Cote d’Ivoire: Laurent Gbagbo must respect voters’ wishes

Cote d’Ivoire has been suspended from the West African regional group known as the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS). This was after the outgoing president, Laurent Gbagbo, defied international pressure and his country’s Independent Electoral Commission and declared himself president, following the presidential election run-off of 28 November 2010.

ECOWAS backed Alassane Ouattara, a former prime minister, who was named winner of the vote by the electoral commission, with 54.1 per cent. Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan, who is chairman of ECOWAS, told reporters after a meeting of West African heads of state in the Nigerian capital, Abuja: ‘Elections have been held and somebody [Ouattara] has won, so he has to take over. The votes of the people must count.’

Alassane Ouattara’s claim to the presidency is also supported by the United Nations, the European Union, the US and France.

Gbagbo’s former prime minister, Guillaume Soro – who has resigned as Gbagbo’s prime minister and has accepted the same position in a rival cabinet formed by Ouattara – has accused Gbagbo of carrying out a coup to retain power.

‘If the combined efforts from the national and international community cannot convince Laurent Gbagbo to leave power, it will be the responsibility of my government to take all the required measures to make sure the verdict of the poll is respected,’ Soro said. In other words, be prepared for war.

This is extremely sad, especially to me and many Ghanaians, for Cote d’Ivoire is a second natural home for us. It is the only country in the world where I can step into a taxi and be able, straightaway, to speak to the driver in my own tongue. 150 years of the division between us caused by colonial boundaries mean little, I found out there.

Indeed, once when my little 8-year-old son was separated momentarily from the rest of the family during a shopping spree in Abidjan, and found himself lost, he was able to take a taxi to where the family’s host worked – a huge international bank – and get him to come down, while the taxi driver waited patiently! Not a hair on his young head was harmed, and he did it all without being able to speak a word of French.

I’ve often wondered, in retrospective terror, how the taxi driver had the goodness of heart not to worry about getting paid for his fare but waited for the matter to be sorted out.

That was the wonderful country that Cote d’Ivoire that was. Its people were generally friendly and open, and its ability to attract tourists was unbeatable.

Once, Air Afrique, the much-lamented African route-master, invited me to be its guest. Camped at the Hotel Ivoire, we went to a new tourist attraction each day.

The one I most vividly remember is the ‘adults only’ beach resort at Assouinde, where a hotel called Jardin d’Eden provides everything that one can imagine being offered in the real Garden of Eden – good surfing, tasty prawns skewered in the shell, cold beer – it was indeed heaven.

But Cote d’Ivoire was living on borrowed time. When its first president, Felix Houphouet-Boigny, finally died in December 1993, he had ruled for over 40 years. One of his fiercest opponents had been a college lecturer called Laurent Gbagbo. He stubbornly defied Houphouet, endured persecution and stood against Houphouet in the first multiparty elections held in 1990.

This doggedness endeared Gbagbo to those who aspired to live under a democracy in Cote d’Ivoire. When Houphouet-Boigny died at the age of 85, Gbagbo watched with interest as Houphouet’s party, the Democratic Party of Cote d’Ivoire (PDCI) tore itself apart in a succession race. It was the former finance minister and substantive president of the National Assembly, Henri Konan Bedie, who emerged on top.

Among Houphouet’s appointees who lost out to Bedie was Alassane Dramane Ouattara, whom Houphouet had appointed prime minister after plucking him back home from the IMF (International Monetary Fund – where Ouattara was a deputy managing director) to put him in charge of the (Central) Bank of West Africa, before appointing him prime minister.

Bedie, however, soon began to dig his own political grave.

He embarked upon a policy of Ivoirité which was plainly tribalistic. The policy sought to deprive people who were born in and had lived in Cote d’Ivoire, but who had one or two parents born in a neighbouring country, such as Burkina Faso, Mali, Senegal or Niger, of their Ivorian citizenship.

It was an unjust policy, for apart from the fact that most of the people affected did not know their ‘ancestral’ homes too well, it also negated the enormous contribution they had made to the wealth of Cote d’Ivoire, mainly with their labour on cocoa and coffee farms, saw mills and timber yards.

The absurdity of the policy was amply demonstrated when Ouattara, who had been deemed fit enough to be appointed prime minister, was told, in July 1999, that he was a ‘foreigner’ (from Burkina Faso) and therefore the electoral code did not allow him to participate in the forthcoming presidential election.

The absurd and cruel nature of Ivoirité cooked Bedie’s political goose, for there were many soldiers, artisans, technicians, teachers and civil servants who found their civil rights nullified overnight in the country of their birth. In December 1999, a group of soldiers toppled Bedie. They appointed General Robert Guei, who, they believed, was in sympathy with their sentiments, to be president. Guei was supposed to organise free elections and hand over power to whoever won.

But Guei had also been bitten by the xenophobic bug, and he too prevented Ouattara from contesting, on the same grounds as Bedie had done, namely, that Ouattara was a ‘foreigner’. However, Guei allowed Gbagbo to contest, believing that Gbagbo was a weakling against whom he could rig the election.

Guei duly announced that he had won. But Gbagbo was having none of it, and inciting Ivorians to take to the streets in their thousands, chased Guei out of power.

Gbagbo announced himself president. Everyone heaved a sight of relief, hoping that Gbagbo, who had been in opposition for so long, would rule as a genuine democrat and organise free and fair elections in which the Ivorian people’s voice would truly carry the day.

But instead, Gbagbo resurrected the self-same ethnocentric policies that had brought Bedie and Guei to grief. Ouattara and his supporters resisted violently, and Gbagbo had to enter a series of alliances of convenience with Ouattara, which always seemed built on sand. Eventually, the pretence at cooperation between the two men was torn away, and they launched a full armed conflict against each other in 2002.

This conflict split Cote d’Ivoire in two: Gbagbo and his acolytes reigned in Abidjan, in the south, while Ouattara’s supporters, calling themselves ‘The New Forces’, held sway in the north, with their capital at Bouake.

Africans, French and other world leaders tried to mediate and reunite the country. At each negotiated ‘agreement’, Gbagbo did not hide the fact that he wanted to have the upper hand, or nothing. Ouattara indulged him, waiting for the definitive presidential election that would expose Gbagbo as a regional, not a national leader. Gbagbo, knowing that he would lose, postponed the election five times!

The current crisis was caused by Gbagbo when, after finally agreeing to hold the election in November 2010, tried to steal it. Those who had eyes to see could have observed that before the election, there was much trouble over the ‘identity cards’ that were to be used in registering voters. The reason? To try and prevent ‘foreigners’ from voting! ‘Déjà vu, déjà vu’ was how one saw it.

But although he eventually gave in on the identity-card issue, Gbagbo cleverly ‘booby-trapped’ the election result announcement mechanism beforehand. Somehow, he had got the UN and everyone else involved in organising the election to take their eyes off the ball, while he inserted a harmless-looking provision in the electoral regulations, providing that after the Independent Electoral Commission had collated the results, they would be passed on to the Constitutional Council (a body he had packed with his minions) which would ‘certify’ them. A mere formality, right?

Wrong! Whereas the Independent Electoral Commission announced that in the decisive second round of the presidential election Ouattara had obtained over 54 per cent and Gbagbo less than 45 per cent in the final run-off, and that Ouattara had therefore won, the Constitutional Council claimed that some of the votes cast for Ouattara in the northern part of the country were ‘invalid’ and that when these ‘invalid’ votes were taken out of the total number of votes cast, Gbagbo got 51 per cent of the votes! So it was Gbagbo who had won.

Meanwhile, the Electoral Commission was denied access by Gbagbo’s gendarmes to national radio and television. Indeed, Gbagbo, acting with ‘malice aforethought’, shut down almost all the media in the country and made it impossible to text by mobile phone! He also closed the country’s borders.

Gbagbo next swore himself in as president. Ouattara too got himself sworn in as president. The spectre of Kenya, Zimbabwe and Togo – where similar post-election debacles had occurred – beckoned.

What has happened is a clear case of an incumbent using the apparatus of the state to steal an election, while the international players – the UN, the AU and ECOWAS, as well as France, the US and the European Union – are reduced to watching in disbelief and calling unanimously on Gbagbo to show statesmanship and step down.

But will they unite in imposing realistic measures that will make Gbagbo give up his brazen attempt to steal the election?

I find it troubling that the UN in particular (which has 9,000 soldiers in Cote d‘Ivoire) and the other actors in this bizarre Ivorian theatre of the absurd could not have gathered enough intelligence on the ground to detect Gbagbo’s intentions beforehand, and have allowed him to reach a position where he may succeed in stealing the election.

If they had had an idea of what he was planning – and they should have – they could have checkmated him before he could bring the country once more to the brink of civil war.

For instance: what did they think the enormous brouhaha over the identity cards was all about? Answer (in case they still don’t get it): to deprive Ouattara’s supporters of the right to vote. Why would Gbagbo want to do that? Answer: Because he knows the demographic profile of Cote d’Ivoire well enough to realise that it offers Ouattara an inbuilt majority of votes, if voters follow the laws of ethnicity. And as everybody knew, Gbagbo had not scrupled to use the ethnic card, which cuts both ways.

When the results were being delayed, what did the international observers think was happening?

When an Electoral Commission official was physically prevented from announcing one set of results, by the simple act of a Gbagbo supporter whipping the papers out of his hands and tearing them to pieces in full view of the media and the public – what did that portend or signify?

It is not good enough for officials entrusted with ensuring that elections are carried out peacefully in a volatile situation – such as the Ivorian one – to take the ‘good faith’ of the main actors, especially the incumbent government, for granted.

Any blood that is shed – and God forefend none is shed – will be upon the heads of many bureaucrats who saw and heard Gbagbo but were fooled by his snide smile, without being able to penetrate into his psyche to get the true meaning of why he smiles so much.

Now, the human fire extinguishers have all been making a beeline for Cote d’Ivoire. The most high profile of them is ex-president Thabo Mbeki of South Africa. He has experience of the ways of the Ivorian actors, for he managed to get an agreement between Gbagbo and ‘The New Forces’ to come into operation in 2004.

However, the ink was hardly dry when it began to fall apart. So it will be a miracle if Mbeki can find a way through the current impasse and give Cote d’Ivoire another chance for peace.

But all these people, well-meaning as they are, must realise that Africa is now ripe for mature politics, which means someone must lose so that another may win. That is the rule in democratic politics and those who can’t accept it must leave the field.

Does Gbagbo think that America’s racist groups were enamoured of Barack Obama’s victory in November 2008? They were not, but they remembered the civil war their country had once fought, and realised that it was a case of accepting Obama rule or going to the barricades. Gbagbo has imbibed enough politics from his leftist friends in France and Europe to comprehend this simple rule, and he must be made a pariah in the world unless he respects the votes of his country folk and steps down forthwith.

One man’s insatiable lust for power should not be allowed to summon the vultures of civil war to come and hover over Cote d’Ivoire once again, hungry as ever, for the flesh of our African brothers and sisters. Africa must unite to deny these vultures the usual diet that the greed and stupidity of some African politicians so often lays out for them to feast upon.

BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS

* Cameron Duodu is a journalist, writer and commentator.
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