prime Minister said the case was not isolated and what was happening was not a “simple coincidence”.
“Chance would have it that the plane was boarded, and they discovered that the plane is not exactly comfortable proving its legality, not only in terms of provenance but also in terms of the cargo it’s carrying. If other planes that passed through here had been boarded, we would have had this situation a long time ago,” he stressed.
“For him (the head of state) to have a plane at the airport without identifying the provenance and the cargo is perfectly normal, just as it is normal for him to enter and leave the country with non-commercial flights that do not go through the security rules, just as it is normal to have foreign armies carrying out exercises on national territory without the knowledge of the People’s National Assembly, just as it is normal for there to be agreements signed for the exploitation of natural resources without the knowledge of the People’s National Assembly,” he said.
Pereira said the “total” of all this shows that we are not facing a “democratic rule of law”
