History as rival Ivory Coast leaders meet for first time in a decade
Three men have dominated the political landscape of the Ivory Coast since the exit of Félix Houphouët-Boigny, the man widely regarded as the “Father of the Nation” and its first president from independence in 1960 to his death in 1993.
Yesterday when all three, President Alassane Ouattara, 80, and his predecessors Laurent Gbagbo, 77, and Henri Konan Bédié, 88, meet for the first time in 12 years, it could very well define the next chapter in Ivorian politics.
Their last meeting, as captured by a picture of the trio, was in June 2010. Five months later, a civil war began that left 3,000 men, women and children dead in 134 days. Since then, the relationship between the trio has been effervescent, if not volatile, with shifting alliances.
Little wonder then, that this is a meeting whose outcome is eagerly anticipated across the country and in West Africa where Ivory Coast is seen as relatively stable, despite experiencing two civil wars in the last 20 years. In their own way, these three men are key actors in that violent past.
In 1990, Houphouët-Boigny recruited Ouattara from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to become the country’s first prime minister and help clean up its finances. This was after prices of cocoa, the country’s premier export, crashed in the 1980s and crippled the economy.
Ouattara’s free market ideology brought in economic reforms but also rising levels of poverty, the result of the removal of state subsidies on consumer goods and historically low producer prices for millions of cocoa farmers.
Houphouët-Boigny also handpicked career diplomat and bureaucrat Henri Konan Bédié to be his designated successor. Bédié assumed the interim presidency in 1993 after winning a power struggle with Ouattara when their mentor died in office.
The former was also elected president of the ruling party (PDCI, Parti Démocratique de Côte d’Ivoire) the following year, and then went on to instrumentalise the most corrosive political concept in Ivorian history: Ivoirité.
Ivoirité was believed to be a ruse designed to keep Ouattara from running for president in 1995 and has left an enduring legacy in the country. The claim was that nobody who could not prove being of full Ivorian descent could ever be president. More than one-third of the people living in Ivory Coast, Francophone Africa’s most successful economy, are from elsewhere.
Ouattara’s ancestry is from Kong, a town destroyed by the great warrior Samori Touré in the late 19th century for its strategic alliance with France. The town eventually became part of the French colony of Upper Volta (now Burkina Faso) and then again Ivory Coast, as the colonisers kept moving the border between both territories. And so it was that Ouattara, deemed to be of Burkinabè extraction, was excluded from the 1995 elections.
Meanwhile, left-leaning historian Gbagbo ran against Houphouët-Boigny, who was seeking a fifth term in 1990 – the first opposition candidate to be allowed to do so after the introduction of multi-party politics. He lost heavily, organised anti-government protests and was jailed together with his then-wife Simone Ehivet, on the orders of Ouattara the premier.
