Breaking the cycle

By Gamal Nkrumah
Failed coup d'états are not usually considered newsworthy. However, when one occurs in the Ivory Coast, it is.
On Sunday, the country's commercial capital, Abidjan, was rocked by explosions. The pauses between them were punctuated by the sound of heavy gunfire. Mutinous soldiers, mostly Muslims from the north of the country, broadcast a statement announcing that they had taken control of the national television and radio stations in the centre of town. By Monday evening, troops loyal to Ivorian President Laurent Gbagbo had managed to regain control.
Gbagbo, leader of the ruling Ivorian Popular Front (FPI), has been in power since convincingly winning presidential elections last September.
Ironically, it was what did not happen that is of most significance, namely the coup's complete failure. Gbagbo, who had at the height of the tensions fled Abidjan for his home town Mama in the southwestern part of the country, reemerged and appealed for calm.
"The people who attempted this coup are amateurs," he reassured his countrymen. But in the same breath, he likened the abortive coup to a "terrorist act". Gbagbo accused neighbouring West African countries of arming agents provocateurs in Ivory Coast, presumably with the aim of paving the way for the main opposition leader, Al-Hassan Abdul-Rahman Ouattara, to take power.
Ouattara, leader of the northern-based Rally of Republicans (RDR), was barred from running in last September's elections on the grounds that he is a foreign national.
In his statement, Gbagbo did not specifically name the countries he believed to have been involved in the coup. The Ivorian government, however, reported that at least one Liberian mercenary had been amongst the mutineers. Government statements also point to Ouattara as being the instigator of the unrest.
The hunt for the coup plotters will take time. In other respects, Gbagbo is acting fast. A curfew was immediately imposed and scores of "suspects" were arrested. Predictably, they were for the most part Muslims from the northern part of Ivory Coast, who form the bulk of opposition leader Ouattara's support.
Along with this widening of the political divide in the country, there has been an accompanying hardening of attitudes.
Over 1,500 Ivorians have lost their lives in politically related violence since Gbagbo took office. Immigrants from Burkina Faso, Mali and other mainly Muslim neighbouring West African countries, who form a majority in the RDR, have refused to become a part of the new coalition government because of Ouattara's disqualification.
Ouattara's unpopularity in Ivorian government circles is deep-rooted. Job-seekers from impoverished neighbouring countries to the north of Ivory Coast came to the country in search of work during the economic boom years of the 1960s and 1970s, when the Ivory Coast's coffee, cocoa, rubber and palm oil exports were fetching high prices on the international markets. When commodity prices collapsed in the 1990s, economic ruin and political chaos ensued. The immigrants today still constitute 35 per cent of the Ivorian population. Mostly Muslims, they have formed political alliances with their co-religionists in Ivory Coast and so altered the country's delicate ethnic and religious balance. Muslims now have the numerical advantage in a country that has traditionally been ruled by Christian southerners. As a result, religious tension has increased.
The curious notion of "Ivoirite" or "Ivorianess" has gained a fanatical following amongst southerners, now paranoid about the influx of immigrants. Northerners and immigrants, both lumped together as Muslim non-Ivorians, are blamed for the country's economic crisis. The political cohesion that had held Ivory Coast together under the towering figure of its late, first president, Felix Houphouet Boigny, now seems like a distant memory.
Can Gbagbo do anything about any of this? His first move should be to restore political stability by incorporating northerners in the country's political establishment.
More generally, unrest in Ivory Coast must be prevented from undermining the democratic systems in neighbouring West African countries, where the situation is anything but stable. The inauguration of Ghanaian President John Kufuor, for instance, was reportedly a sumptuous affair. Four democratically-elected West African presidents were present: Abdullah Wade of Senegal, Blaise Compaore of Burkina Faso, Gnassingbe Eyadema of Togo, and guest of honour Nigeria's Olusegun Obasanjo. It was an opportunity to demonstrate to the world their democratic credentials. Absent from the ceremony was Ivorian President Gbagbo.
Some 300,000 people turned out for the celebrations that took place in Independence Square in the heart of the Ghanaian capital, Accra.
"Our greatest enemy is poverty, and the battle against poverty starts with the need to reconcile our people," Kufuor told Ghanaians. "We have been through difficult times, and we should not downplay or brush aside the wrongs that we have suffered. I do not ask that we forget, indeed we dare not forget; but I do plead that we try to forgive," he said.
The pledges of these presidents to introduce radical changes will, if the past is anything to go by, soon come to seem hollow. They will fail to rise to the challenge of their own pronounced agendas. Kufuor's predecessor, Jerry Rawlings, promised to end corruption. The Ghanaian electorate booted him out of office because of the excessive corruption of his government. The question is whether history is in the making or merely repeating itself.
Senegal in particular faces a testing few months. In the hiatus between his swearing-in ceremony and the inaugural meeting of a newly-elected parliament, President Wade has nervously taken the reins of power. The Senegalese presidential poll that brought him to power was not, though, accompanied by parliamentary elections. Wade's coalition government found itself in the impossible position of being a minority of fewer than 40 in a 140-member parliament. Still, 90 per cent of the Senegalese electorate voted in favour of last week's referendum to institute major constitutional changes. Under the new Senegalese constitution, the presidential term in office will be reduced from seven to five years, and the upper house abolished. Moreover, Senegalese women will have the right to own land for the first time in the country's history. And in another unprecedented move, workers will be granted the right to go on strike.
The region's giant, Nigeria, is a rag-bag of ideological and political opposites and religious and regional rivalries, and many of the local big shots are simply in politics for what they can personally get out of it. As Nigeria introduces economic deregulation and sweeping privatisation, much of what remains of the country's decrepit industry will be shut down, making hundreds of thousands of Nigerians jobless.
However, one thing can be said to have improved: in the bad old days, Nigeria would surely have had a coup by now. If Obasanjo's Nigeria survives 2001 as a democracy, it may be an indication that democratic progress is really being achieved in the entire West African region.
Related stories:
Tale of two elections 14 - 20 December 2000
Ivorian labyrinth 2 - 8 November 2000
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