Hundreds of people gathered in Bangui, the capital of the Central African Republic, to demand constitutional reform.
Pro-government demonstrators on Friday want President Faustin Archange Touadéra to run for a ‘third term’ in office, which is already illegal under the current Constitution.
“I am here today to support President Touadéra’s third term. President Touadéra has shown his mandate in my opinion, but he is also assisting my country by bringing progress to the Central African Republic,” said Jean-Levy, a pro-power demonstrator.
“The constitution is not always related to the president of the Republic,” David Annick Kandida, coordinator of a movement allied to the Republican Front, remarked.
It is up to President Touadéra to reflect for himself and decide whether or not to run again, but we believe that this constitution needs to be amended.”
The Republican Front’s president claimed to have gathered “more than 600,000 signatures, out of a population of around five million people.”
“We launched an activism campaign in the Central African territory on March 28 and were able to collect more than 601,774 signatures that we officially handed over to the office of the National Assembly to ask that this 2016 constitution be revised,” said Héritier Doneng, President of the Republican Front.
Faustin Archange Touadéra was re-elected with 53.16 percent of the vote at the end of December 2020, however due to insecurity in a country that has been in the grip of civil war since 2013, less than ‘one in three people’ were able to vote.