AFRICAN NEWS            

Backgrounder: Cote d’Ivore

Hadiza Wada, DBA …December 11, 2010

Côte d'Ivoire, which at its independence was known as Ivory Coast became independent on 7 August 1960. For three decades since then the country remained under the control of its first leader Félix Houphouet-Boigny.  Since the end of Houphouet-Boigny’s rule in 1993, Côte d'Ivoire has been embroiled in one civil strife after another until a political agreement between the government and the rebels brought relative peace.  Following in the tradition of its first long serving President, the country with its 21 million population with its capital in Yamoussoukro remains a republic with a strong executive power personified in the President.

The Election drama playing itself out today appears to be another embarassing attempt by people in power to remain in leadership regardless of what the general populations of their country feel about them.  In a system where the people are the ones who decide the make-up of those who makes the laws, who execute the laws and also elect the president who makes the final decisions on all national issues, you do not want to put at the very end of chain (President) someone who can sign off on your lives and interests without due regard to what is right and just. 

 Ideally in a heterogenous society, because you can only have one president at  time, you need to search hard and come up with one who is aware of the nation’s problem and has the ability and interest in working towards aleviating them.  You want someone who either feels your pain as a nation literally, or one who can identify with it because at some time in his life he has gathered some experience that appears to affect how he ampathizes with situations like yours.

 The electoral autorities were reported to have announced Alhassane Ouattara as the winner of the Presidential election, not the incumbent President Laurent Gbagbo. That is an unusual occurence by itself.  The electoral body has to be commended, if they indeed have conducted such elections credibly and justly. By damning the consequences from an incumbent leader, and announcing the real winner they are joining just a few exemplary countries of the continent that have the courage to do what is right.

 The usual and common occurence is where incumbent leaders enforce their will on the conduct of the election including tallying of the votes.  The problem usually emanate from the incumbent’s direct control of the institutions of power, including security personnel such as the Police, legal institutions such as the Courts, and facilities used in elections including direct control of the electoral commission.

The present crisis could be said to emanate from a presidential election first held in October 2000 in which Laurent Gbagbo vied with Robert Guéï. That election was marked by military and civil unrest. Following a public uprising that resulted in high casualties, Guéï was swiftly replaced by Gbagbo.  Alassane Ouattara meanwhile, a northern Muslim was disqualified by the country's Supreme Court, under an allegation that he is not a full citizen of Ivory Coast but of Burkina Faso. That announcement sparked violent protests in which his supporters, mainly from the country's north, battled riot police in the capital, Yamoussoukro.  A special electoral code enacted in 1994 was cleverly inserted into a major constitutional amendment that was ratified in 2000 by referendum, which many saw clearly as a way to bar the one time Prime Minister from contesting in the Presidential election.

Since the expiration of his five year mandate, Laurent Gbagbo has found ways of staying in power.  The presidential elections that should have been organized in 2005 were postponed until November 2010. Meanwhile Alassane Ouattara, who has remained adamant in his political ambition, has finally received a commitment from Gbabo in 2007 during Gbagbo’s various schemes to remain in power which involved various organizations local and abroad. Ouattara's nationality certificate, previously issued in late September 1999 in an effort to bring to an end challenges to his nationality status was annulled a month later by a court in October, in what was described as an attempt to seal his fate.  Meanwhile, Burkinabe President Captain Blaise Compoare was once reported to have clarified in an interview that Mr. Ouattara is not his country’s citizen.  Captain Blaise Compoare was quoted by press reports as saying "For us things are simple: he does not come from Burkina Faso, neither by birth, marriage, or naturalization. This man has been Prime Minister of Côte d'Ivoire."

Though the questioning of Mr. Ouattara’s nationality was not first introduced directly by President Gbagbo, he has effectively used it to bar his rival from political participation.  And one has to know the historical background of Mr. Gbagbo, a Professor of History notorious as an advocate of divisiveness. The incessant campaign of ethnic and religious hatred, once a factor that was not ascribed to Ivory Coast became popular after the collapse of the Boigny era. Most Ivorian northerners were seen as foreigners that do not belong because they share ethnicity and religion with some neighboring countries, in what most Nigerian’s may align today with the 1990 Gideon Oka’s failed coup declaration of sending Northern Nigerian States to join Niger Republic.

Gbabo Bio

Who then is Laurent Gbagbo?  BBC news sources described Mr. Gabgbo as a historian and  “a former trade union activist who, since the 1980s, has taken a strongly nationalist stance, espousing the concept of pure Ivorian parentage. His party took steps to exclude Ivorians of foreign descent from the electoral roll.  He spent two years in prison in the early 1970s for "subversive" teaching and eight years in exile in France in the 1980s, before returning in 1988 to campaign for multi-party democracy.” He was also reported to have “proclaimed himself president in October 2000, at the age of 55… (and) derives much of his support from the mostly Christian south and west.”

Ouattara Bio

Alassane Dramane Ouattara born 1942 on the other hand, is an Ivorian politician and the disputed President of Côte d'Ivoire. He was Prime Minister of Côte d'Ivoire from November 1990 to December 1993. He is currently the President of the Rally of the Republicans (RDR), a party which has its support base in the north of the country, and was a candidate in the 2010 presidential election. Besides being a politician he is also a technocrat, trained as an economist and having worked for the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and Central Bank of West African States (BCEAO). 

The Crisis

The preliminary results announced by the Electoral Commission showed a loss for Gbagbo in favor of his rival, former Prime Minister Alassane Ouattara. The ruling FPI contested the results before the Constitutional Council, charging massive fraud in the northern departments controlled by the rebels of the Forces Nouvelles de Côte d'Ivoire (FNCI). The North has primarily became a hot spot described by the government as a rebel area since the political turmoil of early years, and after a civil war which brought a physical demarcation of the country into north and south with a peace zone in between the two. Charges such as these are bound to raise sentiments of regionalism, which has by now become a reality in Ivorian history.

But the charges were contradicted by international observers. In addition to other international monitoring sources, Ivory Coast has about eleven thousand United Nations peace keepers stationed in the country for years, as a result of previous crisis and its civil war.  These observers who are now effectively guarding the premises where the election winner is taking refuge have expressed their assessment that the election was won by Mr. Ouattara.  The initial report of the results by the electoral commission declaring Mr. Ouattara the winner with 54% of the total votes, and the subsequent challenge of those results by the government has led to severe tension and violent incidents.

Due to the fragile and tensed situation, the African Union sent Thabo Mbeki, former President of South Africa, to mediate the conflict which did not materialize into positive results and as a result the African Union has refused Mr. Gbagbo recognition. The U.N. Security Council as well as the Economic Community of West African States, ECOWAS have also announced that they do not recognize the unilaterally sworn government of Gbagbo.