Guinea-Bissau president says situation is ‘under control’

Bloomberg

Guinea-Bissau’s President Umaro Sissoco Embalo said the situation was under control after the West African regional bloc urged soldiers to return to their barracks in a bid to prevent what could become the fourth armed coup in one of its member-nations in less than a year.
“I’m fine,” Embalo said in a tweet, hours after automatic gunfire erupted in the capital, Bissau, on Tuesday as Embalo met with his cabinet. The shooting interrupted the meeting and led to a stampede, Radio France Internationale reported. Armed cordons have been placed around some official buildings and schools have been closed, the broadcaster said on its website.
“The situation is under government control,” Embalo said late Tuesday.
Embalo, 49, has been in power in the lusophone West African nation since winning a disputed presidential election in December 2019. He succeeded President Jose Mario Vaz, who was the country’s first head of state in two decades to complete his term. The nation has succumbed to several putsches since independence in 1974.
The unrest comes a week after the military overthrew the government of Burkina Faso, West Africa’s third coup in less than a year.
Coups in Mali and Burkina Faso were all carried out by US-trained officers in response to intensifying insecurity in the Sahel region, where governments have failed to contain a decade-long insurgency. A coup in Guinea was blamed on bad governance in a country that remains poor despite being the world’s top exporter of bauxite, a reddish ore transformed to make aluminum, which is in cars and drinking cans.
The military takeovers have spurred the Economic Community of West African States, known as Ecowas, to impose sanctions that have curbed trade flows and led Western nations to suspend development aid and security support.
“It looks increasingly hard to argue against the idea of coup contagion — that coups in one place inspire them in another —following the chain of events in the past year,” Eric Humphery-Smith, Africa Analyst at UK-based Verisk Maplecroft, said.