Elections in African drug hub

NY Times:

First the general was blown up. Then the president was shot dead, the former prime minister was arrested and tortured, a presidential candidate was killed in his villa, and the former defense minister was ambushed and shot on the bridge outside town.

Despite those chilling messages — reportedly carried out by men in military uniform — Sunday’s election to replace the assassinated president, João Bernardo Vieira, will go on.

There is jolly music and dancing in the decaying streets; earnest international observers crisscross Bissau, the capital; the remaining candidates hold buoyant rallies in preparation for the vote; and trucks packed with chanting supporters bounce up and down over the little city’s deep potholes.

Underneath, though, there is anxiety and doubt here in Guinea-Bissau, a former Portuguese colony that is pitch-black at night because of a lack of electricity and that is so fragile it is being abandoned even by the drug traffickers, according to a United Nations expert.

No specific suspects or motives have been found for the political killings of the past four months. And few here are betting that the election will check a military that never stood down after winning this West African country’s liberation struggle nearly four decades ago.

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The state “is in a phase of deliquescence,” said a former justice minister, Carlos Vamain. “The state has been dismantled.”

Signs of the government’s disarray are everywhere. The roof is still caved in at the army building where the military chief of staff, Gen. Batista Tagme Na Waie, was killed in an explosion in March. He was the third officer to be killed in that post since 2000.

The windows are still blown out at the roofless presidential palace, abandoned since its destruction in the civil war of 10 years ago. Papaya trees grow from the ruins of buildings downtown destroyed during the war.

The grim indicators pile up, one after another. Potholes two feet deep pockmark central streets. A civil servant in a white shirt, approaching a newcomer, said he had not been paid for two months and begged for money to buy rice. Small, ragged boys scale mounds of garbage at the edge of town, searching for bits of copper and iron.

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“Already in September the drug traffickers had started moving out of Guinea-Bissau,” said Antonio L. Mazzitelli of the United Nations’ Office on Drugs and Crime in Dakar, Senegal, noting that there had been no important drug seizures since October. The drug traffickers, he said, “need a certain stability.

“They don’t need a failed state,” Mr. Mazzitelli added. “They need a weak state.”

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The country was a major transit point for drugs flown from Venezuela that were later shipped to Europe. The decline in the drug transit occurred after a Venezuelan plane and its cargo was seized last year in Sierra Leon south of Guinea-Bissau. There are a series of reports on the FARC drug trafficking through West Africa here.

This story is another example of the incompetence in governance that plagues Africa.