Mali’s New Prime Minister Selects Ministers With Focus On Reconciliation

Written by Ann Brown

Apr 13, 2014

Mali’s new Prime Minister Moussa Mara formed a government, with the outgoing foreign minister becoming reconciliation minister as the deeply-divided nation recovers from months of ruinous conflict. Former planning minister Mara, 39, was promoted to the premiership last weekend after Mali’s first post-war prime minister Oumar Tatam Ly quit just six months into office.

The make-up of the new cabinet, announced by presidential decree on public television, places reconciliation at the top of the agenda. Mara has promised “to mend the social fabric that has been particularly traumatised by the troubles of the previous years”. President Ibrahima Boubacar Keita’s office gave no reason for the resignation of Ly and his ministers, but it later emerged that the outgoing prime minister had become frustrated over being unable to enact reforms in the administration.

Mara said this week that he wants to strengthen governance and public services, improving relations between citizens and the state in post-coup Mali. Army officers angry at the level of support they had received to combat a separatist Tuareg rebellion in Mali’s vast desert north overthrew the democratically elected government of president Amadou Toumani Toure on March 22, 2012.

In the chaos that followed, the Tuareg seized control of an area larger than France before being ousted by al Qaeda-linked groups which imposed a brutal interpretation of Islamic law on the local population, carrying out punitive amputations and executions. Their actions drew worldwide condemnation and prompted France to launch a military offensive at Mali’s behest in January last year that ousted the Islamists.

Mara said that “the safety of all Malians wherever they are, and on the whole national territory” would be the focus of his administration. Malians need “to mend the social fabric that has been particularly traumatised by the troubles of the previous years”, he added. “We will lead the government with the mindset of absolute integrity among its members,” he said, promising loyalty to Keita.