Guinea junta leader demands UN to 'stop lecturing' Africa
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Colonel Mamady Doumbouya, the president of Guinea's junta, urges Africans to reject the old international order and preserve non-alignment.
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Colonel Mamady Doumbouya leaving a meeting with high-level representatives of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) in Conakry on Sept. 17, 2021 (AFP)
Colonel Mamady Doumbouya, the president of Guinea's junta, defended the use of military involvement in politics at a UN address Thursday, following numerous coups in Africa in Niger, Mali, and Gabon.
"Africa is suffering from a model of governance that has been imposed on us. A model that is certainly good and effective for the West, which designed it over the course of its history, but which is having trouble adapting to our reality," he told the UN General Assembly.
He is the only coup leader to speak at the UN and expressed how the aforementioned model only exploits and pillages the resources of Africa by others by ensuring the corruption of the elites.
Doumbouya expressed he was not another soldier who wished to "twist the neck of democracy" and impose his dictatorship, detailing that the "real putschists" are those who "scheme, who use deception, who cheat in order to manipulate the texts of the Constitution in order to maintain themselves in power externally."
According to him, the military action in Guinea was to save the nation from "complete chaos".
Guinea's Alpha Conde became in 2010 Guinea's first democratically-elected President.
But the 83-year-old was deposed by army officers in 2021 amid fierce protests over his successful bid for a third term in office -- a plan that critics said breached the constitution.
He urged Africans of all ages to reject the old international order while preserving non-alignment.
'Old Africa is over'
Doumbouya boldly exclaimed that the old Africa was "over", remarking that it was time to "take our rights back, to give us our place. But above all, it's time to stop lecturing us, to stop looking down on us, and to stop treating us like children."
Earlier, the Central African Republic President accused the West on Thursday of causing a migration problem by plundering Africa's natural riches via slavery and colonization.
Faustin-Archange Touadera spoke at the United Nations General Assembly on the recent arrival of hundreds of African migrants on the Italian island of Lampedusa.
Touadera called the migrants the symbol of the present and future of Africa and explained that their desperate search for an "El Dorado" is only one of the "appalling consequences of the plundering of natural resources of countries made poor by slavery, colonization and Western imperialism, terrorism, and internal armed conflicts."
