The junta in Mali appoints an interim minister and colonel 1st minister
Abdoulaye Maïga, current spokesman for the Malian government, becomes interim Prime Minister to replace Choguel Kokalla Maïga, hospitalized after illness.
Image d’illustration.
AFP
The head of the junta in Mali, Colonel Assimi Goïta, on Sunday appointed another colonel, Minister Abdoulaye Maïga, interim Prime Minister to replace the civilian Choguel Kokalla Maïga, hospitalized a few days ago.
“Colonel Abdoulaye Maïga, Minister of Territorial Administration and Decentralization, has been appointed to take over from Mr. Choguel Kokalla Maiga, Prime Minister, Head of Government,” says a decree read on state television.
In addition to the important Decentralization portfolio, Abdoulaye Maïga, aged about forty, was also the government spokesman. Little known before his appointment to this post at the end of 2021, he has regularly made in this capacity over the past few months, wearing his trellis, on national television some of the most striking government announcements and the most abrupt statements against France. . He had thus “demanded” at the end of July from President Emmanuel Macron that he leave “definitively his neo-colonial, paternalistic and condescending posture”.
Colonel Maïga is said not to have been part of the circle of officers who took power by force with Colonel Goïta in August 2020. But he is considered close to the strong Malian man and has become the voice of politics of rupture with France and its allies initiated after a second putsch which, in May 2021, dismissed the civilian President and Prime Minister. Colonel Goïta was then invested as transitional president.
Military at the head of the state
With the appointment of Colonel Maïga as head of government, the two heads of the executive are, at least temporarily, soldiers, while the colonels had resigned themselves under international pressure after the 2020 putsch to entrust the two positions to civilians, while retaining control over decision-making.
Choguel Kokalla Maïga, a veteran of Malian politics, was chosen to be the head of government after the second putsch in May 2021. He was hospitalized eight days ago after a heart attack, according to a hospital official. His services were then content to indicate that after “14 months of work without respite, (he had) been put on forced rest by his doctor”. They announced his return to work the following week. But no other news of him has been given officially since then.
He has been criticized for several months by many political leaders who are calling for his resignation and by many of his former allies in the June 5 Movement, of which he is one of the founders and which played a leading role in the protest preceded the takeover by the military in 2020.
AFP
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