Mali’s former Defence Minister appointed interim President

 

Mali’s military junta has named a former Defence Minister, Ba N’Daou, as president of the country’s new transition government. The new president is meant to lead the country for several months before returning Mali to civilian rule.

It would be recalled that the military junta has come under intense pressure from leaders of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) to return power to civilians following the August 18 coup that overthrew President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita.

The question on the lips of political watchers is whether this arrangement would satisfy ECOWAS, which last week threatened to step up economic sanctions and impose a total embargo on landlocked Mali if its conditions were not met.

Colonel Assimi Goita, the junta leader of the National Committee for the Salvation of the People (CNSP) which overthrew Mali’s President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita was appointed vice president

N’Daou and Goita were appointed by a group of 17 electors chosen by the junta to oversee an 18-month transition that will culminate in fresh elections.

Regional leaders had demanded that the interim president be a civilian, while signalling they would accept a soldier as vice president so long as he is ineligible to replace the president.

Goita did not say whether the vice president would remain next-in-line to the presidency as stipulated in a transitional charter approved by multi-party talks earlier this month.

N’Daou was once an aide-de-camp to Mali’s ex-dictator Moussa Traore, who died last week aged 83. He received training in the former Soviet Union as well as at Paris’s renowned Ecole de Guerre.