Conakry | At each stage of his campaign across Guinea, he points his watch: Cellou Dalein Diallo is convinced, his time has finally come, after two terms of Alpha Condé.
Entering the political arena after ten years in government under General Lansana Conté (1984-2008), instructed by his failures in 2010 and 2015, Cellou Dalein Diallo vowed not to hold back his blows against Alpha Condé to deprive him a controversial third term.
Frail and invariably elegant, in classic costumes or large clear boubous matched with embroidered toques, or in Saharan when he is campaigning, this man with the soft voice and the allure of West African Gandhi is posed and courteous in private .
But he also sometimes lets himself be won over by the fervor of the masses of his feared supporters, totally committed to his cause, who can form impressive tides of people in Conakry.
Detractors of Cellou Dalein Diallo accuse him of being a “pure product of the Conté system” and of having enriched himself in power. But his camp values his long experience of the State.
A member of the Fulani ethnic group, considered the first in the country, he comes from a family of imams in the village of Dalein (center), where he was born. He likes to recall that his grandfather was “the great scholar Thierno Sadou de Dalein who had written 35 works in Arabic”.
Raised in the village, in a large family – his father had “four wives and about twenty children” – he attended Koranic and French schools, then left for Conakry to study management.
“Technocrat”
Cellou Dalein Diallo then joined the civil service, going through the management of a state-owned company under the father of independence, the dictator Ahmed Sékou Touré (1958-1984).
Under the authoritarian regime of Lansana Conté, he joined the Central Bank and then the administration of major projects as president.
In 1996, he entered the government as a “technocrat”, in his own words, as Minister of Transport, then moved on to portfolios, from Equipment to Fishing.
In December 2004, General Conté, ill, chose him as prime minister, offering him the opportunity to develop a vast network of international relations.
After ten years in government, Mr. Diallo suffered a sudden disgrace in April 2006, against the backdrop of struggles for influence within a dying Conté regime.
In 2007, he became the head of a major opposition party, the Union of Democratic Forces of Guinea (UFDG).
When Conté died in December 2008, like most political leaders, he took note of the putsch, without opposing it, to promote a peaceful transition.
But disillusion quickly sets in and the head of the junta, Moussa Dadis Camara, makes Mr. Diallo one of his targets.
On September 28, 2009, at the time of the massacre of 157 opponents, including many UDFG militants, by soldiers at the Conakry stadium, he was beaten up, seriously injured, and hospitalized in Paris.
“Gift mandate”
In 2010, he seemed on the way to being elected president from his first candidacy, with 43.69% of the vote, far ahead of Alpha Condé, the former historic opponent, with 18.25% of the vote. But at the end of an interminable soap opera, Alpha Condé is proclaimed winner of the second round, organized four months later.
Under pressure, yet convinced of massive “rigging”, Cellou Dalein Diallo, recognizes the results, to avoid a bloodbath, according to him. “I gave a gift mandate to Alpha Condé”, he sums up today.
In 2015, he presented himself “without conviction” against Alpha Condé, easily re-elected in a poll marred by fraud, according to him.
He then concluded an apparently “unnatural” electoral alliance with Moussa Dadis Camara, indicted shortly after for his role in the massacre at the Conakry stadium.
In 2019, the UFDG is actively participating in the mobilization against a possible third term of Alpha Condé.
Despite the adoption in March 2020, during a referendum boycotted by the opposition, of a new Constitution, invoked by the government to legitimize a new candidacy, Cellou Dalein Diallo launches in September in the race for the presidential election .
“The UFDG has decided to take its fight against the third term to the polls,” he explains.
This time, victory can no longer escape him, because of both the “catastrophic record” of Alpha Condé and increased vigilance of citizens in the face of the risk of fraud, he says.
He himself admits with a smile that he “has accumulated a lot of experience, and above all of the will”, in particular that “much more than in the past, to win and to keep his victory”.