FRANCAFRIQUE

Françafrique

Houphouet-Boigny used the word in a positive sense, but it didn't remain that way. In the current French media, the word evokes a shadowy network of personal friendships and money transfers that influence policy on both sides of the Atlantic. "I give you your budget; I can do what I want," former President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing apparently told Jean-Bédel Bokassa. D'Estaing had helped finance Bokassa's grandiose wedding ceremony—worth one-fourth of the annual budget of the country—before growing exasperated with his protegé's wasteful spending and flirtation with Muammar Gaddafi—and throwing French military support behind a 1979 student uprising that brought down the Bokassa regime. In France, political campaigns were financed by oil and even aid money that African leaders—particularly longtime Gabonese President Omar Bongo—skim off and send back to Paris, therefore manipulating French policy in their own way.
Since François Mitterand in 1990, French presidents have tried to distance themselves from the "old boys' club" of "occult networks" of Françafrique. However, it was on Mitterrand's watch that the biggest disaster of Françafrique occurred: a bungled military intervention in Rwanda—a former Belgian colony whose president had worked closely with France— that allowed some perpetrators of the 1994 genocide to escape across the Congolese border.

Pyromaniac

Sarkozy "is a pyromaniac," says Chaibou Boubacar, editor-in-chief of Alternative Espaces Citoyens magazine. "Based on a survey I did yesterday in the capital [Niamey, Niger], we're glad to be rid of him." The fires to which Boubacar alludes are the French interventions in Cote d'Ivoire and Libya.

"Our president [Mahamadou Issoufou] has traveled to Paris 14 times in a little more than a year," adds a resident of Niamey interviewed by Jeune Afrique. "What does he need to go there so often for? France needs to give us our independence back."

After a close, disputed election in Cote d'Ivoire in fall 2010, socialist incumbent President Laurent Gbagbo was widely believed to have won therefore refused to give up power. After several months of slow-burning civil conflict, a French military intervention resulted in Gbagbo's arrest and installed his opponent, Alassane Ouattara, as president. Ouattara, a former IMF economist, is a friend and ideological ally of Sarkozy. His party, Rassemblement des Republicains, even signed a collaboration accord with Sarkozy's Unis pour un Mouvement Populaire shortly before the election.

"It's true that Hollande is a socialist, like Gbagbo, but people here are just happy to see Ouattara's puppet-master gone," says Goué.

France's support of NATO intervention in Libya also left a bad taste in the mouths of many Africans. Former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi had invested millions in schools, mosques and infrastructure across Africa, in the name of Islam and his dream of a "United States of Africa."