“Madame Ilza Maria dos Santos Amado Vaz is appointed Prime Minister and Head of Government” indicates the decree signed Thursday by President Carlos Vila Nova.
Minister of Justice, Public Administration and Human Rights in the previous government, she became the third female Prime Minister in the history of the archipelago.
On Tuesday, the head of state dismissed Prime Minister Patrice Trovoada and his government, highlighting their “notable incapacity” to “provide solutions” to the country in the face of “the scale of existing problems”, and “periods of frequent and prolonged absence of the Prime Minister (…) from the national territory.
Patrice Trovoada denounced a decision “motivated by political interests” and according to him unconstitutional because it did not respect the provisions planned to dissolve the government.
President Vila Nova, elected in 2021, had also asked the Independent Democratic Action party (ADI, center right), which came first in the last legislative elections in 2022 and from which he, like Mr. Trovoada, comes, to “present in a within 72 hours another personality to assume the post of Prime Minister and head of government.”
Read also: Sao Tome and Principe: the president dismisses the government
A former Portuguese colony independent since 1975, Sao Tome and Principe is a very poor Portuguese-speaking archipelago in the Gulf of Guinea of around 200,000 inhabitants, with a history punctuated by coup attempts.
-In November 2022, Patrice Trovoada, already Prime Minister at the time, announced that the army had foiled a new attempt.
After the coup attempts of 2003 and 2009, the parliamentary regime was stabilized, and the country established itself as a model of parliamentary democracy in Africa.
Since the establishment of the multiparty system in 1991, after 15 years of a single-party Marxist regime, the archipelago has been accustomed to alternations in power between the ADI and the Liberation Movement of Sao Tome and Principe-Social Party- Democrat (MLSTP-PSD, center-left).
On the strategic level, last May, the Portuguese government expressed its “great concern” after learning that Sao Tome and Principe had signed a military cooperation agreement with Russia.
Par Le360 Africa (with AFP)
01/10/2025 at 7:18 a.m.
