“Africa needs strong institutions not strong men” Barack Obama

The biggest, saddest, most dramatic thing is happening in the Ivory Coast. One country, two presidents, three first ladies. I was asked by my cuz to write something for some thing he's organizing. So I figured, if I'm out there, I might as well put myself out there here too. For the record, it took me 30 minutes to write this, it's not edited, I didn't bother citing nobody and it's off memory. I didn't cross check my facts. Ce qui est sur,
"Lisez mes écrits... je laisse des traces" I wonder who I just quoted...

The biggest lesson to be learnt from the Ivory Coast crisis is that Africa needs to strengthen its institutions. It was through a revision of the Electoral code that Bédié was able to prevent Ouattara for President from running in 1995. That was an abuse of executive power. It was through a presidential decree that Gbagbo then overruled the electoral code to allow Ouattara to run for elections, hoping that such a gesture would help bring about reconciliation. Even though one can understand the well-meaning intent of that gesture, one has to shudder when the president of a nation can change the law of the land through a presidential decree. It was again due to a weakness in the institutions that Gbagbo decided to ask for the United Nations help in conducting the elections. Finally it was due to weak institutions that the constitutional council decided to cancel the votes of more than 500, 000 Ivoirians claiming ‘irregularities’ in the electoral process in their departments. In each of these instances, the overwhelming power of the Executive vis a vis the Judiciary was abused in a way that would have negative consequences for Ivory Coast.
The Ivory Coast constitution as presently written stipulates that if the constitutional council notices irregularities in the elections, they can declare the elections null and void and they are responsible for organizing new elections within a limited time frame. The constitutional council is also the only body that is supposed to declare the winner of the elections in the Ivory Coast. This is the thrust of Gbagbo’s camp’s argument against the UN, that the UN has overstepped its boundaries by declaring Ouattara President instead of the country’s entity responsible for doing so. This is true. But the constitutional council also overstepped its boundaries by only partly cancelling the results of the elections and then declaring Gbagbo the winner. They should have followed the letter of the law and organized a new set of elections if they felt that these ones were marred by irregularities and fraudulent. That would have caused waves, but at least it would have been in line with the law of the land.

Violence is not an answer
The declared reason by the ‘Force Nouvelles’ for attacking the Ivory Coast 2002 and causing a conflict that split the country in two, was that they were doing this because they wanted Alassane Ouattara to be eligible to run for president. He had been unfairly sidelined by Konan Bédié and was ‘out of politics’ when the crisis started. The Force Nouvelles, who mostly hail from the North, felt Northerners were marginalized and their solution was to pick up arms and attack the country. That was a misguided decision. What was even more misguided was forcing Gbagbo to sit down and negotiate with them and include some members of the Forces Nouvelles in his government. The lesson was very clear, if you can’t get what you want via the political process in your country, pick up arms, attack the country, start a conflict and then through French imposed negotiations you’ll become a Minister in the government. The international community should have condemned the 2002 uprising and the leaders of the rebel movement should have been tried for war crimes. Instead, some of them became cabinet ministers. This may have seemed to be an expedient solution at the time, but it would have disastrous consequences in the future. You don’t compensate violence with ministerial jobs. Unfortunately, now everybody seems to have learnt the lesson and violence is now the modus operandi in Ivory Coast politics. As a Ghanaian, I do hope that we as a country are paying attention, especially these days when ‘all die be die’ is the mantra for the main opposition party… Violence only begets violence.

Don’t rush to elections
Another lesson to learn is not to rush to elections. Laurent Gbagbo had been accused by the whole world of delaying and dodging the elections. This is because he overran his mandate by 5 years saying repeatedly that his country was not ready for elections. It seems that achieving the completion of the HIPC program was motivation enough for him to go to elections, especially since it was estimated that achieving the completion point would mean a $500 million annual addition to Ivory Coast’s budget. Even though it was not openly stipulated, it was an unwritten agreement that Ivory Coast would have to go through free and fair elections before achieving that completion point.
I am all for elections. But how can an election be free and fair, when half of the country is still occupied by rebel forces who are unwilling to disarm? This situation was actually a ticking time bomb. The international community should have insisted on all parties putting down weapons and disbanding their militias before elections occurred, this would have reduced the chance of any side claiming ‘irregularities’. Such an important and expensive election should have at least been adequately prepared so that all that money didn’t go to waste and no party would have a chance to claim fraud. As it is, EVERY camp in these elections claimed that there was fraud against them. Some of these claims have been buttressed by independent electoral observers. What’s the point of rushing to an election that will be fraudulent and marred by irregularities?

The way forward
Since the beginning of this post electoral conflict, I have been amazed at the amount of ‘solutions’ provided by well meaning intellectuals in their Ivory Towers. They seem to forget one little problem: politics is conducted by real human beings in a real world. Not in a theoretical textbook. Any solution to the crisis needs to bear that in mind, it needs to be practical, feasible, and take into account the complicated nature of the Ivory Coast crisis.