When on the morning of September 5, 2021, the defense and security forces announced the end of the rainbow RPG regime, an outcry of joy and relief greeted this news. The people of Guinea, in their overwhelming majority, hailed, not the fall of a man and a government, but the end of a system which had finished, in these last hours, strangling them, humiliate and taunt him in his dignity, flouting the sacred texts of his Constitution.
The constitutional affront of 2020 which allowed President Alpha Condé to win a third term, against all logic of the legislative texts of the moment, and this under the fallacious and shocking slogan that< ce n’est pas un troisième mandat, mais le premier mandat d’une troisième République >> imaginary, could not remain without reaction. The defense and security forces have therefore chosen to put an end to this abject arrogance against the sovereign people of Guinea, and to open a transitional period in the march of our country.
And who says “transition”, says passage in an exceptional political period towards a return to normal constitutional order. A new constitutional order which, logically, will pose the equation of the writing and the adoption of a new Constitution supposed to correct the failures noted in the last and the preceding ones. It is this historic role which is entrusted, by article 37 of the Charter, to the National Council of the Transition and its 81 honorable Councillors, sons and daughters of Guinea, chosen by and in all the social components of the nation.
This body of national representation acting as a legislative body of the transitional period is thus mandated to put into texts of fundamental law, the concerns and aspirations of the working Guinean populations. And to do this, the CNT has logically opted since its establishment for a methodology of close consultation of the populations throughout the national territory. For weeks, the honorable Councilors went to listen attentively to our towns, villages and hamlets and to meticulously collect all their concerns and hopes.
This stage completed and its achievements carefully recorded in a safe place, the time has come for the CNT to turn its gaze towards academic perceptions and experiences at different stages in different countries, for a plural analysis of the process of writing a Constitution. This is the subject of the symposium on constitutionalism, organized on February 21 and 22 at the Riviera hotel in Kaloum.
The fundamental concern of the CNT in organizing this forum is not only to trace the history of the various Constitutions which have managed Guinea, from its accession to independence in 1958 to the present day, but also and above all, to benefit from the semantic contribution and the practical experience of legal experts, constitutionalists, sociologists, national and international, with a view to collecting elements of culture and language for the writing of a Constitution. The inner concern is to find the right and adequate words to better name each of the concerns and aspirations of our people, in order to translate them accurately into the legislative texts to be drawn up.
However, the President of the transition, Colonel Mamadi Doumbouya, who chaired the opening ceremony of this workshop, set clear guidelines for this process of drafting the new Guinean Constitution: “We want to develop a Constitution that addresses the realities Guinean with Guinean-style solutions. It will not be a copy-paste of the Constitutions of other countries, hastily compiled to be submitted to the Referendum of our people”.
For the President of the Transition, one could not be clearer. It is a question of finally freeing oneself from academic blinders, doctrinal complexes and mechanical recitations of stereotyped quotations to produce practical and pragmatic legislative texts which concern men more than articles of law.
The new Guinean Constitution will thus be, as Dr. Dansa Kourouma, President of the CNT, says and repeats on each occasion, “a Constitution that resembles and brings together the people of Guinea”.
As we can see, this desire to write a Constitution which will henceforth prevent Guinea from experiencing possible political and social disturbances is clearly shared and expressed by the highest authorities of this transition. However, the international experts, panelists at this symposium on constitutionalism in Guinea gave warnings which it would be wise to take into account:
1- The process of drafting a constitutional text takes time. Precipitation gives birth to improvisation. And improvisation will always produce fragile and unstable texts, likely to be called into question at every opportunity.
2- The Constitution is not a panacea or a magic wand that would format the brains of Guineans to automatically make them better and more civic than before. The solidity of a Constitution depends on the attitudes of the citizens towards the texts of law. Only the free and responsible respect of the texts by each citizen can guarantee the change hoped for through the production of a new Constitution.
3- It should be specified that before the adoption of a new Constitution, only the structures of the State could organize polls, since the definition of the body of management of the elections and its installation could not be envisaged and defined only by the organic texts of the new Constitution.
In conclusion, we will therefore retain that the panels have enabled us to gather rich lessons on the essential elements related to the articulations of the legislative texts. We examined, among other things, the electoral process, political parties, types of electoral management bodies, electoral disputes, the democratic process, the situation of gender and vulnerable people, the role of civil society organizations… in short , we benefited from a rich intellectual walk through the maze of different experiences of the democratic and electoral process in various countries, thanks to the remarkable performance of each of the international experts invited. Above all, we have learned and learned many lessons by revisiting the history of the various and successive Constitutions that Guinea has registered from 1958 to the present day. It is certain that at the end of this two-day meeting, the honorable National Councilors will have been sufficiently equipped to initiate and conduct useful and fruitful debates on constitutional issues.
Completed the academic stage of our process of producing the new Constitution, it is now time for the political phase of the exchanges: the constitutional orientation debate!
Cell com CNT