PRESIDENT Alassane Ouattara, 83, is the most favoured boy of the West ruling an African country today. To make him President of Cote D’Ivoire, the West, with France leading, backed two civil wars which claimed thousands of lives.
Also, in order that Ouattara became President, French and compromised United Nations troops, marched on the Presidential Palace to abduct a sitting African President, his wife and son. President Laurent Gbagbo was flown to Europe on false charges of crimes against humanity. His wife, Simon and son, Michel, were handed over to Ouattara who sent the former to jail for 20 years, and the latter to five years imprisonment.
The Europeans first held President Gbagbo for five years without trial. Then, in 2016, brought him before the International Criminal Court, ICC. After three years, the ICC got tired of the tantrums of the Europeans and, realising that all the charges were cooked up, set him free. Despite this, the Europeans in order to continue keeping President Gbagbo out of circulation while Ouattara continued to rule or misrule Cote d’Ivoire on their behalf, held the innocent African President for another three years, this time in Brussels, the headquarters of the European Union.
As far back as the 1960s, the West has been grooming Ouattara for this ignoble Uncle Tom role. They have, sometimes, simply imposed him on the continent. An American-trained economist, he was employed by the International Monetary Fund, IMF, in 1968. They must have quickly identified him as a perfect quisling to be embedded in the African leadership. So, they built a facade around him. They presented him as an economic whizz kid by making him the African Director of the IM, 1984-88. He was also appointed Governor of the French Central Bank of West African States, BCEAO in 1988.
Tragically, Côte d’Ivoire was one of the 35 African countries which accepted the imposition of the Structural Adjustment Programme, SAP, by the IMF. Given the slavish position SAP placed the victims, the IMF instructed then President Felix Houphouet-Boigny to appoint Ouattara who was also the Minister of Minister of Finance, as Chairman of the Inter-Ministerial Committee for the Coordination of the SAP. The veteran African President did as he was told. So Oattara held three very powerful positions simultaneously; Minister, Chairman of SAP implementation as well as the Governor of the West African Central Bank.
Not satisfied, the IMF gave President Houphouet-Boigny new instructions: to make Ouattara the country’s Prime Minister. This instruction was faithfully carried out on November 7, 1990.
When Houphouët-Boigny fell ill, Ouattara immediately hijacked power and began ruling. When the former died on December 7, 1993, Ouattara, rather than President of the National Assembly, Henri Konan Bedei who constitutionally should be the Acting President, took it upon himself to announce the President’s demise and attempted to seize power. But the country insisted on following the constitutional provisions, and Bedei became the President.
Ouattara then left and became the Deputy Managing Director of the IMF for five years from 1994. He decided to run for the Ivorian presidency in 2000, but was caught by two electoral provisions and disqualified.
The first was that candidates either of whose parents are of foreign nationality were barred. Now, Ouattara’s father was born in Burkina Faso. Secondly, candidates who had not lived in the country for the preceding five years were barred. Ouattara had lived outside the country for five years, serving the IMF.
However, Ouattara produced a nationality certificate allegedly issued in September 1999. This, was on October 27, 1999, declared a forgery by the courts and an arrest warrant was issued. But a coup on December 24, 1999, removed the Bedei government. A jubilant Ouattara said the military takeover was not a coup, but “a revolution supported by all the Ivorian people”.
The disqualification of Ouattara was one of the reasons that led to the first civil war in Cote d’Ivoire. The second one broke out following the 2010 elections. Then President Gbagbo, an intellectual, had refused to do the bidding of France, including in the award of contracts over which the latter thought it had some proprietary rights.
The West was desperate to get Gbagbo out and bring in their stooge. After the elections, the Chairperson of the Electoral Commission went to Ouattara’s office to announce the results, claiming that the latter won by 54 per cent. On the other hand, Gbagbo went to the Constitutional Court, which declared him the winner with 51 per cent. The African Union Observers backed Gbagbo, and the UN and the West backed Ouattara. It was in the ensuing conflict that French and UN troops stormed the Presidential Palace.
US Secretary of State in the Obama administration, Hillary Clinton, celebrated the invasion of the Ivorian Presidential Palace and abduction of President Gbagbo. She claimed this “sends a strong signal to dictators and tyrants…. They may not disregard the voice of their own people”.
Ouattara served the constitutional two terms and announced that in accordance with the constitution, he was no longer running. Rather, he supported the candidacy of Prime Minister Amadou Gon Coulibaly. When the latter died suddenly on July 8, 2020, Ouattara switched to Defence Minister, Hamed Bakayoko. Then the latter was accused of being a drug trafficker, and Ouattara announced he was running for a third term, which is illegal.
Now that his term is running to a close and new elections are scheduled for October 2025, he is running for an illegal fourth term.
Beyond this, although the Ivorian elections are three months away, they have already been rigged by Ouattara. He has done this by disqualifying all the strong opposition candidates who can challenge him. These include Gbagbo, his close ally, Charles Ble Goude, who was also freed by the ICC; former Prime Minister Guillaume Soro; and international banker, Tidjane Thiam, who leads the main opposition Democratic Party of Ivory Coast, PDCI.
It is clear that Ouattara cannot resist the dictates of his Western masters just as Houphouët-Boigny could not. So, it is likely he would not only contest for a fourth term but for more terms until sickness, death, betrayal or a coup separates him from the Presidency.
Whatever the case, his shameful role in subjecting Africa to the exploitation and subjugation of enslaving foreigners cannot be erased from history. But much worse is that he endangers democracy and development in Africa.
Men like Ouattara, Umaro Sissoco Embalo of Guinea Bissau, who has twice sacked the democratically elected parliament, and Faure Essozimna Gnassingbe of Togo, who imposes new constitutions on his country in order to stay perpetually in office, are no different from military coup plotters. They need to be treated as such and their countries redeemed.
*Lakemfa writes from Abuja