By Reuters
Guinea’s military junta on Wednesday named Mohamed Beavogui, a former civil servant and expert in agricultural finance, as prime minister to preside over a promised transition back to democratic rule following a coup in September.
Beavogui, 68, is also the nephew of Diallo Telli, a celebrated Guinean diplomat who served as the first secretary-general of the Organisation of African Unity, the predecessor to the African Union, and was killed by the regime of dictator Sekou Touré in 1977.
Beavogui, whose nomination was announced in a decree read on national television, will oversee a transition whose precise contours have yet to be defined.
In the 1980s, Beavogui worked as a civil servant and at the Compagnie des Bauxites de Guinee (CBG), one of the country’s leading producers of bauxite. Guinea possesses the world’s largest reserves of aluminum ore.
He later worked for the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization and, more recently, as director-general of African Risk Capacity, an African Union agency that helps governments plan for natural disasters.
Colonel Mamadi Doumbouya, who led the ouster of former President Alpha Conde, was inaugurated as interim president last Friday. He promised to organize free and transparent elections but did not say when.
