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Understanding the Present Political Crisis in
Cote d’Ivoire
By Dr. Abass Bundu
That Alassane Ouattara won the election in Cote d’Ivoire on
November 28, 2010, is acknowledged even by his opponent, Laurent
Gbagbo. The problem arose only because the constitutional
council subsequently ruled against certain poll counts in
Ouattara’s strongholds in the north of the country, for alleged
election irregularities. But the council’s credibility is
suspect.
Before the poll, Gbagbo had set about willfully to pack the
council with his handpicked cronies, fearing he might turn out
to be the loser in the contest. So the choice facing the
international community is clear: either to accept the popular
will as expressed at the poll or to accept a subversion of that
will by the council. ECOWAS leaders chose the former, followed
by the rest of the international community: the United Nations
General Assembly approved the regional decision and recognized
Ouattara as the winner and president-elect.
A brief historical background to the crisis would help. Cote
d’Ivoire gained independence from France in 1960 with Félix
Houphouët-Boigny as president. He ruled the country
autocratically under a virtual one-party system.
Notwithstanding, for more than two decades, this universally
unacceptable political system produced a massively successful
economy. Agriculture as its mainstay, the economy grew
exponentially with cocoa exports at the apex.
Immigration was at the core of this growth: immigrants
particularly from the Sahel were welcomed to cultivate cocoa on
unused land. A tidal wave of immigrants followed. It peaked in
1980, producing about 40 per cent of the national labour force.
Politically the model worked: Houphouët gave immigrants economic
muscle while taxing their cocoa exports heavily to finance jobs
in a public service dominated by Ivorian indigenes.
Houphouët’s model suffocated from the economic shocks of the
1980s, characterized by rising international oil prices and
collapsing cocoa prices, leaving the country heavily indebted.
By 1993, the national debt had risen to $15 billion. Poverty
soared. The mostly immigrant cocoa producers seemed the only
group insulated from the vagary. The tax on cocoa exports,
disguised as price stabilization, guaranteed the farmer a local
price whatever the international price. When the international
price fell below the local guaranteed price, what was originally
a tax turned into a subsidy and the immigrant farmer got the
windfall. This aroused anti-immigrant sentiments especially in
the urban and cocoa-growing areas, including in Gbagbo’s
homeland. A powder-keg was waiting to explode!
In December 1993 Houphouët died without an obvious successor.
After a lot of wrangling, Henri Konan Bédié emerged as
president. Ouattara, who had been prime minister and generally
regarded as possessing better leadership credentials, decided to
leave the country to take up the number three position in the
IMF hierarchy in Washington. France took the unprecedented
decision of disconnecting the CFA franc from its moorings in the
French Treasury, leading to its immediate devaluation by 50 per
cent. As if that was not problem enough, Bédié unwisely teamed
up with Gbagbo to reverse the ruling party’s historical position
on immigrants, all aimed at disenfranchising Ouattara as a
presidential candidate in the election then planned for 1995.
Ouattara, a Muslim from the north, was now cast as an immigrant
and a noncitizen.
Gbagbo had always known he would suffer an ignominious defeat in
any fair presidential poll against Ouattara or Bédié, so he did
not stand in 1995. Instead, he boycotted the poll, along with
Ouattara’s supporters. This left Bédié to win the election. By
promoting xenophobia, Bédié ignited the powder-keg against
immigrants; he also removed many northerners from their
positions in government.
At the same time, the army became restive. They had first shown
signs of restiveness in 1990 when they mutinied to secure better
wages. Gueï, a general in the army, negotiated an end to the
mutiny and got himself promoted as chief of staff.
Gueï continued as chief of staff under Bédié who wanted him to
purge the army of northern elements and also arrest Ouattara.
Gueï refused. Bédié fired him along with 700 soldiers. In 1999
Gueï replaced Bédié in a bloodless coup, promising fresh
elections within six months. Although he kept his promise, he
soon convinced himself of his natural proclivity for the job of
president. So he made himself a presidential candidate.
However, elections posed a problem for him. Although his talents
were evident to himself, there was no upwelling of popular
support in an electorate already divided between support for
Ouattara and support for Bédié.
Gueï declared them both to be ineligible, securing approbation
from a packed constitutional council, which, having got the hang
of it, also ruled out a further 12 candidates. He forgot to
borrow a leaf from the contraption of Sani Abacha in Nigeria.
Abacha had pioneered a multi-party election in which each of the
five parties he helped to create chose him as its candidate.
Sadly he had died before being able to contest his planned
election against himself. For his part, Gueï, being less
ingenuous, decided he ought to have an opponent to legitimize
his victory. Gbagbo obliged and became Gueï’s handpicked
opponent. But, like the archetypal dictator, Gueï made the
classic error of overestimating his popularity. Most people did
not bother to vote in the sham election, and among those who
did, most voted for Gbagbo.
Gueï merely used the election to anoint himself with the magic
oil of democracy; not one to choose a president. So he did not
take kindly to being rejected by the Ivorian electorate and
promptly declared himself winner and disbanded the electoral
commission; in effect staging a coup against himself.
But Gueï had also underestimated Gbagbo, who immediate deployed
his Young Patriots, whom he had been secretly arming as a
private militia. In no time they outfought Gueï’s army and also
turned their guns on northerners living in Abidjan, dumping
bodies of those they killed in the lagoon.
From time immemorial, the Ivorian army’s chivalry hardly ever
rose above the ceremonial, never having been baptised by enemy
gunfire until that moment. If Bédié salami-sliced the army
whenever they mutinied, Gueï gutted them. So when the time came
that Gueï needed them most to defend his regime, he discovered
to his astonishment that not much gallantry had been left in
them to be of any use.
So then Gbagbo came to power through the admixture of an unfair
election and a rag-tag militia of youths. Lacking confidence in
his own ability to win a fair election against Bédié or Ouattara,
Gbagbo had made no secret of his aversion for elections: he
skillfully avoided every demand to restage or hold fresh
elections.
Gueï, on the other hand, had tasted power once and had evidently
allowed it to intoxicate him. So he attempted a comeback coup.
The coup failed, his army proving no match for Gbagbo’s youth
militia. In the process Gueï was killed along with his family.
The rump of his soldiers then retreated to the north of the
country, coalescing into the Forces Nouvelles (FN) and waging a
rebellion.
As that rebellion raged, further entrenching the FN in the
north, Gbagbo’s grip on power proved more and more precarious.
His writ hardly ran outside the capital. To make matters worse,
he made the mistake of using French citizens living in Abidjan
as hostages as well as inciting his youth militia to attack
them; all in a desperate effort to force France to come to his
defence. French troops did come to his rescue just so that they
could save their nationals from attack by his youth militia,
whose ranks by then were swelling with mercenaries from former
rebel forces in Liberia and Sierra Leone.
An attempt was made to broker an accord in Paris between
Gbagbo’s regime and the FN, providing for the formation of a
coalition government headed by Gbagbo and the FN holding some
key cabinet posts including Defence. The accord unravelled when
Gbagbo repudiated this aspect of the deal. He then proceeded to
import more arms into the country, including air power,
prompting the UN and ECOWAS to impose an arms embargo, albeit it
proved utterly ineffective. He used his air force to bomb a
French base near Bouaké, killing nine soldiers. The French
retaliated by destroying his air force.
The ensuing stalemate prevailed well beyond the end of Gbagbo’s
term as president. A second deal, worked out with the help of
the international community, brought about the replacement of
his regime with one headed by a neutral technocrat as prime
minister. Not too long after, this international deal was
replaced by yet another deal, this time an internal one struck
between Gbagbo and the FN leader, Guillaume Soro. Gbagbo got rid
of the technocrat as prime minister and appointed Soro in his
place. Both Gbagbo and Soro promised elections but on their own
terms. Again, not too long after, Soro narrowly escaped death in
a helicopter crash. After the election, Soro switched his
allegiance to Ouattara.
Thus seen, whereas the UN was demanding democratic elections,
involving the participation of Ouattara and Bédié, before giving
its imprimatur, fearing that the poll might produce a winner
other than himself, Gbagbo decided in advance to pack the
constitutional council with his handpicked cronies, who would
help him to reverse the result of the poll if it did not go in
his favour. This is why today he is relying solely on that
council’s verdict for doggedly clinging on to the presidency,
not on the poll result declared by the electoral commission. His
refusal to accept defeat and hand over power is nothing short of
a coup against the democratically-elected and internationally-recognised
president of Cote d’Ivoire.
All in all, Gbagbo, despite all his shadow boxing and
stubbornness, must be a worried man. Given that his socialist
friends in France are no longer in office, and the UN has
unanimously recognized his opponent, Ouattara, as the
president-elect of Cote d’Ivoire, he is now without friends.
Where to spend the remainder of his life and his new wealth are
matters which must now be exercising his mind, to say nothing
about his likely prosecution for human rights violations. All
the same, it is better for Gbagbo to accept the offer of asylum
made to him by foreign governments or the offer of amnesty by
the president-elect while they are still available.
But the most surprising thing of all has been the conspicuous
silence of the Ivorian military, or what is left of it since its
emasculation by both Bédié and Gueï. Maybe, a mere threat from
them could have provided a heavy restraint on Gbagbo. Something
similar happened in Senegal in 2000. There was an election,
resulting in the defeat of the incumbent president. Any
reluctance on his part to accept defeat and demit office rapidly
dissolved when the army made it known that if he did not, they
would mount a coup. That Senegalese episode is certainly one
modern example where the mere threat of a coup, not even a coup
attempt, by the military saved the democratic process.
* Dr. Abass Bundu, Sierra Leonean politician and diplomat, is
the former Executive Secretary of ECOWAS (1989–1993) and
Assistant Director of International Affairs and Consultant in
Constitutional Law in the Commonwealth Secretariat in London, UK
(1975–82)
Source: http://www.thepatrioticvanguard.com/spip.php?article5767
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