Guinea-Bissau Coup: Soldiers Seize Control, Silence a Nation
By: Abudu Olalekan
Chaos erupts in Guinea-Bissau as the military declares “total control,” suspending elections and imposing a curfew. What’s next for the coup-prone nation?
Wednesday hit Guinea-Bissau like a cold shock. Gunfire cracked near the presidential palace at dawn. Not the distant pop of festival fireworks. The sharp, echoing kind that makes neighbors lock their doors and kids press their faces to floorboards. Men in military fatigues rolled in and blocked the main road to the palace. No warnings. No pleas for calm. Just barricades and loaded rifles.
By early afternoon, General Denis N’Canha—head of the presidential military office—sat down with Reportersroom correspondents and other outlets to read a statement. He was flanked by armed soldier, their boots planted firm on the tile floor. “A command composed of all branches of the armed forces is taking over the leadership of the country until further notice,” he said. His tone was flat, no flicker of emotion. Total control, just like he promised.
Incumbent president Umaro Sissoco Embalo—who was the favorite to win Sunday’s general election, per pre-vote polls—was holed up in a building behind military headquarters. “With the chief of staff and the interior minister,” a senior officer told Reportersroom on condition of anonymity. We still don’t know if he’s under arrest. No official statement from his team. No social media posts. Just radio silence.
Before the coup, the election was already a mess. Embalo and opposition candidate Fernando Dias both declared victory within hours of polls closing. Official provisional results were supposed to drop Thursday. Now? They’re gone. Vanished. The military suspended the entire electoral process in one breath. Just like that.
N’Canha claimed the takeover was necessary to stop a plot to destabilize the country. “Involving national drug lords,” he said. “They smuggled weapons into the country to alter the constitutional order.” We can’t verify those claims yet, but let’s be real—Guinea-Bissau is no stranger to this kind of chaos. It’s one of the poorest countries on the planet, and a major hub for cocaine trafficking between Latin America and Europe. Political instability has been its calling card for decades, with four coups since independence and countless near-misses that never made global headlines.
The military didn’t stop at the election. They closed all borders. Suspended all media programming—no news, no radio, no nothing. Imposed a mandatory curfew: anyone caught outside after dark risks arrest, or worse. Even the National Electoral Commission wasn’t spared. Unidentified armed men broke into their offices, Abdourahmane Djalo, a CNE communications official, told Reportersroom. Windows were shattered. Files strewn across the floor. No one was hurt, but the message was loud and clear: we run this country now.
ECOWAS deployed more than 6,780 security forces to keep the peace for the election and post-vote period. That didn’t matter. This isn’t the first time Guinea-Bissau has been here, either. The 2019 presidential vote turned into a four-month standoff, with both main candidates claiming victory and refusing to back down. Then there’s the 2025 election drama: PAIGC, the party that led Guinea-Bissau to independence from Portugal in 1974, was kicked off the ballot. The Supreme Court said they filed their applications too late. The opposition calls it blatant manipulation, and insists Embalo’s term expired back on February 27—five years to the day he was inaugurated. He’s been ruling by decree since dissolving the opposition-dominated legislature in 2023, with no checks on his power.
No one knows what comes next. The streets are quiet now, too quiet. People are hiding in their homes, refreshing their phones for any scrap of news that doesn’t sound like a death sentence. Reportersroom’s team on the ground is still digging for updates, even as curfew looms and the military patrols the empty avenues. For now, Guinea-Bissau is in the military’s hands. And that’s a dangerous place to be.
