President Of Guinea Bissau Dismisses Prime Minister And Entire Cabinet

August 14 Guinea Bissau President Jose Mario Vaz opened talks with the country’s main political parties on Friday to form a new government, after he fired the previous cabinet in a power struggle with the prime minister.

President Vaz said that there called “a breach of trust” between the two men.

Despite concerns about the potential fallout from the crisis, life on Bissau streets carried on as usual, with no extra deployment of security forces, an AFP journalist said.

Guinea-Bissau has had so many coups and countercoups that no elected leader has been able to complete his term in the four decades since the country won independence from Portugal in 1974.

Pereira had previously said the PAIGC, the ruling party to which both Vaz and Pereira belong, was planning a convention this year to address the tensions.

“The (reconciliation) efforts did not succeed in resolving hard relations between the president and the prime minister”, he said.

In March 2009, political veteran Joao Bernardo “Nino” Vieira, who had led the country on and off since 1980, was assassinated by soldiers in apparent revenge for the killing of the then army chief.

He also raised the closure of the border with Guinea over the Ebola crisis and cited problems of corruption and nepotism, a lack of transparency in public procurement and obstruction of the judiciary.

The former Portuguese colony in West Africa has undergone nine coups or coup attempts since 1980.

In recent years, it has emerged as a major transit point for cocaine trafficked from South America to Europe, a trade in which U.S. authorities say senior military officials play a pivotal role.