ABIDJAN — Sitting in the crowd, glued to a wide-screen television at the open-air BMW X5 "maquis" restaurant in Abidjan, felt a lot like old times. Côte d’Ivoire’s national soccer team, the highest-ranked in Africa, was doing just about enough to hold off Senegal and qualify for next year’s soccer World Cup finals in Brazil.
As ever, superstar Didier Drogba dived and writhed to good purpose, attracting indulgent murmurs from the mainly male customers. Young men served cold beers and young women hurried back and forth to the oil-drum grills in the narrow side-street, bearing plastic plates of grilled chicken and fish with "aloco", the oily fried plantain which no visitor to Abidjan should miss.
"Life is gradually getting back to normal," lawyer Drissa Traore, who represents the Paris-based International Federation for Human Rights, said. His work brings him into daily contact with the legacy of the country’s abnormal recent past, including the incarceration of former president Laurent Gbagbo in The Hague, where International Criminal Court (ICC) prosecutors want to try him for crimes against humanity.
Côte d’Ivoire was a pretty unique place for the first four decades after independence from France in 1960. No coups d’état, no civil wars, no glaring political upheavals, unlike every other country in West Africa bar Senegal.
A military putsch in 1999 came out of the blue but heralded a disastrous decade of pent-up anger and conflict when everything bad that Côte d’Ivoire had avoided seemed to befall it in one compressed burst — ethnic war, village massacres, rapes, internal migration and enforced exile, north-south partition, factory closures and business collapses.
Yet only two years after the conflict was declared over, visitors to Abidjan would be shocked to hear of the recent calamities if they failed to do any homework. The city appears to be moving on with its life, the university has reopened and major infrastructure projects are back on track, more needed than ever because Abidjan’s population has grown to around 4-million.
Foreign support for President Alassane Ouattara, a former number two at the International Monetary Fund in Washington, is pronounced, with France leading the way. A recent news bulletin on Ivorian state television had reports on the visiting head of the French co-operation agency signing loans worth €630m over the next three years and a second one about French police instructors training the local force’s crack antiterrorism units.
The sense of déjà vu was intense, taking some viewers back to the days when Côte d’Ivoire was France’s most successful and unapologetic neocolony. It was also the world’s biggest cocoa producer and third-biggest coffee producer.
Indeed, the economy built by late president Félix Houphouët-Boigny and successive French governments from 1960 until his death in 1993 was so solid that most of it survived the conflict and paralysis of the 2000s. It grew by 9.5% in 2012 and will continue growing almost as quickly unless rancorous politics intervene.
Mr Ouattara, a 71-year-old Muslim, is using his connections to the hilt to attract foreign investment and has helped to convince the African Development Bank to commit to return to its historic headquarters in Abidjan by the end of the year after 11 years in a temporary shelter in Tunis. He travels so much that his local nickname is "Magellan" after the Portuguese explorer.
France is set to remain the key investor but SA-UK miner Randgold Resources, which owns and operates the country’s biggest gold mine at Tongon, is upbeat, saying Côte d’Ivoire could become one of Africa’s top exploration destinations.
"The Ivorian government should ensure that its mining code, currently under review, remains investor-friendly and that it acts as a partner to the mining companies in the creation of long-term economic value to benefit all stakeholders," the company said in October.
South African ambassador Vusi Sindane says things are picking up but two-way trade is still low. He compared it with SA’s trade with neighbouring Ghana, cemented by a host of bilateral agreements and a recent visit by President Jacob Zuma. "We want to lift Côte d’Ivoire to that point," Mr Sindane said.
The background to most conversations in Abidjan is security — for example, a South African embassy driver was shot dead last year. A United Nations peacekeeping force is still deployed in the country and France keeps a small force garrisoned near the international airport. Although the army, gendarmerie and police are being gradually restructured, the victorious former rebels are seen as the main threat to real peace. Thousands are armed and will not be recruited into the new security forces.
They are theoretically loyal to Mr Ouattara, but their allegiances are closer to National Assembly president (speaker) Guillaume Soro, and principally to their own commanders, known as "comzones". The former rebels’ roadblocks around the country and their presence in barracks in Abidjan are a daily reminder that Côte d’Ivoire has a way to go.
To add to the uncertainty, the country of 20-million is supposed to conduct elections in October 2015. Despite his advancing age, Mr Ouattara is expected to stand and may head a coalition with the oncedominant independence party the Democratic Party of Côte d’Ivoire.
Mr Gbagbo’s party, the Ivorian Popular Front, has boycotted elections since he lost the civil war and was transferred by the ICC, in November 2011, to Scheveningen prison in Holland.
It is uncertain whether the court’s judges will decide there is a strong case for him to answer. The longer he remains in custody without trial, the better his case for bail and for blunt political interference, promoting the view that "reconciliation" will be served if the charges are dropped.
The Ivorian government has declined to extradite Mr Gbagbo’s wife, Simone, and his party’s one-time youth leader, Charles Ble Goude, to the ICC. The government says the judicial system is now able to conduct the trials at home. Mr Ble Goude, who also faces charges of crimes against humanity, was a guest of Julius Malema in SA when the latter headed the African National Congress Youth League during the government of Thabo Mbeki.
The ICC has failed to arrest former rebels, although they had committed ethnic massacres in pro-Gbagbo areas during the war. Hundreds of military and civilian Gbagbo supporters remain in exile in West African countries and at least 800 are in Ivorian prisons or detention centres where most have been tortured, Amnesty International says.
Business Day newspaper
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