Out-going Ivorian President Ouattara wins easy re-election

BY JIBRIL TURE

President Ouattara has won Sunday’s presidential election in Cote d’Ivoire. He received 84 percent of the votes, against 9 percent for the second-place finisher, Pascal Affi N’Guessan, who ran as head of one of the rival factions of former president Laurent Gbagbo’s Ivorian Popular Front.

The announcement was made today by Youssouf Bakayoko, head of the Ivorian Electoral Commission. The Ivorian Constitutional Court is expected to validate the results, thus paving the way for President Ouattara’s second term. By mastering 84% of the votes at the first round, Ouattara, who only needed 50% plus one vote to win, clinches victory without a run-off.

This came really as no surprise to anyone familiar with the Ivorian political theater, given that Ouattara was the heavy favorite months ahead of the election.

According to the electoral commission, turn-out was more than 54%, a rate below the 80% recorded during the first round of the highly-contested and disputed 2010 election that Ouattara won, but could not start his term for months, due to the short civil war stemming from former president Laurent Gbagbo stubbornly refusing to concede his crystal-clear defeat.

Several members of the opposition, PDCI icons Amara Essy, former foreign minister, and fomer prime minister Charles Konan Banny, as well as the speaker of the Ivorian parliament under former president Gbagbo, head of the LIDER party, dropped out of the race saying that the stage was set for the vote to be rigged. All gave “proofs” of their claims which were dismissed by the electoral commission as unfounded.

According to both official and independent sources, the election was incident-free.

After less than a full five-year term, Ouattara can boast an impressive economic legacy with an average of 7% annual economic growth since 2012, and for turning Abidjan into a vast construction site, with new hotels and new real-estate developments popping all over town. However, the fruit of his administration’s economic prowess has not so far benefited a large segment of the population, just as, despite the unquestionable social appeasement, discontent has grown over the one-sided justice that has so far spared those on Ouattara’s side who bare unquestionable responsibility in the post-election violence of 2011. “It would be unwise to expect the president to tackle all those biting problems, which have piled up over the years, in just one term,” Fofana Coulibaly, a local wealthy businessman, told The African in a phone interview conducted today.

Ouattara has vowed, during the campaign, to address those issues head on.