LIBREVILLE (AFP) - The president of the small island state of Sao Tome and Principe, Fradique de Menezes, has asked former labour minister Damiao Vaz d'Almeida to form a new government.
Vaz d'Almeida had 48 hours to pick a team to succeed that of Maria das Neves, who was sacked on Tuesday after months of tension and hostility with the head of state over the running of the west African country, political sources said Friday.
The prime minister was dismissed after being named early in the week in a supposedly confidential report alleging that she was a suspected beneficiary of embezzled foreign aid funds, one source told AFP, asking not to be named.
D'Almeida was labour minister under Das Neves, who comes from a different party than the president. The head of state's own Democratic Movement of Forces for Change (MDFM) is in the minority in the parliament of the Atlantic archipelago.
One official, who said that the official nomination of the new prime minister was expected later Friday, added that "we hope he will have a less conflictual relationship with the president" than his predecessor.
While D'Almeida is one of three vice presidents of the Movement for the Liberation of Sao Tome and Principe (MLSTP), which has a narrow majority in the national assembly, he also comes from the island of Principe, whose inhabitants have complained of being marginalised by people from Sao Tome.
Sources said that De Menezes wanted a new government set up quickly in the country of scarcely 140,000 people, which is deeply in debt but stands to become richer on the strength of recently discovered viable oil reserves.
However, discussions on who should be part of the team were still under way on Friday, one of the sources said.
De Menezes has reportedly consulted politicians and leading social figures who told him they would rather see a new reshuffled government than an early general election, since the country is due soon to open talks with oil companies.
Das Neves became prime minister in October 2002 and returned to office at the head of a reshuffled coalition government after a military coup bid which began and ended peacefully in July 2003.
Until March, the government included members of all three main political parties in the archipelago, but the four MDFM ministers handed in their resignations that month. They were accepted by the president.
Since then, Das Neves has been head of a government with no ministers from the presidential party. She had asked for the resignation of two of the MDFM ministers on the grounds that they were taking decisions without consulting her. The others followed suit in solidarity with their colleagues.
In August last year, Das Neves handed in her resignation in the wake of the coup bid, in which a self-proclaimed "national salvation" junta took ministers hostage on July 16 while the president was on a trip to Nigeria.
The coup plotters denounced poverty and corruption and said they would set up transitional authorities, but backed down a week later under strong pressure from Portugal, other former Portuguese colonies and the United States, which oversaw negotiations.
The MLSTP was until a 1990 constitutional referendum the sole ruling party in the archipelago.