Chad’s Military Chief, Déby, Sworn – in As Country’s Sixth President

Mahamat Idriss Déby Itno, the son of Chad’s former ruler and the African country’s interim military leader, was sworn in on Thursday as Chad’s sixth president.

He was sworn in for a five – year tenure having recorded 61 per cent of the vote in the presidential election of May 6.

Déby had taken power with a group of generals in 2021 after the death of his father, Idriss Déby Itno, and suspended the constitution.

His father had previously ruled the country for more than 30 years.

Since 2020, seven countries in Africa have experienced successful military coups, almost all of them in Francophone West and Central Africa.

Chad is the first country in the so-called Coup Belt in the Sahel region to hold elections since then.

Déby is the sixth president in the history of the country of around 19 million inhabitants, which has never experienced a peaceful transfer of power since its independence from the former colonial power France in 1960.

The Constitutional Council rejected objections to the election result by the opposition, which, like representatives of civil society, spoke of massive electoral fraud.

Chad is located at an important crossroads between the crisis states of Sudan, Libya, Niger, and the Central African Republic and is home to more than one million refugees.