Mali: Choguel Maïga, a veteran of politics at the prime minister's office
Choguel Maïga, the new Malian Prime Minister.
© RFI
Text by: Serge Daniel
11 mins
Appointed Prime Minister this Monday, Choguel Maïga is responsible for forming the government in Mali.
He is a tenacious politician who takes the helm of the new team at a time when the challenges are numerous.
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From our correspondent in Bamako,
The scene takes place in 1997. The floodgates of democracy and multipartyism have been open for six years in Mali. Choguel Maïga is president of the Patriotic Movement for Renewal (MPR) which claims to be the former single party swept away by a popular insurrection. He is considered a "plague" by the entire Malian political class whose slogan "Long live change!" ". He is almost alone against everyone, shunned by a large part of the press.
Draped in one of his famous traditional boubous, he receives us in Bamako for an interview. His phone rings. It was the Prime Minister at the time, Ibrahim Boubacar Keïta (IBK), who called him for a discreet interview. He who is rather short in stature and frail pace, he bulges the chest. The "outcast" begins to become popular. Impossible to hear what the two men say to each other. After hanging up, the young leader of the MPR launches: “
In politics, you need convictions. But after convictions, you have to be tenacious!
"
Tenacity, this engineer with a doctorate in telecommunications has shown it throughout his school and university studies.
Rather brilliant during the first years of his schooling in northern Mali where he is from, he continued his studies in the 1970s at the technical high school of Bamako - of good reputation -, with option "mathematics and industrial techniques" (MTI) .
He graduated from his promotion, with a technical baccalaureate in his pocket.
He carried out his higher education mainly in the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR).
Young, he tested the political terrain, in particular within the National Union of Young People of Mali, an association phagocytosed by the single party of the time.
The man knows not to mince his words.
He is an outstanding tribune.
He proved it once again last March, during a television program in which he participated on the occasion of the thirtieth anniversary of the 1991 uprising. He faced the revolutionaries who had the wind in their sails at that time and who have since bleached under harness.
Alone against all, Choguel Maïga finds the words to further defend the one-party regime.
Tenacious.
Revenge after a journey strewn with pitfalls
This Monday, June 7, 2021,
a little over thirty years after the Malian revolution, he definitely takes his revenge by acceding to the prime minister's office.
His wounds are probably healing.
Because his political career has been strewn with pitfalls.
In 1997, he boycotted the presidential and legislative elections.
In 2002, for the first time, he was a candidate for a presidential election.
He will not obtain the reimbursement of his deposit, having obtained a score lower than 5% of the votes cast.
In the second round, he called to vote for General Amadou Toumani Touré who sits in the chair left empty by a giant of the Malian political scene, Alpha Oumar Konaré.
For the first time in the history of Mali, a democratically elected president succeeds another.
The following five years, politically, Choguel Maïga rolls on a very narrow path. His party, which has a tiger for emblem, has five deputies out of the 147 that made up the hemicycle in 2002;
and he will have eight in 2007. He makes alliances in the backwater where the caimans dreamed of devouring him.
The man will be minister twice.
In 2002, for a few years, he held the Industry and Commerce portfolio.
In 2015, it returned to the government, more specifically to the Ministry of the Digital Economy and Communication.
Back to center stage with the M5
But if he has really returned to the front of the stage, it is because of his posture within the M5-RFP, a motley movement which contributed to the downfall of
former President Ibrahim Boubacar Keïta
, "IBK".
Created on June 5, 2020 and made up of political parties and movements, the Rally of Patriotic Forces has appointed Choguel Maïga as its “President of the Strategic Committee”.
Like other leaders of the movement, he shows his physical courage.
On July 10, 2020, the movements united within the M5-RFP once again beat the pavement.
Public buildings are ransacked.
At least two dead and many injured.
In the days that followed, the leaders and activists of the M5-RFP were arrested.
Among them, Choguel Maïga.
The activists show their muscles.
They are determined.
The people arrested are nevertheless released.
In a report, the gendarmerie where they were detained specifies: “
Mr. Maïga did not seem at all affected by the detention.
[…] He was getting phone calls from all over the place.
"
Choguel Maïga stands out as "the voice" of the protest.
Spokesman of the movement, he almost daily floods the press with press releases, which ends up annoying members of the movement.
Some start by speaking directly to the press, taking the opposite view of Choguel Maïga's statements.
When the former Malian president IBK fell on August 18, 2020, the M5 - and the president of its Strategic Committee at the head - dreams of the big night.
Doctor Maïga is 63 years old.
But the movement is divided. A section of this group - especially young people - prefers to join the military authors of the coup.
Imam Mahmoud Dicko
, a central figure in the M5-RFP, says he is returning to his mosque. A nice euphemism to say that the concord with the leaders of the M5-RFP is over. Members of the movement are unhappy with this decision by the influential religious leader. For their part, the soldiers who took power say they want to stay away from political forces and refuse a forced marriage with the M5-RFP. Choguel Maïga, meanwhile, refuses to shoot red balls at the imam. He maintains contact, but continues to criticize the new direction taken by the junta.
The reality is that the M5-RFP, on the eve of the fall of the former president, was looking for a new lease of life.
The ruling junta did not intend to govern with this man from the past.
This is why, in September, for the appointment of the new Prime Minister - the junta having a priori already in the briefcase the name of the president -, the soldiers ask all the candidates for this post to submit their files.
Choguel Maïga, cunning as a Sioux, feels the blow.
Unlike other of his comrades in the movement, he does not stoop to submitting his candidacy file.
He got it right.
There too, the soldiers had already chosen their candidate and were seeking to create a diversion by showing that the post was open to all candidates.
Tenacity that pays off
Nine months later, Colonel Assimi Goïta, vice-president of the Transition, after having
landed the president of the Transition, Bah N'Daw, and his Prime Minister, Moctar Ouane
, whom he himself had chosen needs 'a new alliance to govern.
He then throws himself into the arms of the M5-RFP which accepts the prime minister's office.
A week before, on the eve of the last cabinet reshuffle which will trigger a new crisis, a fringe of the M5-RFP refused the folding seats proposed by the President of the Transition.
Today, the camp of Colonel Assimi Goïta and that of Choguel Maïga have thrown the quarrels into the river.
Gone are the days when the military did not want to work with the M5-RFP.
And vice versa.
The tenacity of the Prime Minister has borne fruit. But at what cost ? To occupy the cozy chair of the Prime Minister, Doctor Choguel Maïga still ate, on several subjects, a tip of his hat. He who required a civilian president for the Transition will finally work with Colonel Assimi Goïta. And to show that it does not bother him at all, he has already made himself his spokesperson, on June 4, 2021, during a gathering of the M5-RFP, when he was not yet officially appointed Prime Minister . Speaking at this gathering, when Paris had just suspended its military cooperation with Bamako because of the second coup d'état in nine months, he indirectly addressed France, to diplomatically provide assurances: "
What the President of the Transition has asked me to convey is to reassure all our partners.
The Malian people want to regain their independence, their dignity;
he wants to work in honor and we are particularly attentive.
We will remain attentive to the concerns of our main partners, which are the countries which extended their hand to us when we were in difficulty, but today we need a new lease of life.
"
Man of compromise
The one who was a brilliant student also took his hat off what is a bit the Grail of his political career:
the Algiers peace agreement
, signed between the former rebels from the north and the government. He always believed that this agreement would inevitably lead to the partition of Mali. A follower of a shady nationalism, he is nevertheless now ready to apply the agreement. Moreover, to convince the most skeptical, he received, even before taking office, a delegation of ex-rebels. "
Really, during the meeting, he gave us the assurance that we are all Malians and that he did not come to behave like an elephant in a porcelain store
", comments a member of the delegation. ex-rebels.
Choguel Maïga is now abandoning another of his demands: the dissolution of the National Transitional Council (CNT), the legislative body of the Transition.
The M5-RFP, which found that it was not at all representative of the people, had asked the courts to declare this body “illegal”.
The new Prime Minister must today have his government program validated by the CNT, hence the operation of charm which has begun.
Difficulties will quickly stand in its way.
The first is the holding - as planned - of presidential and legislative elections at the end of February.
If he wants to keep the dates, how is he going to do it?
If he wants to postpone the deadline, how will he be able to pass the thread through the eye of the needle without provoking the wrath of the international community?
The other challenge, let us repeat, is that he was not chosen by the military because he has the most magnificent boubou of the local political class.
The choice of soldiers is more a matter of strategy.
Will the Choguel Maïga / Colonel Assimi Goïta couple work?
Two known experiences in Mali, in 2012 and 2020, left a bitter taste.
We have seen a “cohabite-tension” and not a cohabitation between soldiers and civilians at the head of the Transition.
The new president of the Transition,
who was sworn in on Monday, June 7, 2021
, will concentrate many powers in his hands.
He will appoint his relatives to sovereign positions.
His Prime Minister will he then only be a "simple collaborator"?
Relatives and activists of the new Prime Minister's party urge caution.
Abdoulaye Sissoko, a declared partisan sociologist of Choguel Maïga, advises in any case not to underestimate him: “
If you take his political route since the 1990s, he always knows where he is setting foot.
He made compromises with people like former President Amadou Toumani Touré who is still the killer of his mentor, General Moussa Traoré.
He made compromises with the leaders of the Alliance for Democracy in Mali (Adéma), which is the political formation which seized power in 1992 and which created all kinds of problems for it.
Choguel is the man of compromise, but not of compromise.
I think he'll be okay with it.
"
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