Domingos Simões Pereira (DSP) ended his most recent captivity of, unless I am mistaken, 66 days, last Friday. The same days since the November 26th coup, which interrupted the 2025 electoral process in Guinea-Bissau (GB), with presidential ruptures between the electorate and the then president (PR) Sissoko Embaló. As for DSP, he is now under house arrest.
Since the coup, the National Transitional Council (CNT), led by General Horta Inta-A Na Man, also Interim PR, approved what we can call the “Sissoko Constitution”, ending 30 years of semi-presidentialism, starting this January an “unconstitutional presidentialism”, due to the way everything was discarded before the elections and cooked since the end of November. The CNT also scheduled elections for December 6th, changed the name of Parliament, dropping “Popular” and maintaining the National Assembly.
And now DSP, what to do?
For now, there are elections scheduled for December, but it is unknown whether the current PR of the PAIGC, the imprisoned DSP, will be able to run, be elected, etc., because he does not know how much longer he will remain in this exile, “maintaining” the young woman and connected to the world as a receiver of foreign news.
He has an important connection to the PR of Senegal, Bassirou Diomaye Faye (BDF), mediator/negotiator of his transfer from the police station cell, where he remained for two months, to home. This fact is very important, because DSP, blocked by its own, will not be indifferent to BDF’s plans for the new ECOWAS, the “CEE of West Africa”, in disintegration since 2020.
The PR of Senegal, deeply anti-French, may find a counter-brake in the PR of the PAIGC, an important tower in the Lusophone chess, and certainly intuiting, like other Portuguese, that France is needed, counts and should return through the big door, to West Africa. The way to do this will be precisely through the current debate, “and now, what to do, O ECOWAS”?
Blocked from the inside, DSP could grow even more from the outside, if it actively engages in the debate on how to do better, based on what it has. At the moment, everyone has already identified that they miss France, which can always change. This is where DSP can make a difference, since “being anti-French in Africa” is being anti-Portuguese, insofar as one is anti-colonizer. I know, we never see ourselves in this forgotten evidence, of a former colonizer!
In this context, Domingos Simões Pereira, may be the Lusophone influencer of a common sense that Senegalese PR lacks, that of accepting the constraints on the exercise of power, some (the constraints), centuries old and impossible to disentangle!
Political scientist/Arabist
www.maghreb-machrek.pt
Write according to the old spelling
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