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From: wolda002@umn.edu
Date: Sun Jan 30 2011 - 13:27:32 EST
The 'Problem' with Côte d’Ivoire: How the Media Misrepresent the Causes of
Conflict
Much media coverage of conflict in the Ivory Coast relies on a familiar
explanation of Africa's wars - that they stem from immutable tribal and
sectarian differences. Despite religious and ethnic faultlines, conflict in
the Ivory Coast is above all political.
By Patrick Meehan for openDemocracy
------------------------------
Once a beacon of rapid economic development and political stability in
Sub-Saharan Africa, Côte d’Ivoire has experienced significant economic
decline and growing social tensions over the past two decades. These
tensions reached their peak in 2002 when civil war briefly broke out across
the country. The civil war culminated in the de facto partition of the
country with the ‘rebel’ anti-government forces controlling over half of the
country to the north whilst the south (including the principal city,
Abidjan) remained a government stronghold. For much of the eight years
since, French troops and UNOCI (UN Operation Côte d’Ivoire) have commanded a
narrow belt across the centre of the country. Numerous peace settlements
have been signed and reneged and the elections first promised in 2005
finally took place in November/December 2010 having been postponed six
times. However, far from establishing the foundations for a more viable
peace settlement the elections have re-opened ill-healed wounds and the
threat of renewed civil war is now at its highest since 2002.
Responses in the international media to events in Côte d’Ivoire are laced
with despair that yet another African state has succumbed to the scourge of
conflict. The ethnic and religious differences between the north and south
of the country are cited above all else as the major explanation. Implicitly
or explicitly, the ‘problem’ with Côte d’Ivoire is essentialised; it is an
‘ethnic’ conflict, the roots of which lie in the supposedly immutable
propensity for violence inherent in tribalism and within countries
displaying a high degree of ethnic heterogeneity. Even those reports which
have taken the time to engage in Ivorian politics have often succumbed to
the same superficial explanations or alternatively have blamed the crisis
narrowly upon power struggles within the political elite. However, the
current events in Côte d’Ivoire can only be understood through a committed
engagement with the country’s history, its economic structure, state-society
relations and the nature of political power, all of which are almost
completely absent from the coverage Côte d’Ivoire has received.
*A brief history of Côte d’Ivoire*
Côte d’Ivoire had been explored by the Portuguese as early as the fifteenth
century and by the mid nineteenth century it came under increasing French
influence, becoming a French protectorate in 1889 and a French colony in
1893. The French established Côte d’Ivoire’s plantation economy, planting
vast cocoa and coffee plantations across the southern belt of the country.
The colonial economy was dominated by these primary commodities which were
exported to Europe through the country’s southern coastal ports. The French
encouraged and coerced vast amounts of cheap labour from other parts of
French West Africa, notably Upper Volta (now Burkina Faso) and Mali to work
on the plantations (often through systems of taxation that could only be
paid in the currency with which they paid plantation workers.) Heavy
economic reliance on primary commodity exports and the north-south migratory
patterns first developed under French colonial rule have remained an
enduring legacy ever since.
Côte d’Ivoire gained independence in 1960 and Felix Houphouët-Boigny became
the country’s first President, a position he maintained until his death in
1993. Having been elected to the French parliament and having served in a
number of ministerial positions in the French government he was one of only
a few post-colonial African leaders with considerable political experience.
Under Houphouët-Boigny’s (relatively benign) autocratic leadership Côte
d’Ivoire became one of Sub-Saharan Africa’s greatest success stories
recording average annual growth rates in the region of 7-8% throughout the
1960s and 1970s. The ‘Ivorian miracle’, as it became known, was founded upon
sound economic management, effective development of the coffee and cocoa
industries and the maintenance of close trade links with the west.
Houphouët-Boigny actively encouraged the same migration patterns that had
underpinned the colonial plantation economy by allowing migrants to quickly
gain Ivorian citizenship and stating that ‘land belongs to he who works it’.
Rapid economic growth across the southern coastal belt of the country
encouraged migrants from the north and from Burkina Faso, Mali, Guinea,
Ghana and beyond. By 1998 a quarter of the population were migrants who had
been born outside of Côte d’Ivoire or had parents who had. The liberal
landownership laws were designed in part to ameliorate the profound economic
inequalities between the north and the south by allowing migrants from the
north to settle quickly. Houphouët-Boigny also sought to placate the ethnic
groups in the north through a policy of ‘ethnic quotas’ which ensured that
all the country’s major ethnic groups and regions were fairly represented
within state institutions and strived to prevent economic inequalities from
translating overtly into political inequalities.
Houphouët-Boigny maintained a very close relationship with France, through a
policy that became known throughout West Africa as Françafrique. Under the
1961 Defence Agreement between France, Côte d’Ivoire, Niger and Dahomey (now
Benin), France enjoyed priority access to all those “raw materials
classified as strategic”, Côte d’Ivoire was required to “inform the French
Republic of the policy they intend to follow concerning strategic raw
materials and products and the measures that they propose to take to
implement this policy”, and “concerning these same products, the Republic of
Ivory Coast for defence needs, reserve them in priority for sale to the
French Republic, after having satisfied the needs of internal consumption,
and they will import what they need in priority from it.” Côte d’Ivoire’s
foreign policy was also closely aligned with its former colonial power,
reflected most clearly in Houphouët-Boigny’s vehemently anti-communist
stance and his support for the opposition to Kwame Nkrumah in Tanzania in
1966, Mathieu Kérékou in Benin* *in 1977, and his suspected involvement in
the overthrow of Thomas Sankara in neighbouring Burkina Faso in 1987.
*Economic collapse*
Despite its sustained success during the 1960s and 1970s Côte d’Ivoire’s
developmental model, based entirely upon primary commodity exports, proved
extremely vulnerable. The worldwide recession in the late 1970s and early
1980s induced by the oil crises and the growing competition amongst primary
commodity exporting countries saw the price of cocoa and coffee on the world
market (and other commodities exported by Côte d’Ivoire such as cotton,
pineapples, sugar and coconuts) plunge dramatically. By 1990 cocoa prices
stood at a quarter of their 1977 prices. With virtually no industrial sector
and with only a limited tertiary sector the huge fall in commodity prices
saw Côte d’Ivoire suffer one of the worst economic collapses in Sub-Saharan
Africa and across the world. Faced with a huge balance of payments deficit
Côte d’Ivoire became one of the first countries to sign up to the structural
adjustment programmes (SAPs) offered by the World Bank and the IMF. These
SAP loans came attached with extensive conditionalities underpinned by
neoliberal economic dogma that sought to reduce state intervention in the
economy and promoted privatisation and trade liberalisation. The state
corporation, Caisse de Stabilisation, which had managed the cocoa industry
throughout the 1960s and 1970s was forced to halve the prices it paid to
producers and was also forced to dismantle the Price Stabilisation Fund
which offered producers a relatively stable price for their cocoa from year
to year (saving money in years of plenty to spend in bad years) but which
had become a huge drain on state resources. Public sector salaries were cut
by as much as 50% almost overnight and the government was also forced to
dismantle state-run welfare systems. Government investment in education
(especially higher education) and health rapidly declined throughout the
1980s as the government sought to reduce its fiscal deficit. Structural
adjustment however failed to address the root causes of Côte d’Ivoire’s
economic vulnerability, namely its extreme reliance upon primary commodity
exports and lack of economic diversification, and hardly surprisingly its
impact was limited. Growth rates remained below 1% throughout the 1980s and
inflows of foreign direct investment (FDI) have been far smaller than the
World Bank and the IMF envisaged.
*The birth of democracy and the rise of Ivoirité*
The prolonged economic crisis, high unemployment and the declining welfare
system led to growing political opposition, social unrest and a clamour for
democracy spearheaded by the country’s student population. In 1990
Houphouët-Boigny finally legalised opposition parties and promised
multi-party elections. During the early 1990s three major political parties
emerged. The Front Populaire Ivorien (FPI) led by Laurent Gbagbo, a
university history lecturer, commanded much support amongst students and
trade unions and became the first major opposition to Houphouët-Boigny’s
ruling Parti Democratique de la Côte d’Ivoire (PDCI). Following
Houphouët-Boigny’s death in 1993 a power struggle within the PDCI saw the
party split in two after Henri Konan Bedie beat Alassane Ouattara in the
battle to succeed the revered president. Bedie became the country’s
president until 1999 when he was overthrown by a military coup led by
General Guei. Ouattara left Côte d’Ivoire to take up a leading position in
the IMF and his supporters abandoned the PDCI to form their own party, the
Rassemblement des Republicans (RDR). During the elite power struggles that
raged during the 1990s ethnicity became increasingly politicised and the
country’s underlying ethnic and religious heterogeneity became a major site
of political contestation. ‘*Ivoirité* (literally meaning ‘Ivorian-ness’)
became the major political discourse of the 1990s. It argued that the
country’s troubles lay in the pollution of true Ivorian identity and its
future would be reliant upon liberating the country’s autochthonous citizens
who had suffered from decades of excessive immigration. First, second and
even third generation migrants and settlers began to face increasing
discrimination as they were made the scapegoat for the country’s stagnation.
The distinction between internal and international migration became blurred
in the conceptualisation of *Ivoirité* and quickly led to the discrimination
of those who had settled in the south regardless of whether they had
immigrated from Burkina Faso, Mali, Guinea or beyond or were internal
migrants who had lived in the north of the country for generations.
Gbagbo was the first to employ the notion of *Ivoirité* in what may largely
be seen as an attempt to break the backbone of Houphouët-Boigny’s support
base which the FPI argued was rooted in the large immigrant and settler
populations which had benefited from his pro-migration policies and liberal
landownership rights. *Ivoirité* later became a more overt strategy to
marginalise Gbagbo’s main rival, Ouattara, and also formed part of the FPI’s
anti-imperialist efforts to redefine a sovereign Ivorian culture.
Upon becoming President, Bedie enthusiastically embraced the
*Ivoirité*discourse in an increasingly desperate attempt to overcome
the challenges he
faced from a split party and the prolonged economic crisis. The political
motivations behind his support for *Ivoirité* became most explicit in the
country’s New Electoral Code (1994) which restricted the right to vote to
Ivorian nationals, stated that all presidential candidates must have
complete Ivorian parenthood, must not have lived outside of the country
within the past five years and should never have renounced their citizenship
to take the nationality of another country. It was clearly designed to
prevent Ouattara from running against him for President since Ouattara’s
father was purportedly Burkinabe and Ouattara had worked abroad for the IMF
since 1993 and had once travelled on a Burkinabe passport. In 1998 Bedie
also introduced a new Land Code which stated that only Ivorians had the
right to buy land, effectively denying non-nationals the right to settle in
the south and left those already settled vulnerable to land-grabbing. Many
of these policies had formed the backbone of the FPI’s early manifestos and
allowed Bedie to steal much of Gbagbo’s thunder.
In the country’s first election (1995) Ouattara was excluded from running
for President, the RDR and the FPI both boycotted the election and the PDCI
led by Bedie recorded a large majority although lacked much popular
legitimacy. Over the course of the 1990s Ouattara and his supporters in the
RDR portrayed his exclusion from the presidential candidacy as a result of
him being a northerner and a Muslim and thus managed to invert *Ivoirité* in
order to convert the latent discontent across the north of the country into
their own ethnicised support base.
By the late 1990s, with the economy stagnating and unemployment growing,
social tensions continued to grow and in 1999 Bedie was overthrown in a
military coup by General Guei. Initially an impassioned critic of
*Ivoirité*discourses Guei promised to serve as caretaker leader only
until fresh
elections could be held. However, he soon performed a rapid volte-face,
deciding to stand for election in the 2000 and again employed *Ivoirité* to
ban Ouattara for running against him. Gbagbo and the FPI recorded a decisive
victory in the elections despite desperate efforts by Guei to curtail the
election process. Gbagbo has remained President ever since.
*Civil War and fractious peace*
Under Gbagbo’s presidency ethnic groups in the south, especially Gbagbo’s
own Baoule group, began to enjoy systematic favouritism including
preferential access to some of the country’s most fertile coffee and cocoa
growing regions in the west and south-west. The ‘baoulisation’ of the
political system, the economy and the army marked a major departure from
Houphouët-Boigny’s policy of ethnic quotas. Northern groups, predominantly
the Kru and northern Mande became increasingly marginalised ensuring that
the north of the country experienced growing political exclusion to add to
the socio-economic inequality it already suffered. The final straw came in
2002 following the government’s decision to demobilise northern troops that
had been recruited to the army under Guei. The troops refused to relinquish
their weapons and what began as a localised army mutiny quickly escalated
into widespread civil war.
The war effectively pitched Gbagbo’s supporters against an array of
opposition groups, including supporters of Ouattara and the RDR but also a
handful of smaller rebel groups including the Movement of the Ivory Coast of
the Great West (MPIGO) and the Movement for Justice and Peace (MJP). The
military wing of the government was comprised of the National Army (FANCI)
and the Young Patriots, a youth nationalist militia closely aligned with
Gbagbo personally. The rebel forces gradually converted themselves in the
Forces Nouvelles (FN) under the leadership of Guillame Soro. The fighting,
which began in September 2002 lasted only four to five months with the first
formal peace agreement being signed at Linas-Marcoussis in January 2003. By
that time the opposition forces controlled about 60% of the country all to
the North but their efforts to take control of major towns and cities in the
south had been thwarted.
The Linas-Marcoussis agreement retained Gbagbo as President of a government
of reconciliation in which the opposition gained control of the Ministry for
Defence and the Ministry for the Interior. French troops and later (February
2004) a UN force undertook to keep the peace by forming a narrow peace-belt
across the centre of the country effectively partitioning Côte d’Ivoire into
north and south. By March 2003 the government of reconciliation was already
floundering under accusations of government orchestrated political deadlock
and the FPI’s refusal to share power. Following the government’s
heavy-handed and brutal response to a peaceful anti-government march, which
left over one hundred protestors dead, the majority of opposition leaders
which had taken up positions in the government walked out. However, in July
both sides signed an ‘End of War Agreement’ which again formally recognised
Gbagbo’s authority and saw both sides commit to a program of demobilisation,
disarmament and reintegration (DDR).
A second peace agreement – Accra III – in July 2004 tried to reactivate the
political process of reconciliation but again failed as Gbagbo refused to
act on his pledge to reconsider the criteria for presidential candidates and
the rebels refused to disarm. The situation in Côte d’Ivoire, already tense,
was further complicated in 2004 by the final disintegration of relations
between France and Gbagbo. A FANCI air attack on the northern town of
Bouake allegedly hit a French military base killing ten French soldiers and
an American citizen. Chirac’s response was uncompromising and orders were
swiftly given for French troops to take control of the country’s major
airport in Abidjan and to destroy the Côte d’Ivoire air force (consisting
largely of two fighter bombers and a handful of helicopters). Anti-French
and anti-imperialist outrage across the country rapidly escalated (both
sides had criticised France for supporting the other) and most expatriates
abandoned the country.
A third peace settlement, this time at Pretoria in South Africa was agreed
in 2005 and initially resulted in concerted efforts on both sides to disarm.
However, these efforts again proved short-lived until 2007 when Gbagbo and
Soro met twice in Ouagadougou. The peace process finally seemed to be making
significant process as Soro became Prime Minister under Gbagbo, the UN
buffer zone began to be dismantled, Gbagbo travelled to the north on an
official state visit for the first time since the civil war had broke out
and FANCI and FN troops marched together in a show of solidarity.
Tensions remained, although at an altogether lower ebb, before resurfacing
with renewed ferocity during the 2010 presidential elections in which
Ouattara was finally able to stand, in a run-off against Gbagbo and Bedie.
No candidate gained an outright victory in the first round and Bedie, with
fewest votes, was eliminated leaving Gbagbo and Ouattara to enter a
second-round in which Ouattara was declared the winner by the Electoral
Commission and foreign observers. Gbagbo however has refused to stand down,
claiming massive electoral fraud in the north, and orchestrated the
overturning of the result by the Constitutional Council which now proclaimed
Gbagbo as the victor with 51% of the vote.
France, committed in its opposition against Gbagbo even before the election
process began, led the calls for Gbagbo to stand down which have since been
voiced by the UN, the US, ECOWAS and many states across Africa. Gbagbo
however has continued to stand firm and with tensions rising the prospect of
civil war looms again. Even if war is averted and Gbagbo stands down to be
replaced by Ouattara it is highly likely that the tensions which have
pulsated through Ivorian society for much of the past twenty years will
remain extremely high.
*Rejecting mainstream explanations of the conflict in Côte d’Ivoire*
It is little exaggeration to state that the majority of media analysis of
Côte d’Ivoire’s growing instability over the past two decades has been
underpinned by latent discourses of atavism and primordialism that have
invariably tended to essentialise the linkages between ethnicity and
conflict. This was perhaps elucidated most clearly by that saviour of the
third world, Bono, in his op-ed for the New York Times at the start of 2010,
when, in emphasising the positive impact that the World Cup would have on
Africa, he commented that,
“… A few years ago, Ivory Coast was splitting apart and in the midst of
civil war when its national team qualified for the 2006 jamboree. The
response was so ecstatic that the war was largely put on hold as something
more important than deathly combat took place, i.e. a soccer match. The team
became a symbol of how the different tribes could — and did — get on after
the tournament was
over.”[1]<http://www.opendemocracy.net/opensecurity/patrick-meehan/problem-with-c%C3%B4te-d%E2%80%99ivoire-how-media-misrepresent-causes-of-conflict#ednref1>
Bono’s willingness to disregard Côte d’Ivoire’s complex civil conflict as
little more than the manifestations of tribal primitivism may be abhorrent
and utterly reductive but it is perhaps not so far removed from the beliefs
held by many in the west. Learned academics have also given great credence
to essentialist explanations of conflict across the developing world. Samuel
Huntingdon’s unjustly influential work on the ‘clash of civilisations’ is
arguably the best example. “Cultural characteristics and differences”,
Huntingdon argues, “are less mutable and hence less easily compromised and
resolved than political and economic ones” creating an ‘us versus them’
mentality.[2]<http://www.opendemocracy.net/opensecurity/patrick-meehan/problem-with-c%C3%B4te-d%E2%80%99ivoire-how-media-misrepresent-causes-of-conflict#ednref2>Huntingdon
goes on to point out that “Islam has bloody borders” and that the
fault lines between Christian and Muslim civilisations, clearly apparent
across a number of West African countries such as Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana,
will likely create conflict-prone “torn
countries”.[3]<http://www.opendemocracy.net/opensecurity/patrick-meehan/problem-with-c%C3%B4te-d%E2%80%99ivoire-how-media-misrepresent-causes-of-conflict#ednref3>
What Bono and Huntingdon both seem to advocate, and it is a view that is
certainly dominant in most media coverage of Côte d’Ivoire, is that the
country’s conflict can be quickly understood as soon it is acknowledged and
realised that is an *ethnic* and *religious *conflict. It is almost as if
these two adjectives alone are sufficient to provide readers with the
information required to form an understanding of what is happening in this
corner of Africa. The complex historical, social, political, economic (and,
dare I say, in part western) foundations of Côte d’Ivoire’s conflict are
effectively repackaged into a simplistic and depoliticised atavistic or at
least culturalist discourse, which gives analytical pre-eminence to the
seemingly irrational and pre-modern forms of social organisation that
continue to fracture the dark continent.
The mere facts that Côte d’Ivoire has experienced peace and stability
throughout much of its post-independence history and that other countries
which share similar ethnic and religious diversity, notably neighbouring
Ghana, which shares Côte d’Ivoire’s distinctive poor Muslim north, richer
Christian south divisions, have remained for the most part peaceful since
independence, seem to be unimportant.
The major weakness in the essentialist characterisation of Côte d’Ivoire’s
conflict lies in the fact that it is tautological; it argues that ethnic
divisions lead to conflict which in turn heightens ethnic divisions which
then creates heightened conflict. It is a sort of chicken and egg scenario
from which one can only escape by taking the leap of faith and proclaiming
that the seeds of conflict are contained within the very formation of ethnic
identities, that the ‘us versus them’ mentality underpins the very fabric of
ethnic identities. Of course, the fact that *Ivoirité* discourses have
become such an important part of Ivorian politics has seemingly justified
those who have argued that the conflict is rooted in the country’s ethnic
diversity. However, Ivoirité must be understood as a reaction, a sympton not
a cause, of the wider political and socio-economic challenges that the
country faces.
To properly understand why Cote d’Ivoire again stands on the break of civil
war the culturalist thesis must be rejected in favour of an analysis that
instead acknowledges and engages with the three deeper foundations of the
country’s crisis: (i) the politicisation of ethnicity across the country;
(ii) the hugely adverse impact of Côte d’Ivoire’s prolonged structural
economic crisis which has been exacerabated and not alleviated by World Bank
and IMF imposed neo-liberal economic policies; and finally (iii) the very
nature of the country’s political system and the way in which political
power is constrcted and wielded.
*The politicisation of ethnicity*
Historically, ethnic identities throughout Côte d’Ivoire have been dynamic
and fluid and the starting point for deconstructing the essentialist
analysis of the country’s social tensions must begin with an understanding
that the growing rigidity afforded to ethnic identities is politically
motivated. The politicisation of ethnicity over the past two decades has
been motivated by three major political factors. The first is the elite
power struggle between Gbagbo, Bedie, Ouattara and Guei which has encouraged
all of them to play the ethnic card in an effort to mobilise support. The
intractable nature of Côte d’Ivoire’s economic crisis and the tensions this
has raised has also encouraged those in power to divert anger away from the
government by channelling discontent towards migrants (from both the north
and neighbouring countries) who have become a convenient scapegoat. High
unemployment, growing social tensions, declining welfare provision and weak
institutional capacity have all undermined the government’s ability to
uphold the social contract which in turn has eroded the legitimacy of both
the government and the political system as a whole. The reactionary resort
to xenophobic and nationalist rhetoric has thus become an alternative
mechanism by which to retain legitimacy and support.
The ethnicisation of politics has therefore sought to achieve what may best
be termed ‘horizontal inequalities’, that is inequalities between culturally
defined groups (ethnicity, religion or race) in the form of economic
inequalities (restricted access to assets such as land and capital), social
inequalities (restricted access health and education and consequently poorer
outcomes), political inequalities (unequal distribution of decision-making
powers) and cultural inequalities (refusal to recognise cultural
norms).[4]<http://www.opendemocracy.net/opensecurity/patrick-meehan/problem-with-c%C3%B4te-d%E2%80%99ivoire-how-media-misrepresent-causes-of-conflict#ednref4>Efforts
to enshrine these horizontal inequalities are designed to strengthen
fragile governments by systematically favouring supporters and excluding
opposition. It is these horizontal inequalities (both perceived and actual)
that underpin the rising tension, frustration and anger in Ivorian society.
The explicit political calculations that have underpinned *Ivoirité *discourses
has certainly encouraged a far more nuanced analysis of the politicisation
of ethnicity in Côte d’Ivoire than elsewhere in Africa (e.g. the Rwandan
genocide). However, such analysis often tends to remain descriptive rather
than analytical in that it fails to consider why this political strategy has
emerged only in the past twenty years and why political elites have
abandoned the seemingly more effective and more stable policy of
accommodation embraced by Houphouet-Boigny. The growing politicisation of
ethnic identities cannot be attributed merely to changing political
personalities but is in fact rooted in the very different economic and
political structure that has emerged in* *Côte d’Ivoire since the 1980s.
*The impact of Côte d’Ivoire’s economic crisis*
It is a great irony that Côte d’Ivoire, one of the first countries to be
subjected to IMF and World Bank imposed structural adjustment programmes had
largely adhered to the kind of economic policies advocated by the Bretton
Woods institutions. Unlike other parts of the developing world, notably
Latin America, where inefficient state led import-substitution
industrialisation (ISI) was blamed for the debt crisis, Côte d’Ivoire had in
fact embraced Ricardo’s theory of comparative advantage, which underpins
neo-liberal economic theory, and the country’s development model was based
on exporting primary commodities to the west through the global market.
Whereas in Latin America aid conditionality was designed to coerce countries
to dismantle expensive industrialisation policies and instead open up their
markets to free trade and focus on exporting primary commodities in which
they had a comparative advantage, in reality Côte d’Ivoire had been pursuing
such policies since independence and should have served as a warning of the
inherent structural flaws in this development model. Sadly, it did not.
Côte d’Ivoire was instead forced to adhere to the same rationale of rolling
back the state to allow the free market to flourish. The 1980s saw the
systematic dismantling of the poverty safety nets that Houphouet-Boigny’s
government had installed in the coffee and cocoa sectors. The Price
Stabilisation Fund was abolished and almost overnight the prices paid to
cocoa producers were halved. Investment in agriculture declined and the
credit systems once available to the farming sector dried up. The Caisse de
Stabilisation was dismantled, a process finally completed (after much
opposition from the Ivorian government) in 2000, as the country’s most
profitable sectors were cleared of state intervention in readiness for
privatisation. The country’s welfare system was also heavily scaled back and
many public sector employees were either made redundant or saw their
salaries halved. Economic stagnation and fewer jobs saw the growing
informalisation of the labour market whilst foreign direct investment (FDI),
prophesised as the engine of future growth, remained largely absent except
in the most profitable sub-sectors. The free market proved unable to plug
the country’s huge finance gap and Côte d’Ivoire suffered one of the
greatest and prolonged economic declines anywhere in the world in the 1980s.
The prolonged economic crisis has created two interlinked problems. Firstly,
and most obviously, it has fuelled rising poverty, disaffection and anomie.
Secondly, heavy aid conditionality has drastically reduced the government’s
policy space and hence its ability to proactively address this rising tide
of poverty. Privatisation, trade liberalisation and the sale of state
institutions (much to the chagrin of Côte d’Ivoire’s leadership) has vastly
reduced the government’s sphere of influence in the economy. Large
multi-national companies, including Nestle, Bouygues, Total and France
Telecom effectively control the most lucrative economic sectors. There are
still subtle differences between the leading parties; Ouattara, having
worked at the IMF for a number of years and having been instrumental in the
implementation of structural adjustment during his period as Côte d’Ivoire’s
Prime Minister (1990-1993), is certainly more in favour of the Washington
Consensus model of economic reform. Gbagbo, on the other hand, has shown a
far more vehement dislike of the neo-liberal economic reforms his government
have found themselves implementing. His distaste for the influence of French
capital has certainly resulted in attempts to diversify Côte d’Ivoire’s
sources of investment with major US players such as Cargill and Archer
Daniel Midland (ADM) gaining a larger presence over the past decade.
However, the fact remains that whoever becomes President will have very
little room to manoeuvre since, as the US Department of State itself
acknowledged as early as 2001, “the Ivorian government has largely removed
itself from economic
activity.”[5]<http://www.opendemocracy.net/opensecurity/patrick-meehan/problem-with-c%C3%B4te-d%E2%80%99ivoire-how-media-misrepresent-causes-of-conflict#ednref5>
Growing poverty and inequality combined with the government’s declining
ability to tackle its root causes has thus had a double impact. It has
greatly increased social tensions whilst at the same time it has denied
parties the ability to appeal to economic reform as a possible basis of
support (in the way Chavez and Morales have done in Venezuela and Bolivia
for example). In this toxic environment the resort to xenophobic
nationalism, with immigrants (who form approximately one quarter of the
country’s population) forming an easy scapegoat, has become an essential
means by which to generate support. Secondly, and far more importantly, the
program of structural adjustment in Côte d’Ivoire completed failed to
understand or engage with the nature of the country’s political system and
has thus inadvertently eroded the very foundations of political power and
stable governance.
*The nature of Côte d’Ivoire’s political system*
Western development policy in the developing world has a terrific propensity
to analyse states in terms of their failures to conform to what we think
they ought to be like rather than engaging with how they actually function.
As a consequence states tend to be analysed in terms of their deficiencies;
their failure to uphold liberal democracy, their failure to enshrine free
market capitalism, their failure to establish institutional governance
underpinned by the rule of law. The majority of western development policy
is thus designed to rectify these failures by imposing changes to the
recipient country’s political, economic and social structure. However, the
normative assumptions of development policy contain a major failure of their
own, namely the failure to engage in how politics and power actually
function in the societies they proclaim to be remedying.
All societies experience social tensions which provide a challenge, albeit
not an insurmountable one, to effective statehood. The two most enduring
political systems that have emerged in the modern world to address and
manage these social tensions are institutional governance and patrimonial
governance. In Weberian, institutional governance social conflicts are
institutionalised and addressed within political institutions underpinned by
so-called ‘rules of the game’, the most important being the rule of law.
Patrimonial governance however works to a different set of rules founded
upon the establishment of patron-client relationships in which the patron
rewards loyal supporters once in power. Patrimonial politics can be
understood as an “auction of
loyalties”[6]<http://www.opendemocracy.net/opensecurity/patrick-meehan/problem-with-c%C3%B4te-d%E2%80%99ivoire-how-media-misrepresent-causes-of-conflict#ednref6>with
a chain of buyers and sellers of loyalty stretching from political
elites to local government and underpinned by the mutually beneficial ties
that link patrons and their followers. To western eyes patrimonial
governance is corrupt, inefficient and unenlightened. Perhaps, but it can
also be a foundation for stability. Indeed, Houphouët-Boigny’s long and
relatively stable tenure was based largely upon his clear understanding of
the logic of patrimonialism and his ability to adhere to its rules (his
policy of ethnic quotas perhaps being the clearest example).
Côte d’Ivoire’s economic crisis and the structural adjustment policies which
followed have completely undermined the logic upon which patrimonial
politics is based. Competition for declining economic resources has become
increasingly intense over the past twenty years whilst at the same time the
huge debt that the government is saddled with and the pervasive
privatisation of the commanding heights of the economy has vastly reduced
the resources with which the state is able to buy loyalty. Lucrative
concessions and economic decision-making powers have all largely disappeared
from the state’s portfolio denying the government the opportunity to
‘buy-in’ support across the country. There is no doubt that such policies
have historically tended to undermine economic efficiency since resources
are invariably used for in un-economic ways for political ends. However, it
is equally true that the dismantling of the economic foundations of
patrimonial rule have also had a devastating impact. Successive governments
have abandoned efforts to buy-in loyalty across the country in the way that
Houphouët-Boigny sought to do and have instead sought to construct more
limited regional support bases by politicising ethnic identities. It is the
underlying conflict for diminishing resources that has created the
‘winner-takes-all’ mentality in Ivorian politics and has meant that
strategies to buy-in loyalty nationwide have been replaced with a more
limited agenda to secure a smaller support base. This changing political
policy has dramatically heightened what is at stake in the country’s
elections which in turn has increasingly destabilised the country’s nascent
democratic system.
The erosion of the traditional economic basis for patrimonialism has
encouraged political elites to try to foster loyalty in non-economic ways.
Playing the ethnic card is in many ways best understood as an attempt to
demonetarise the patrimonial system. It has become a way of buying loyalty
on the cheap and the promises of the major parties to enact favourable
policies for certain ethnic groups (regarding employability, voting rights
and citizenship for example), epitomised in *Ivoirité,* embody a relatively
cost effective (albeit destabilising) way of generating widespread support.
*Conclusion*
The ‘problem’ with Côte d’Ivoire, therefore, is not that its “tribes” can’t
“get on” or that the country’s ethnic and religious diversity mean that
conflict is in some way predetermined. The ‘problem’ with Côte d’Ivoire is
the country’s structural economic crisis and the poverty, the sheer
disaffection and the anomie of a generation that has seen its hopes
frustrated and its dreams largely disappear. It is a result of the impact
that perpetual economic crisis and structural adjustment have wrought on the
country’s political system and the way that they have destabilised
patrimonial politics and state-society relations. Until this is properly
understood by development policymakers it is unlikely that western
intervention in Côte d’Ivoire, be it military, economic or political, will
be able to promote stability and peace.
------------------------------
Patrick Meehan is a research consultant for the development NGO
WaterAid<http://www.wateraid.org/uk/>.
Editor's note:
To view the original, click
here<http://www.opendemocracy.net/opensecurity/patrick-meehan/problem-with-c%C3%B4te-d%E2%80%99ivoire-how-media-misrepresent-causes-of-conflict>
.
------------------------------
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This article originally appeared on
openDemocracy.net<http://www.opendemocracy.net/>under a Creative
Commons licence.
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Comments
hana | lebanon | 17 January 2011
this is the first logical analysis i ever read about the current situation
in Ivory Coast.
this is called transparent journalism.
bravo
NDIKUM | University of Yaounde | Yaounde, Cameroon | 17 January 2011
Please what could you suggest as an immediate solution to the current
stalemate in Cote d'Ivoire? We have got a clear picture of the roots of the
problem and how can we advise African Union and others on how to approach
it?
Ivorien man | N/A | N/A | 18 January 2011
Gbagbo was the first to employ the notion of Ivoirité.
This statement is not true. Ivoirité was first lay on the political arena by
Henry Konan Bedie when he was struggling and fighting for his power.
One more thing is according to the Cote D'Ivoire constitution the President
of the "Assemble Generale" (which is the body voting the laws) is the person
who assume power in case of the president resignation or deceased. So Bedie
was the legal person to assume power.
And in the death of Boigny Allassane Ouattara which was Boigny Prime
Minister wanted to seize power. This is after all that the Ivoirité conceipt
came.
Proud Ivorian man.
Stephen Smith | Abidjan, RCI | 18 January 2011
I greatly appreciated the historical background and clear analysis for
understanding the conflict. Very helpful! One important error stands out
and, unfortunately raises some serious questions - Mr. Gbagbo is not Baoulé.
He is Bété. It's hard to see how anyone who doesn't know that could
accurately evaluate the situation. (not necessary to post this). Please
inform the author.
julien kassy kouadio | usa | 19 January 2011
although this analysis contain some sparks of truth it's nothing but an
essay of somebody who actually have not been on the field, experience the
ivorian, live in cote d'ivoire. the simple fact that the author says gbagbo
introduced the ivoirite disqualified this article as accurate and true. i
was born in abidjan in the sixties and did not leave cote d'ivoire until the
late nineties. the ivoirite is the inventions of scholars close to henry
konan bedie, president of cote d'ivoire in the nienties after the death of
houphouet. gbagbo maybe a nationalist and panafricanist, he did not invent
or create the ivoirite. as matter of fact when the ivoirite was created
gbagbo and ouattara were allied in the front republicain. voila la verite.
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