ANALYSIS-Guinea's coup: a true break with past or deja vu?

By Saliou Samb

CONAKRY, Dec 28 (Reuters) - Guinea's new military rulers must swiftly meet promises of fighting graft and preparing for free elections if they are to avoid the route of other would-be reformers in Africa who badly outstayed their welcome.

Seizing control of the world's No. 1 bauxite exporter after the death of President Lansana Conte a week ago, the young officers of the National Council for Democracy and Development junta have been unopposed in what is so far a bloodless coup.

Led by a 44-year-old little-known army supply corps captain, they have promised a clean break from a nearly quarter century of Conte's rule, which saw the diabetic, chain-smoking general govern with a corrupt clique of military and civilian cronies.

Capt. Moussa Dadis Camara has promised elections in December 2010, saying he has no wish to keep power. He has also pledged to review multi-billion dollar mining contracts with foreign firms.

But although Camara has been cheered in the streets and applauded by political and civil society leaders, Africa watchers say his words are the staple offering of incoming reformers, used more often than not to justify violent or unconstitutional takeovers.

"We've seen this before in Africa -- the young guard wanting to have the trappings and power of the old guard. And then it's always the people who get left out," Corinne Dufka, senior West Africa researcher for Human Rights Watch, told Reuters.

"If Camara is serious, he needs to hold elections quickly, well before 2010. Guineans are fed up, they want democracy and have been denied it for years."



SAVIOURS

Africa's turbulent half century of post-independence history has seen a legion of self-styled "saviours" and reformers, and national liberators, from Uganda's Idi Amin to Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe whose bright, crusading starts in power have degenerated into long, autocratic, inept, and nepotism-riddled regimes.

Many also started off with domestic and foreign blessing.

Guinea's own Conte, who as a colonel took over in a bloodless 1984 coup after the death of the first president, the Marxist Sekou Toure, made similar early public pledges to usher in an a new era of freedom and prosperity.

Conte did introduce multi-party democracy after the end of the Cold War, and opened up Guinea to wider foreign investment.

But he remained a military autocrat, increasingly capricious and reclusive at the end of his rule, tolerating no rivals and keeping power and privilege in the hands of a small elite, whose squabbling members he skilfully played off against each other.

The vast majority of Guineans still live in poverty, without regular electricity or piped water despite the nation's mineral riches, which besides a third of the world's known bauxite -- used to make aluminium -- include gold, iron ore and diamonds.

"We can't abandon our fate to soldiers. We need to get back as quickly as possible to a civil regime," said Madani Dia, a political analyst from a local Guinean think-tank, Agora.