This morning I woke up to wet heavy snow coating the branches and the street. On the internet I watched Ivorian television, the masquerade of Gbagbo being sworn in as president in the presidential palace in front of about two hundred people. Gbagbo himself looked serious, and when a noise came from outside, the audience members looked nervously over their shoulders at the door. On the road Gbagbo has taken, he will always have to look over his shoulder from now on, wondering who may burst in, how it may end. When the gold necklace was placed around his neck, he finally smiled and gave his supporters two thumbs up; his wife cheered enthusiastically from the front row. Of the 15 million Ivorians, these 200 people are the only ones who stand to benefit from his electoral coup.
Called friends on Saturday night. Do., in Abobo, said that Friday afternoon, when they heard that the Conseil Constitutional had named Gbagbo president, they ran straight home. They have not gone out since. They heard shots in the street Friday night and until about eleven on Saturday morning. It was quiet outside Saturday afternoon, but they were afraid to go out. “We have no news,” she said. “We have only the government television channel and they play the same speeches over and over.” I told her that the United Nations, the African Union, France, and Obama had all recognized Ouattara as the true president, that Soro had resigned to Ouattara and been reappointed by him, and the IMF had said they would not work with Gbagbo’s government.
“We didn’t know any of that,” she said. Even the United Nations FM station has been blocked. She had heard a rumor that Ouattara was inaugurated at the Golf Hotel.
I said that if they went to the cyber café, they could get the news on the Internet. “Yes, but it’s too dangerous to go out.” The little boys were playing soccer inside the apartment.
“How could they annul all those votes,” she said indignantly. “Korhogo, Bouaké, Ferké--it’s like we’re not part of the country!”
Her younger brother calls every day from the village to get news but she cannot call him back. Calls won’t go through to the north.
As Billy Billy sings, “Changement, Bloquage!” We are stuck at bloquage.
Before the first round of this election, the International Crisis Group warned that of all the possible run-off scenarios, the riskiest would be Gbagbo-Ouattara. In Abidjan, in Korhogo, and even here in the Midwestern US, in the first snow of the season, Ivorians and all of us who care about Ivory Coast are holding our breath…
“Surreal,” said the anchor on France 24 before she played the video of what happened yesterday at the Independent Electoral Commission (CEI). As the spokesman for the Independent Electoral Commission got ready to announce results in his mellifluous baritone, two pro-Gbagbo members of the commission stood up and protested the announcement. As the spokesman watched in disbelief and the cameras whirred, one grabbed the sheets and walked away with them, tearing them up as he went.
The deadline to announce results--midnight Wednesday--has passed. The French, the Americans, the EU, the UN--everyone is urging the immediate announcement of the results. Between the lines of diplomatic language, perhaps the real message is, "Man up, Gbagbo, and admit defeat!" His response was to extend the curfew until Monday morning.
Gbagbo’s party, the LMP, wants the votes from the north invalidated. The Carter Center, the European Union, and the African Union all had observers in the north and all have judged the election, although not ideal, sufficiently transparent. The representative of the UN concurs.
If you look at the numbers, it’s clear that unfortunate as the problematic incidents were, they could not have changed the outcome. The numbers are essentially the same as the first round, which everyone agrees went impeccably. In the Savanes region (departments of Korhogo, Boundiali, Ferkéssedougou, and Tengrela), Gbagbo received 19, 312 votes in the first round, 6.5% of the vote. In the second round, he received 21, 203 votes or 6.45% of the vote. His percentage went down slightly while Ouattara’s percentage rose from 85.9% to 93.5%. This makes sense because the percentage of invalidated ballots went down from 6.6% to 1.3%. Most of those votes (16,635), cast correctly in the second round, probably went to Ouattara. Ouattara also picked up the votes of those who voted in the first round for Bedié and the eleven other candidates. Nevertheless, despite the intimidation his party claims, Gbagbo gained 1891 votes in the second round.
The rebellion happened in large part because northerners resented being excluded from the political process. To invalidate their votes now would doom the peace process and take the country back to more years of division and instability.
I am watching the run-off like expatriate Ivorians—on the Internet. The nationwide mood of calm determination I experienced at the end of October has evaporated. Bitter accusations were hurled between Alassane Ouattara and Laurent Gbagbo in the last days of the campaign. Each accused the other of instigating the violence that has plagued Ivory Coast. But just when it seemed the campaign was slipping irretrievably into the danger zone, the two candidates backed off. Thursday night, as we ate Thanksgiving Dinner here, Ouattara and Gbagbo participated in a ninety-minute debate on Ivorian national television moderated by a journalist. It was both polite and substantive. The face-to-face debate was a first for Ivory Coast and may well be a first for West Africa. Even from here, I could feel the national sigh of relief.
But perhaps it was too little too late.
On Saturday, the day before the run-off, violence broke out. And now, as night falls on Election Day in Ivory Coast, at least six people have died.
Today I called friends to ask them how their Election Day had gone. In the neighborhood of Abobo, where three youths were killed on Saturday when soldiers fired live bullets at demonstrators protesting the curfew, Adama’s son Chekoroba, a university student, said that he was anxious. He was unable to vote because he had registered in Korhogo, his hometown in the north, so he stayed home all day. “There are young men on both sides in this neighborhood with rocks and machetes,” he said. “It is very worrisome.” He called his younger brother, who was staying in another neighborhood of Abidjan, and told him not to go out.
Also in Abobo, Dofongyoh, a schoolteacher, said turnout was down at the polling place where she worked. She thought the curfew made people nervous and kept them home, even though it didn't start until ten p.m.
Pauline, a friend, professor, and Gbagbo supporter, said that when she went to vote in an upper class neighborhood of Abidjan, the turnout was considerably lower than the first time. She thought it was because voters feared for their security. But she also thought that many people who voted the first time were not really Ivorian and stayed home, afraid of being found out this time.
Another friend, Lanzini, was at a polling place in a neighborhood of Abidjan called Marcory when I called. He found the low turnout a bad omen for his candidate, Ado. Nor was he pleased about the curfew from ten p.m. Sunday night to six a.m. Monday morning. He felt it made the vote count less transparent, although the curfew does not apply to members of the Independent Electoral Commission, journalists, or election observers.
In Korhogo, my friend Fofana was upbeat. Out of 338 registered voters at his neighborhood polling place, 280 had voted. The turnout was almost as high as the first round, but the voting went more quickly. With only two choices rather than fourteen, voters quickly found their candidate on the ballot. He said his neighborhood was peaceful, but in another part of Korhogo, Gbagbo’s campaign manager had his car windows broken out. The rumors in Korhogo say that he was bribing youths to vote for Gbagbo and trying to vote in more than one polling place. (This second accusation seems unlikely for someone so well known.)
On the national news, the spokesman for the LMP (La Majorité Presidentielle--Gbagbo's party) decried this event and listed others perpetrated by members of the New Forces against Gbagbo supporters. He asked to have the vote in the northern zone annulled. No spokesperson for the RHDP or the New Forces appeared on the news program to respond. No explanation for this one-sided coverage was given by the anchor.
Now comes the risky part--the announcement of the winner and the loser. Will the loser accept the results as both candidates have promised to do?
November 4, 2010 1:10 am
Just after midnight, the head of the Independent Electoral Commission (CEI), Youssouf Bakayoko, finally announced what everyone here had figured out themselves by piecing together the numbers. The run-off will be between outgoing President Laurent Gbagbo of the FPI Party and opposition candidate Alassane Ouattara of the RDR Party.
Gbagbo came in first with 38.3% of the vote. Ouattara was second with 33.08%. Former president Bedié received 25.24% of the votes cast. Bedié's PDCI, the former single party in the country, made a statement questioning the results and asking for a recount.
Voters here in Korhogo, in the northern part of the country, were intensely disappointed today as 80% support Ouattara. They had hoped that the rest of the country would follow their lead and that Ouattara, whom everyone calls Ado, would win in the first round.
Ivorians were worn out with waiting. Many sat listlessly Wednesday, unable to concentrate on anything but why the results were taking so long. Even the favorite Ivorian pastime of sharing conspiracy theories and rumors lost its lustre. Anxious observers criticized the slow announcement and urged the CEI to get moving.
Overall, the election went amazingly well. Election observers here from the Carter Center and the European Union noted only minor infractions. Even the slow announcement of results, they remarked unofficially, was the result of disorganization rather than any intention to deceive.
Eighty percent of Ivorians turned out to vote, and in some places, the percentage was as high as 86%. Election day was animated by a remarkable spirit of mutual respect and civic determination. After nearly ten years of crisis, Ivorians flocked to classrooms turned into polling places to cast their ballots for a peaceful reunification of their country. They desperately want a return to normal life and to restart the engine of their stalled economy.
The pollworkers moved to the Prefecture and waited, but at nightfall, not a franc had been distributed. Nawa Soro, who was waiting outside the Prefecture, worked as secretary at a polling place in Daboka. "It went so well. We don't want problems now," he said. "But we need the money."
This polling station in Korhogo at the Lycée Municipale opened about 7:30 this morning, a half hour behind schedule. The voting moved slowly as each person's card and name were checked and they were given a stamped ballot. After depositing their ballot, each person dipped his or her finger in ink. Elderly women were taken to the front of the line by the uniformed security forces.
An elderly woman is helped to the front of the line.
Adama Koné dips his finger in ink to show he has voted. He was the 25th voter. 379 are expected at this station. "Easy," he said. "No problems. Just a long wait!"
Signing in with a fingerprint.
On Friday afternoon, I went to see an old friend in the village, a widow named Natagora Sylla. Natagora is never afraid to speak her mind and she is a fervent supporter of Ado.
I asked whether anyone had come by to show the women in her part of the village how to vote. “No, the men are too busy with the campaign,” she said. “So I decided to call a meeting myself.” Natagora isn’t literate, but the RDR men had given her a photocopy of the ballot and showed her how to mark it correctly. She also had a brochure that explained all the rules for voting. A non-governmental organization had dropped them off in the village to help women vote, although they confused most people because the sample ballot pictured in the brochure was an invented one, and when people looked for the symbol of their candidate, it wasn’t there.
By the time I reached her house later that night, about forty women, all dressed in their best clothes, were sitting on mats under the light outside. Natagora was holding up the photocopy of the ballot and shining a flashlight on it. The women passed the ballot and flashlight around and repeated her explanation. Find the little house and then go straight down and in the box under it, you either make an X with a pen or you dip your finger in the ink and put it carefully there.
Two of the women said they couldn’t vote because their photo was too dark. They could have their identity card remade, but not until after the election.
While the ballot went from group to group, the conversation moved from voting to marriage. Natagora said she thought it was time to end forced marriages in the village. “We want to marry this young girl to that young man. We, the parents, we start playing the drums and singing even if the couple is unhappy. All that is going to change. It’s going to be over.”
Domingué Yeo, president of a cooperative of cotton farmers in Katiali, supports former president Henri Konan Bedié, the candidate of the Democratic Party of Ivory Coast (PDCI) because when Bedié was president, the price of cotton was higher. "If we get a decent price for our cotton," said Domingué, "we can buy what we need. We can send our children to school." Domingué said he didn't care that Bedié was from another ethnic group and another region. What mattered to him was the price of cotton. Domingué and the other farmers will harvest this year's cotton crop shortly and he says it promises to be a good harvest.
Domingué hasn’t seen Bedié on television, but his neighbors who did said Bedié looked too old and tired to govern anything. Bedié did not appear on the 90-minute program “Face aux Electeurs” to answer questions from journalists.
Despite the lack of enthusiasm for Bedié, some of Domingué's neighbors turned out to wait for the PDCI organizers on October 29, the last day of the presidential campaign. (It officially opened October 14--why can't ours be this short?) While they waited, musicians played for the village chief and other elders, and the kids practiced their dance moves.
This time is for real. At least, that’s what people here say. “Ca va se passer! It’s going to happen!” The new national photo ID cards and voter registration cards have been successfully distributed. A current of hopeful excitement runs through the largest city, Abidjan. But there is also a current of nervous fear. So many things can so easily go wrong.
One schoolteacher, drafted to work at the polls, said she would have preferred to vote early and then stay home. But she felt she had no choice. She is hoping the UN peacekeepers will be in her neighborhood, which is densely populated and politically divided.
So goes Abidjan, so goes the election, say observers, because 30% of registered voters live in the sprawling port city. Half of those urban voters are under 35. And nearly half of those are unemployed.
There are fourteen candidates for president, but three front-runners—incumbent Laurent Gbagbo, former president Henry Bedié, and former prime minister, Alassane Ouattara, known as Ado. Each candidate has a symbol for illiterate voters: Gbagbo, who smiles confidently in every photo, has two fingers raised in a victorious V. Ado has a round thatched roof hut like you see in northern villages. Bedié has an elephant.
The other eleven candidates, including one woman, a former Minister of Justice (clasped hands), and a popular comedian (a smiling mouth), are campaigning hard. They are positioning themselves for the run-off. Felix Akoto-Yao, an independent (the blue rooster), was holding a rally in the central city of Bouaké when I passed through. Like all the others, he stressed job creation for the young. He had no T-shirts to give out; the money, he said, could be better spent elsewhere.
When I asked a member of his campaign if Akoto-Yao had a chance without a party behind him, he played the anti-incumbent card. “Better an independent,” he responded. “My candidate hasn’t had any part in Ivorian politics.”
In Bouaké, a city caught in the middle during the civil war, black oil had been poured over the smile of the current president on every one of his shiny blue billboards.
“We are all tired of this,” the candidate said into his microphone, and the crowd murmured in assent. It’s the dominant refrain of the election. “We are worn out.” Worn out with political conflict, worn out with partition, with corruption, with our economy stuck at a standstill. Worn out with their political leaders.
But Ivorians are not worn out with the election. Volunteers sing and hand out T-shirts. There are substantive debates on television. A different candidate answers questions from journalists for an hour and a half every night.
The questions are tough: How will you end corruption? How will you create jobs? We haven’t yet heard the Big 3 but the others speak frankly. Tourism? Low on my list. Our people need to eat. Foreign investment? Investors won’t come until we have a transparent judicial system. Social security accounts. Education accounts. Railroads. Taxes--for education. Lower taxes for youth and women. Regional universities. More women in government. The ideas of the future float up into the cloudy Ivorian sky…no matter what happens on Election Day, these ideas have been heard and they won’t go away.
This commentary aired on Illinois Public Media WILL AM 580 on October 28, 2010. You can download the podcast there.
Virginie and Elodie, above, were part of a group of campaign workers handing out T-shirts for incumbent Laurent Gbagbo in Deux Plateaux, an upper class neighborhood of Abidjan. They support Gbagbo because, they say, he loves the country.
Since 2002, when an armed rebellion took the north but failed to capture the south, Ivory Coast has been stuck in a paralyzed stalemate that is neither all-out civil war nor genuine peace.
The first president of Ivory Coast, Felix Houphouët-Boigny, ruled over a one-party state with a state-controlled media. The Old Man took office at independence in 1960; he settled into the presidential armchair and didn’t budge. In 1990, with his health failing, he was pressured into allowing, for the first time, an independent press and multiple parties. When he died in 1993 without naming a successor, the struggle between the next generation of political leaders ripped the country apart.
At the same time, the economy declined. The Ivorian economy depends on the export prices of coffee and cocoa, which are grown in the southern part of the country. When prices were high, Ivory Coast, especially the south, prospered. Migrant workers from poorer neighboring countries were welcomed. But prices fell, and high unemployment in the 1990s forced young men to leave the city of Abidjan and return to the countryside. But the land they hoped to farm was already being cultivated by emigrants from two countries to the north, Burkina Faso and Mali, and by farmers who had moved south from northern Ivory Coast.
Calling themselves “true Ivorians,” locals seized the farms of people they called foreigners. Farmers originally from neighboring countries and from the north were driven away from plantations they had cleared, planted, and tended for generations.
Self-serving politicians inflamed the southerners with an exclusionary, xenophobic politics they called “Ivoirité.” According to Ivoirité, some Ivorians, specifically southerners, were more Ivorian than others. The government blocked the northern candidate from running for president in 1995, claiming he wasn’t Ivorian enough because his mother had been born in Burkina Faso. Ivoirité was like playing with matches and gasoline. In Abidjan, violent street mobs attacked northerners. Hundreds of people died and many more were driven out of their homes. The armed rebellion in 2002, led and supported by northerners, was the eventual response.
A peace agreement signed by all parties in March 2007 officially ended the conflict and the ex-rebels, known as the New Forces, joined the unity government. But the signers didn’t rush to reunite the country and hold elections. While government leaders and New Forces commanders dragged their feet and jockeyed for advantage, or profited from the war economy, ordinary Ivorians suffered. Their fragile economy was split in two, and roads, water systems, health clinics, and schools, already very basic, deteriorated.
The past eight years have been especially tough in the northern part of the country. “We are like one of those little millet pancakes the women grill,” a village elder said. “When we are burned on one side, they turn us over and burn us on the other.”
Longing for an end to the ordeal, Ivorians are placing their hopes on presidential elections, which should have been held in 2005. After six postponements, Election Day has finally been set for October 31, 2010. The political leaders who ripped the country apart are enthusiastically campaigning for the job of stitching it back together.
The logistical challenges to this election are daunting. Getting the voter ID cards out to remote communities in time won’t be easy. And that’s just the beginning.
Nor is one election a panacea. But it is a critical and necessary first step. Fifty years after independence, the people of Ivory Coast hope to vote peacefully for a single president. They know the future of their country hangs in the balance.
Hear the podcast of this post on Illinois Public Media WILL AM 580.
