Guinea Bissau’s Supreme Court has upheld the nomination of Prime Minister Baciro Dja, boosting President Jose Mario Vaz’s rule amid a power struggle with former prime minister Carlos Correia.
Vaz sacked Correia and replaced him with Dja, a move that further divided the ruling PAIGC party and which Correia denounced as a “constitutional coup d’etat”.
“The legal proceedings brought by the PAIGC (against the nomination) are null and void and therefore inadmissible,” the court ruled late on Friday, according to a decision broadcast on local radio.
“The presidential decree that appointed Baciro Dja as head the government of Guinea-Bissau is indeed constitutional.”
Vaz, after sacking Correia and his government on May12, said they had proved incapable of managing a month’s long political crisis caused partly by the overlapping of duties of the president and the prime minister in a semi-presidential system.
Vaz, a former finance minister, was elected in 2014 after the army was forced to hand back power to civilian politicians following a military coup.
