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| - After months of silence over highly charged speculation about his future, Guinea's 82-year-old president looks set to follow a long autocratic tradition by bidding for power again, despite his advancing years. President Alpha Conde's Rally of the Guinean People (RPG) party on Thursday broke months of silence over the issue and announced him as its formal candidate. The president, for his part, acknowledged the request but did not explicitly commit to running. "If you want me to accept your proposal, you have to commit yourself to making the RPG what it used to be, a party that forgets no one," Conde told party delegates, referring to women, youngsters and the poor. To critics, the RPG's announcement on Thursday is nothing but a formality. They have argued for months that Conde has been plotting to stay in office beyond the legally mandated two presidential terms. The president is coming to the end of his second term, so the principal stumbling block to such a plan would have been Guinea's constitution. But Conde has faced down a mass protest movement, and the criticism of the United States and former colonial power France, and overcome that hurdle. He pushed through a revamped constitution in March -- which he argued would modernise Guinea -- but which opponents cast as a ploy to reset the presidential term counter, enabling him to run again. Deadly clashes since October over the possibility of Conde running for a third term have claimed dozens of lives. A canny operator, the president's tactical skills were forged by years in exile or prison, followed by an almost miraculous rise to power. The former opposition leader became Guinea's first democratically elected president in 2010 and was returned to office by voters in 2015. Critics say he has become authoritarian, however, intolerant of dissent and increasingly tempted to wield the iron fist. "If anyone comes to wreck the ballot boxes, hit them," Conde notoriously urged supporters ahead of the March constitutional referendum. Conde has been "so disappointing", said opposition leader Cellou Dalein Diallo, a former prime minister, earlier this year. He has created "a banana republic -- a dictatorship in all but name", Diallo said. An alliance of parties, unions and grassroots groups opposed to the referendum also delivered a similarly brutal judgement earlier this year. "He took himself for Mandela but decided to become Bokassa," it said, referring to Jean-Bedel Bokassa, the former president of the Central African Republic who declared himself emperor. Conde was born in Boke, western Guinea, to a family in the Malinke ethnic group, the country's second largest. Aged just 15, he headed to France, the colonial power at the time, where he gained diplomas in economy, law and sociology, and thereafter taught at the Sorbonne. In the heady years after independence in 1958, Conde led a French federation of African students and spurred opposition to the dictatorship of Guinea's first post-colonial leader, Ahmed Sekou Toure. Sekou Toure had Conde sentenced to death in absentia in 1970. He returned to the country in 1991, seven years after Sekou Toure's death, and contested presidential elections in 1993 and 1998. He was credited with winning 27 percent of the vote in the first and 18 percent in the second -- neither ballot was deemed internationally to be free and transparent. His activism as founder of the RPG was deemed a threat by the then-president, Lansana Conte, who had him arrested just after the 1998 elections. In 2000, he was given a five-year jail term for "harming the authority of state and the integrity of national territory," but was pardoned the following year thanks to international pressure. Conde stayed in the opposition after a military junta, led by Captain Moussa Dadis Camara, took power. In 2010 came the annus mirabilis, when Conde, after a defeat by Diallo in the first round, romped to victory in the runoff. An elegant dresser who walks with a slight limp, Conde has been married three times and has one son. He is a skillful speechmaker who can work a crowd. When he turns to his record, he talks up the building of hydro-electric dams, rewriting mining contracts and tightening control over the army -- all this while the country was struggling with an Ebola epidemic that ran from late 2013 to 2016. The centrepiece of his second term was the constitutional reform, which he argued was necessary to fight female genital mutilation and ensure fairer distribution of the country's mineral wealth. His adversaries see him as a man in a hurry -- sharp-tongued, impulsive, authoritarian. He once mocked students who demanded he provide the computer tablets he had promised during his election campaign. "You're like baby goats -- 'tablets, tablets'," he said sarcastically, as he performed a little goat-like jump. "Conde has definitely done some things important in moving Guinea forward," said Jim Wormington of Human Rights Watch (HRW), referring to local government and army reforms. If the apparent turn towards authoritarianism could be factored out, "it would be possible to paint quite a positive picture" of Conde, he said. "That's what makes his position so sad." siu-bm-eml-cv/lal/eml/erc
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