Côte d’Ivoire’s grand old man, Felix Houphouet-Boigny, had a prodigious stock of aphorisms, but one of his favourites was ”peace is not a word, it’s a way of life”.
He died in 1993 and so was spared the experience of seeing the edifice that he and the French built over 50 years — the polished façade as well as the rotting timbers at the back — all but collapse in less than a decade.
The remains of Le Vieux must have been spinning, not just turning, in their marble tomb in Yamoussoukro, as the ”Switzerland of Africa” stumbled from its first coup into a brief civil war, to ethnic pogroms and, since 2002, to partition.
Peace is not today’s motif. Peace accords, on the other hand, are. And the worry is that they have become a way of life for one of Africa’s least responsible political classes.
As of this weekend, Ivorians and their friends around the world, as well as enemies who envied the ”haven of prosperity” and the sceptics who had predicted its downfall, now have another multi-point peace plan to digest — after Linas-Marcoussis (in France), Accra and Pretoria comes the Ouagadougou Accord, unveiled on March 4.
Two of the three men in the photographs of the talks looked thoroughly at home: Ivorian President Laurent Gbagbo and student-turned-rebel leader Guillaume Soro have got the T-shirt when it comes to signing peace deals, if not for honouring them.
The man in the middle, President Blaise Compaore of Burkina Faso, was more of a surprise in this context. He is to be the ”facilitator” of this latest process, something to chew on for Gbagbo supporters who have always been led to believe that Le Beau Blaise was the godfather of the northern rebels.
The accord was signed on the same weekend that Ouagadougou, Burkina’s moped-mad capital, had bid farewell for another two years to one of Africa’s most enjoyable cultural events, the Pan-African Film Festival. The coincidence was curious but there was no likelihood that Cote d’Ivoire’s umpteenth peace deal would overshadow the award of the Yennenga Stallion for best film to Ezra, a Nigerian movie about a child soldier.
Cote d’Ivoire’s sleeping conflict, however vicious and cowardly its eruptions, has not created anything like the number of mini-monsters that the horrible succession of skirmishes and massacres that passed for warfare in Liberia and Sierra Leone during the 1990s did.
But Cote d’Ivoire had so much further to fall than its two English-speaking neighbours. Its transport networks, ports and commercial agriculture could only be compared with South Africa’s and Zimbabwe’s. There was retail glitter in Abidjan, an ice rink, restaurants from every horizon, great music and, most importantly, a small, portly and well-paid army.
Today, the business conferences are all held further up the coast, in Senegal. For the first time, Ivorians are economic migrants around the world. And while 50th birthday tributes poured in to neighbouring Ghana on March 6, the house that Houphouet-Boigny built is physically split between north and south. Some rooms are still habitable but the 18-million inhabitants are getting poorer and dying younger.
What went wrong? A question with a thousand answers, spanning neo-colonialism, inaction about the status of millions of West African immigrants, land rights, a corrupt elite above a me-me middle-class, and lip-service to good governance.
Ouagadougou One (Ivorian peace accords tend to spawn offspring) does not even bother to run through the country’s ailments. That stage is long past. But the official communiqué kicks off with a long and coherent set of measures to deal with the identity and identification of the population. Who is, more or less, an Ivorian?
There are bullet-points galore and a timetable. Integration of the two armies. Militia disarmament. Gradual withdrawal of French and United Nations peacekeepers from the buffer zone. Elections …
This is all familiar territory. The same goals have been agreed, and missed, for the past four years. But what is different about the latest plan is the list of big players who were apparently marginal to its negotiation. Both the UN and France, despite their costly military and political engagement in Cote d’Ivoire, seemed to be taken off-guard. The accords also barely had a word to say about Charles Konan Banny, the moderate prime minister they foisted on Gbagbo and who could soon be looking for a job.
The country’s politicians, apart from Gbagbo’s circle, were kept in the cold for the first time. Used to riding on the UN gravy train during previous leisurely peace talks, it seemed this time they had to read the Ouagadougou communiqué on the internet.
The leaders of the two main opposition parties, Henri Konan Bedie and Alassane Ouattara, might be kept sweet by their inclusion in a new supervisory committee whose only other members are Gbagbo, Soro and Burkina’s Compaore.
In a cautious reaction, Bedie and his Parti Democratique du Cote d’Ivoire party welcomed the accord and immediately listed all that was wrong with it: the sidelining of the UN, the risk of premature withdrawal of the 11 000 UN and French peacekeepers, the calls for the Security Council to lift its arms embargo as well as personal sanctions against the Gbagbo and Soro camps, the exclusion of smaller parties and the deal’s general amnesty, by decree, for most crimes since the attempted coup of September 2002.
Ivorians do not have to be Bedie or Ouattara loyalists to see that the Ouagadougou deal was tailor-made by and for the two main belligerents. Gbagbo will stay in office for at least another year before elections, stretching an original five-year mandate to eight.
Soro will be rescued from his northern provincial outposts to become the de facto vice-president and possibly the prime minister as well.
Between them, the two men will appoint all the generals, ministers and top civil servants. Whatever material benefits they accrued from Cote d’Ivoire’s unpoliced economy over the past four years will be dwarfed by the potential of a double-act in Abidjan.
If the deal starts to gel, it will offer the UN and the French an exit strategy at long last. If they decide to play along, Ouagadougou might last longer than its many predecessors.
Nick Kotch is a correspondent and media consultant based in Johannesburg. He worked for Reuters for 25 years, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa