El-Ouali Mustapha Sayed

El-Ouali Mustapha Sayed الوالي مصطفى السيد
Portrait of El Uali Mustafa Sayed by Olivia Mora, based on photograph taken circa 1975–76.
General-Secretary of the Polisario
In office August 1974 – 9 June 1976
Prime Minister	Mohamed Lamine Ould Ahmed
Succeeded by	Mohamed Abdelaziz
Personal details
Born	1948 Bir Lehlou, Spanish Sahara, Spanish West Africa or Agyeiyimat, French West Africa
Died	9 June 1976 (aged 27–28) Inchiri Region, Mauritania
Political party	POLISARIO
Alma mater	Mohammed V University, Rabat, Morocco
Religion	Sunni Islam

El-Ouali Mustapha Sayed (also known as El Uali, El-Wali, Luali or Lulei) (Arabic: الوالي مصطفى السيد ‎‎; b. 1948 – 9 June 1976) was a Sahrawi nationalist leader, co-founder and second Secretary-General of the Polisario Front.

El-Ouali was born in 1948 in a Sahrawi nomad encampment somewhere on the hammada desert plains in eastern Western Sahara or northern Mauritania; some sources give his place of birth as Bir Lehlou, a location that is symbolic for the Polisario Front, for being the place of the proclamation of the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR). His parents were poor and his father handicapped, and with the sum of the severe drought on the Sahara that year, and the consequences of the Ifni War, the family had to abandon the traditional bedouin lifestyle of the Sahrawis, settling near Tan-Tan (nowadays southern Morocco) at the late 1950s. Some sources stated that Ouali's family was deported among others to Morocco by Spanish authorities in 1960.

He went to Primary School in Tan-Tan in 1962, and then to the Islamic Institute in Taroudannt in 1966 with impressive results, being awarded scholarships to attend university in Rabat in 1970. There he studied Laws & Political sciences, and met other young members of the Sahrawi diaspora, who like him were affected by the radicalism sweeping Moroccan universities in the early 1970s (heavily influenced by May 1968 in France). He was the first alumnus in the history of Moroccan universities on achieving a puntuation of 19 out of 20 in Constitutional law. He travelled to Europe for the only time in his life about this time, visiting Amsterdam in the Netherlands & Paris in France.