Kemo Cham, AfricaNews reporter in Dakar, Senegal
Adja Andre Touré, the widow of Guinea's former independent leader, Ahmed Sékou Touré, has expressed dissatisfaction over the situation in her country. She described the situation in the nation as 'destroyed'. The country has gained headlines for drug trafficking among other social vices.
“Everything has been destroyed in Guinea: justice, military, health, education, etc.,” Touré said in an interview with Dakar based Walfadjri newspaper.
The former Guinean first lady narrated how she and her family went through ill-treatment in the hands of the successors of her husband; her experience in jail and subsequent exile in Morocco, Ivory Coast and then Senegal, up to her return home in the year 2000 to settle down to work in preservation of the image of her late husband, whom she described as pan-Africanist.
According to Touré, after the death of her husband she went through a hell of hardships. She said that just a week after his [Sékou Touré’s] funeral, “I was arrested and imprisoned with the entire family; my children, my husband's brothers, sisters and members of his government, without any procedure. I stayed in prison for four years.”
But thanks to the intervention of personalities like the late King Hassan II of Morocco she was released from prison on 1 January 1988, and that after a brief stay in the North African nation, mainly for medical check up, Ivorian Independent leader, Felix Houphouet Boigny, “invited me to Côte d'Ivoire and granted a scholarship for my son. And I stayed in Abidjan until the death of President Boigny. This is what made me go back to Senegal with my daughter Mariam Touré.”
She blamed part of the problems of Guinea on “some senior Guineans” whom, she said, were trained in the spirit of the revolution in Guinea but who then chose to ignore it.
“I wonder how they fell in such situations. We did not experience these problems of ethnicity then. But those who are behind this division have been colluding with the executives of the country to weaken Guinea,” she said.
Although disappointed by what has befell the country in the past few months, the former first lady appeared optimistic, especially given the signs being shown by present head of state of Guinea. She noted that although she doesn’t know much about General Saikouba Conateh, she said there is hope for Guinea.
“It remains to be seen if he has the strength to continue. His way of doing things is convincing,” she said.
She kicked against holding an early elections because there are no structures to oversee such exercise.
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