![Junta leader Colonel Assimi Goita, announcing the appointment, added that he himself would serve as vice president of the transition government [Amadou Keita/Reuters]](http://www.aljazeera.com/mritems/imagecache/mbdxxlarge/mritems/Images/2020/9/21/61a5c168009c4e0b80de7f8b4a41c81a_18.jpg "Ba N'Daou named Mali's interim president, colonel named VP")
Mali’s former defence minister Ba N’Daou has been named as president of the country’s new transition government.
Military government leader Colonel Assimi Goita was appointed vice president, state television announced on Monday.
According to a plan backed by the military government, the new president is meant to lead the country for several months before staging elections and returning Mali to civilian rule.
Mali’s ruling junta has come under intense pressure from leaders of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) to return power to civilians following the August 18 coup that overthrew President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita.
It was unclear whether the arrangement would satisfy ECOWAS, which last week threatened to step up economic sanctions and impose a total embargo on landlocked Mali if its conditions were not met. An ECOWAS spokeswoman was not immediately available for comment.
Colonel Assimi Goita, the junta leader of the National Committee for the Salvation of the People (CNSP) which overthrew Mali’s President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita was appointed vice president [Reuters]
N’Daou and Goita were appointed by a group of 17 electors chosen by the junta to oversee an 18-month transition that will culminate in fresh elections.
They will be sworn in on Friday, Goita said in brief remarks on state television.
Regional leaders had demanded that the interim president be a civilian, while signalling they would accept a soldier as vice president so long as he is ineligible to replace the president.
Goita did not say whether the vice president would remain next-in-line to the presidency as stipulated in a transitional charter approved a multi-party talks earlier this month.
N’Daou – whose name is also spelled Ndaw – was once an aide-de-camp to Mali’s ex-dictator Moussa Traore, who died last week aged 83.
A veteran soldier, Ndaw received training in the former Soviet Union as well as at Paris’s renowned Ecole de Guerre.
Kaou N’Djim, a spokesman for influential Muslim cleric Mahmoud Dicko, who led mass protests against Keita before the coup, praised N’Daou‘s nomination.
“Ba is an upright official. He has never been implicated in matters of financial corruption,” N’Djim told Reuters.
SOURCE:
News agencies
