webGuinée

Préfecture de Kindiya

Bazaar highlights Guineas's new free-market spirit

Source: webperfect

KINDIA, Guinea, Feb 20 (Reuter) - The rattle of 400 sewing machines competes with the chatter of thousands of traders in the bazaar in Kindia, symbolising a new-found spirit of free enterprise in once-Marxist Guinea.
The return of private capital in the decade since the death of dictator Ahmed Sekou Toure has fuelled a free-market boom in the West African country, which has swept aside most of the vestiges of socialist central planning.
But for all the bustle, Guinea remains one of the poorest countries in the world with huge mineral wealth untapped, and international experts say future economic growth is hampered by lack of trained workers and of diversification.
"Guinea's economic prospects continue to be highly uncertain, because the economy still depends to a considerable extent on one commodity, bauxite," the World Bank said in a 1995 report on trends in developing economies.
Once notorious for Camp Keme Bourema, its maximum security prison where Toure's opponents were tortured, Kindia has embraced economic reforms promoted by President Lansana Conte after he seized power in a military coup the year after Toure's death in 1984.
Graceful Mandingo women, better known previously as cheerleaders of the Toure regime, have rechannelled their energies into the textile and garment trade, which now employs more people than Kindia's Ukrainian-run Bauxite mill.
Men and elementary schoolchildren work as part-time tailors in a hangar-like hall, the heart and soul of Kindia town, 150 km (95 miles) north of the capital Conakry.
Around the building a teeming marketplace trades in goods ranging from food to imported radios and electronics.
"Ten years ago all they sold here was cassava," recalled market watchman Abou Camara.
"Things were bad then. Everyone was afraid of the economic police,'' said cola-nuts seller Ibrahima Soro, who fled the Toure regime at its height in 1978 to try his hand at illegal diamond digging in neighbouring Sierra Leone.
Civil war in Sierra Leone ended Soro's adventure and he returned home in 1991 just before Conte bowed to internal and foreign pressure for multi-party political reform.
Though blessed with a vast untapped mineral wealth, Guinea still ranks among the poorest countries in the world, not least because of Toure's disastrous Marxist experiment.
Life expectancy is a dismal 40 years, only 39 percent of children have access to education and 50 percent of people in the capital Conakry earn less than $1 a day.
Toure launched a massive crackdown on free enterprise in 1975 after price hikes he said were engineered by saboteurs. All private imports were banned and profiteering became a crime.
Conte, elected civilian president in 1993, has rolled back state control as part of reform measures backed by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Foreign investors have flocked to Guinea, lured by gold and diamonds and a new mining code which has cut costs and reinforced security of investment.
Conte survived a bloody mutiny by soldiers over pay on February 2-3,1996 when his presidential palace office complex was devastated by shell fire as he hid in a bunker.
Conakry residents say the fact that civilians stayed out of the disturbances, in which at least 20 people died, was an endorsement of Conte's political and economic reforms.
Today Conakry is a bustling city where the black market in everything from foodstuffs to foreign exchange has given way to well-stocked shops, foreign banks and a boom in private residential and office buildings.
World Bank and International Monetary Fund sources say that despite weak policy implementation in the early 1990s, Guinea's reform programme is generally on course.