Faustin-Archange Touadéra
Faustin-Archange Touadéra has been president of the Central African Republic since March 2016, the mathematics professor and former prime minister of Bozizé who won the run-off of February 2016 as an independent with sixty-three per cent, after the three years of the Séléka and anti-balaka war that had emptied the Muslim quarters of Bangui and killed some five thousand. He has governed a state that controls its capital and little else, with fourteen armed groups holding the countryside at the peace agreement of Khartoum in February 2019, which gave their leaders ministries. It broke at the election of December 2020, when a coalition of them under Bozizé marched on Bangui and were stopped by the Russians. The Wagner group, which had arrived in January 2018 with weapons the UN had exempted from the embargo and instructors who became his presidential guard, became by 2021 the country's army. It retook the towns with the government's soldiers and Rwandan peacekeepers, killing civilians by the hundred in the operations the UN documented. It took the gold of Ndassima and the timber and the diamonds. It made the country the model for Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger. The French garrison left in 2022 after sixty-two years and the French ambassador was told not to bother. He was born in Bangui in 1957, the son of a driver, studied mathematics at Bangui and at Abidjan, took a doctorate at Lille and another at Yaoundé. He taught at the University of Bangui and was its rector from 2004 to 2008. Then Bozizé made him prime minister, an office he held for five years without a party or a militia, which was his qualification in 2016. The constitution of 2016, written to end the presidencies for life, limited him to two terms. The constitution of July 2023, approved by referendum with ninety-five per cent, removed the limit and lengthened the term to seven years, which the opposition boycotted and the Russians helped campaign for. The election of December 2025 gave him a third term with seventy-five per cent. The country remains at the bottom of the human development index, with the UN feeding half its people and the peacekeepers still there. He has said that Russia came when nobody else would, which is true. He has said that the price is the country's business, which the country has not been asked.
- Lived: 1957 CE – ?
- Nationality: Central African
- Roles: president, mathematician, politician
