In a familiar pattern than continues to be repeated, President Idriss Déby looks set to be elected for yet another term in Chad following this Sunday’s presidential elections. In power since 1990, this will be the 68-year-old incumbent’s sixth term.

President Déby’s victory at the ballot box may be all but assured, but that’s not to say he doesn’t face significant opposition. When he was nominated to be the ruling Patriotic Salvation Movement’s flagbearer this February, the announcement sparked widespread demonstrations. In the capital N’Djamena and other major cities, protesters took to the streets chanting “no to a sixth term!” and “Leave, Déby!”.

The government has responded with force. Authorities arrested hundreds of protesters. They charged several with assault and disturbing the public order. In anticipation of more street action, authorities also imposed a blanket ban on protests. Internet restrictions are expected to follow.

This is all characteristic of Déby’s repressive rule and management of the upcoming elections. For years, his government has overseen sustained attacks against human rights defenders, opposition politicians and journalists. One of Chad’s most prominent human rights defender, Baradine Berdeï Targuio, has been detained since January 2020 charged with “subversive activities on social media”. In November 2020, security forces surrounded the premises of several opposition parties and civil society groups, and raided private radio stations including Radio FM Liberté.

Amid this increasingly unequal playing filed, Chad’s main opposition leader, Saleh Kebzabo, quit the presidential race in early-March. His decision came shortly after two people were killed as security forces tried to arrest his fellow opposition leader Yaya Dillo.

A regional problem

Since he came to power via a coup in 1990, President Déby has won every election and amended the constitution twice to facilitate his stay in power. His 2005 constitutional revision removed the two-term limit. The 2018 amendments re-imposed it, but ensured it would not apply retroactively while also extending presidential mandates from five years to six. This means Déby could now stay in power until 2033.

This determination to cling onto power, along with the brutal treatment of opponents, is consistent with the broader picture in Central Africa. Throughout this region, politics has been militarised and electoral periods are characterised by violence and instability. Authorities target anyone who speaks out – from human rights organisations and the political opposition to trade unions – and presidents maintain a tight grip on power.

Equatorial Guinea’s Teodoro Obiang and Cameroon’s Paul Biya are two of the world’s longest serving presidents, having been in office for 42 and 39 years respectively. The Republic of Congo’s Denis Sassou Nguesso of the Republic of Congo is referred to by some as an “Emperor”, having ruled for 36 years over two periods. Gabon’s Ali Bongo has been president for a comparatively brief 12 years but was preceded by his father who ruled for the 42 years before that.

Along with undemocratic and repressive domestic policies, several Central African leaders’ stays in power have been made possible by international complicity. Chad is a strategic US ally in the campaign against Islamist insurgencies in the Chad Basin. Cameroon, Congo and Gabon are among the last bastions of French influence in Francophone Africa. The Central African Republic has presented a useful opportunity for Russia to expand its international standing.

These alliances of convenience have often provided authoritarian governments with crucial support and funding – some of which has financed security forces that then commit the same kinds of abuses as the groups they are meant to be targeting – while also shielding undemocratic leaders from international censure.

Pushing back

As seen in Chad, people across Central Africa are not staying silent. Civil society groups in the Congo and Cameroon, for example, are increasingly speaking out against state excesses and calling for political reforms, starting with free and fair elections and adherence to term limits. Despite the risks, protests against rising costs of living, increasing inequality and the monopolisation of power by ruling elites are growing. Repeats of Sudan’s 2019 uprising, which ended Omar al-Bashir’s three-decade reign, cannot be ruled out.

To support these movements and help reverse Central Africa’s authoritarian trend, regional and international civil society organisations should start building networks across the region. They should bolster groups that work on the ground to encourage people and governments to move towards democracy. At the same time, they should demand that foreign governments look beyond their own narrow strategic interests and recognise the impact of the militarisation of politics and the use of violence against civil society, the media and opposition.

Without this support, local civil society will struggle to push back against authoritarian leaders. They need broader support as they attempt to prevent leaders like President Déby extending his undemocratic rule and, in the longer-term, resist the plans of ageing presidents to follow in Gabon’s footsteps by converting their individual reign into dynastic rule, further extending the cycle of human rights violations and repression.

Culled from African Arguments

The most powerful of the Central African Republic’s armed groups said in a statement Monday it will quit a rebel coalition aiming to unseat President Faustin Archange Touadera.

The Unity for Peace in Central Africa (UPC), mainly active in the country’s east, “commits to withdraw from the Coalition of Patriots for Change” (CPC), the group’s head Ali Darassa wrote.

The coalition is an alliance of some of the war-torn country’s most powerful armed groups, who joined together on December 19 accusing Touadera, the frontrunner in the December 27 elections, of trying to fix the vote.

Its components were drawn from militia groups that, together, controlled two-thirds of the impoverished country.

Touadera was reelected with barely one in three voters able to cast their ballot because rebel groups control most of the country.

Darassa said Monday that since the “electoral crisis, the population has suffered terribly from insecurity, the health situation, famine and the lack of humanitarian assistance.”

The UPC, the statement continued, “reiterates its commitment to the Khartoum Accord process,” a peace agreement signed in February 2019 between the government and 14 armed groups.

Surge in violence

Tensions have been high in the Central African Republic since the December election, although the surge in violence in recent months is just the latest flare-up in a civil war that has lasted eight years since the ouster of president Francois Bozize.

More than 30,000 people have fled the country due to the violence surrounding the elections, the UN says, while tens of thousands more have been internally displaced.

On January 13, rebels launched twin attacks on the outskirts of the capital — the first time they had struck so close to the city since the start of their offensive.

But their offensive foundered faced with government forces backed by 12,000 UN peacekeepers force, Russian paramilitaries and Rwandan troops.

Since January, the government and its allies have recaptured towns once held by fighters from the alliance of militias.

Bangui has accused Bozize, now the head of the CPC, of attempting a coup.

The UPC announcement came just days after another powerful group in the CPC announced that its chief had died from wounds suffered during an attack, in another blow to the rebel alliance.

Sidiki Abass, head of Return, Reclamation and Rehabilitation (3R), died on March 25, the rebel group announced Friday.

Abass, whose real name was Bi Sidi Souleymane, died in hospital in the country’s north, 3R said in a statement, adding he had been “seriously wounded” during attacks in the town of Bossembele on November 16.

The 3R group is made up largely of the Fulani ethnic group, whose members are traditionally nomadic herders.

Abass’s group has in the past been accused of war crimes, and judicial sources said he had been the target of an investigation by the country’s Special Criminal Court, set up to probe serious human rights violations committed since 2003.

Mineral-rich but rated the world’s second-poorest country on the Human Development Index, the CAR has been chronically unstable since independence 60 years ago.

Source: AFP

Soldiers were arrested in Niger after an “attempted coup” early Wednesday, a security source said after gunfire broke out in the capital Niamey, adding “the situation is under control”.

Residents reported hearing overnight bursts of gunfire near the presidency, just two days before Mohamed Bazoum is due to take the helm of the coup-prone country.

“There were some arrests among a few members of the army who are behind this attempted coup,” said the source, speaking on condition of anonymity.

“The Presidential Guard retaliated, preventing this group of soldiers from approaching the presidential palace,” said the source.

A resident of Niamey’s Plateau district, which includes the president’s official residence and offices, told AFP: “It was around 3.00 am, we heard shots from heavy and light weapons and it lasted 15 minutes before stopping, followed by shots from light weapons.”

“The gunfire lasted about 20 minutes,” another resident said.

A third resident spoke of “intense shooting, with heavy and light weapons”.

Online newspaper actuniger.com reported that calm had returned by around 4.00 am.

In short video clips posted on social networks, only several seconds in length, sporadic bursts of gunfire could be heard in the pitch dark.

It was not yet possible to independently verify the location and timing of the videos.

The alleged coup comes ahead of Bazoum’s scheduled inauguration on Friday — the first elected transition in Niger’s history since independence from France in 1960.

Bazoum is a former interior minister and right-hand man of outgoing president Mahamadou Issoufou, who is voluntarily stepping down after two five-year terms.

His victory in the second round of the election on February 2 was confirmed by the constitutional court this month.

The results were contested by Bazoum’s rival, former president Mahamane Ousmane, who claimed he was the real winner.

Ousmane had called for “peaceful marches” across the country, but a planned opposition protest Wednesday in Niamey was banned a day earlier by authorities.

Niger is the poorest country in the world, according to the benchmark of the UN’s 189-nation Human Development Index.

It has suffered four coups in its history, most recently a February 2010 putsch which toppled then president Mamadou Tandja.

The Sahel country has also recently been struck by repeated jihadist attacks as Islamist movements have spilled over from neighbouring Mali and Nigeria.

Source: AFP

The Republic of Congo votes in presidential elections on Sunday with incumbent Denis Sassou Nguesso aiming to extend his decades-long hold on power in the Central African state.

Sassou Nguesso has accumulated 36 years in office — he was most recently re-elected in 2016, after which the opposition was effectively sidelined and his two main rivals sentenced to 20 years’ forced labour.

The 77-year-old retired paratrooper appears favoured to win a fourth term in Sunday’s ballot. The largest opposition group, the Pan-African Union for Social Democracy, is boycotting the vote.

Sassou Nguesso hopes for a first-round victory over six challengers, including former minister Guy-Brice Parfait Kolelas, who was runner-up in 2016, and former finance minister Mathias Dzon.

“One shot, KO,” proclaimed his campaign posters forecasting a win for the candidate.

Sassou Nguesso has placed youth and the development of agriculture at the heart of his campaign, pointing out that the country imports most of what it consumes despite its farming resources.

Several thousand supporters, some waving banners with his initials “DSN”, rallied for his last campaign stop in Brazzaville on Friday, where he promised more programmes for the country’s youth.

“Our policies in favour of young people will continue with force and vigour during the next mandate,” he told his supporters.

But his pitch to the young seems to have met a mixed response in a country where most of the population of five million are people aged under 25 who have never known another president.

“Even if there is some hassle here, there’s no war like in other countries. Better to stay with Sassou who brings us peace, at least that is good,” said Mariela, a 19-year-old high-school student in the coastal city of Pointe-Noire.

“There’s no point voting,” said Francesc, a 25-year-old law student in the capital Brazzaville. “The dice are loaded in advance.”

Congo’s Catholic Church episcopal conference has already expressed “serious reservations” about the transparency of the ballot and fears a possible internet shutdown on Sunday, as in the 2016 election.

Oil-dependent

Sitting between Gabon and its giant neighbour the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Republic of Congo has significant oil reserves and 80 percent of its budget comes from petroleum.

But the former French colony, also known as Congo-Brazzaville, has been hit hard by cycles of falling world crude prices and is also hobbled by debt, corruption and poor infrastructure.

Per-capita GDP in 2012, at the height of an oil boom, peaked at $3,922, but tumbled to $2,279 in 2019, according to World Bank figures.

Last year, the economy contracted by 6.8 percent, according to the African Development Bank (AfDB). In the 2020 UN Human Development Index, a benchmark of poverty, the country ranked 175 out of 189 countries.

Transparency International classed Congo 165th out of 179 countries in its 2020 Corruption Perceptions Index.

Members of the Sassou Nguesso family were placed under investigation in Paris in 2017 in a case involving alleged “ill-gotten gains”.

Last July, the NGO Global Witness said US federal prosecutors were probing his son, Denis Christel Sassou Nguesso, over alleged embezzlement of several million dollars from the publicly-owned National Society of Petroleum of Congo (SNPC).

Thirty-six years in power

A former elite paratrooper, Sassou Nguesso first ruled from 1979 under a one-party system, stepping down in 1992 when he placed third in multi-party elections.

He then returned to power in 1997 at the end of one of Congo’s civil wars. He won votes in 2002 and 2009, although both victories were contested by the opposition.

A controversial 2015 referendum removed a 70-year age limit and a ban on presidents serving more than two terms, allowing Sassou Nguesso to run again the following year.

That election sparked protests in Brazzaville and an armed conflict by anti-government rebels in the southern Pool region.

Two Sassou Nguesso rivals, former army general Jean-Marie Michel Mokoko and ex-minister Andre Okombi Salissa, who contested the results, were later jailed for breaching state security and illegal detention of weapons.

France, the country’s biggest supporter, has been urged to push hard for fair elections and condemn rights abuse.

A group of French and Congolese activists, in a commentary published by Le Monde in Paris, said “the Republic of Congo, like French diplomacy, should return to democracy.”

(AFP)

Samia Suluhu Hassan is a soft-spoken, Muslim woman thrust from the obscure role of vice president to become Tanzania’s first female leader after John Magufuli’s sudden death.

Under the constitution Hassan, the country’s 61-year-old vice president, will serve the remainder of Magufuli’s second five-year term, which does not expire until 2025.

She will also become the first female President in East Africa.

After consulting with her Chama Cha Mapinduzi ruling political party, Suluhu will propose her possible successor as Vice-President – with the official appointment being confirmed by the National Assembly via votes of no less than 50% of all the Members of Parliament.

What do we know about Suluhu?

Suluhu was born in 1960 in Zanzibar, a former slaving hub and trading outpost in the Indian Ocean.

Then still a Muslim sultanate, Zanzibar did not merge formally with mainland Tanzania for another four years.

She graduated from high school but has said publicly that her finishing results were poor, and she took a clerkship in a government office at 17.

By 1988, after undertaking further study, she rose the ranks to become a development officer in the Zanzibari government.

She was employed as a project manager for the UN’s World Food Programme (WFP) and later in the 1990s was made executive director of an umbrella body governing non-governmental organisations in Zanzibar.

She was a parliament member for the Makunduchi constituency from 2010 to 15 and has been Minister of State in the Vice-President’s Office for Union Affairs since 2010.

In 2014, she served as the vice-chairperson for the Constitutional Assembly which was tasked with drafting Tanzania’s new constitution.

Suluhu is married to Hafidh Ameir, a retired agriculture officer, and together they have three sons and a daughter.

Their daughter Mwanu Hafidh Ameir is a member of the Zanzibar House of Representatives.

Suluhu is among a very small circle of women to lead East African nations. Burundi briefly had an acting female president in 1993, while both Mauritius and Ethiopia have had women appointed to the ceremonial role of president.

Source: Africa News

Ivory Coast’s ruling party and the main opposition both claimed victory Sunday in the West African nation’s legislative elections, with the official results still to be announced.

Saturday’s polls come as a key test of stability following violence before and after October’s presidential vote, which claimed 87 lives in the former French colony.

Adama Bictogo, number two in the ruling RHDP party, said early trends from local election commissions “clearly show that our party will emerge victorious with a comfortable majority”.

“We have achieved our goal of securing around 60 percent of the seats,” he declared.

But the centre-right Ivory Coast Democratic Party (PDCI) opposition party has also claimed to have won the vote, alleging that the preliminary results were riddled with irregularities.

Top opposition party official Niamkey Koffi told a news conference in the economic capital Abidjan that the PDCI believed it had won “around 128 seats with our allies” in the 255-seat National Assembly.

“Our concern is that the results may be manipulated,” said Koffi, warning the government against “any attempt to falsify” them.

The conflicting victory claims came after the independent electoral commission announced early provisional results, which Koffi said were “strewn with fraud, tampering and manipulation”.

Koffi alleged attempts to reverse results in several large cities including the political capital Yamassoukrou, the coastal resort of Grand-Bassam, and key districts of Abidjan.

Turnout had been a mere 20 percent, he added, citing “fear of violence”.

Bictogo, for his part, denied the opposition’s allegations of fraud.

“This is the reasoning of losers,” he said.

Shifting alliances

The PDCI, in an unprecedented move, had forged an election alliance with the centre-left coalition Together for Democracy and Solidarity (EDS), whose driving force is the Ivorian Popular Front (FPI) of former president Laurent Gbagbo.

Their declared aim is to prevent President Alassane Ouattara and his RHDP party from “consolidating absolute power” in the world’s top cocoa grower, formerly a haven of peace and prosperity in troubled West Africa.

Ouattara, 79, won a controversial third term with more than 94 percent of the vote in the presidential polls, which were boycotted by the opposition.

In the last legislative vote in December 2016, the RHDP and PDCI were allied, winning an absolute majority with 167 seats on turnout of 34 percent.

Last year’s election crisis shattered that deal.

The FPI, for its part, lifted a decade-old boycott of electoral politics in order to take part in Saturday’s vote, in which more than 1,500 candidates were vying for the votes of roughly seven million people.

Abidjan Mayor Sylvestre Emmou, an opposition candidate, said that three people had been stabbed and injured in the city on an otherwise calm day of voting. Election observers reported no other major incidents.

Ouattara forced Gbagbo out of office in 2011 after a post-election civil war that claimed some 3,000 lives and left the country deeply split.

After his ouster, Gbagbo, now 75, was flown to the International Criminal Court in The Hague to face war crimes charges arising from that conflict.

He was acquitted in January 2019 and is now living in Brussels pending the outcome of an appeal.

More recently, Ouattara has reached out to his old foe, and in a bid for “national reconciliation”, issued Gbagbo with two passports, one of them a diplomatic pass.

Gbagbo’s supporters are impatient for his return, which the ex-president recently said would be “soon”.

Source: AFP

A series of explosions at a military barracks in Equatorial Guinea killed at least 15 people and wounded hundreds of others, state television reported.

TGVE read out a statement from President Teodoro Obiang Nguema which said the explosion was due to the “negligent handling of dynamite” in the military barracks located in the neighborhood of Mondong Nkuantoma in Bata. He said that the explosion occurred at 4 p.m. local time. The president said that impact of the explosion affected buildings across the city.

TVGE said that at least five explosions caused at least 20 deaths and wounded more than 400 others.

There were some discrepancies with the death toll, with TGVE reporting 20 dead, a Health Ministry tweet saying 17 were killed and the president’s statement mentioning 15.

State television showed a huge plume of smoke rising above the explosion site as crowds fled, with many people crying out “we don’t know what happened, but it is all destroyed.”

The health ministry tweeted that its health workers are treating the injured at the site of the tragedy and in medical facilities, but feared people were still missing under the rubble.

Images on local media seen by The Associated Press show people screaming and crying running through the streets amid debris and smoke. Roofs of houses were ripped off and wounded people were being carried into a hospital.

The blasts were a shock for the oil rich Central African nation. A doctor calling into TVGE, who went by his first name, Florentino, said the situation was a “moment of crisis” and that the hospitals were overcrowded. He said a sports center set up for COVID-19 patients would be used to receive minor cases.

Radio station, Radio Macuto, said on Twitter that people were being evacuated within four kilometers of the city because the fumes might be harmful.

Following the blast, the Spanish Embassy in Equatorial Guinea recommended on Twitter that, “Spanish nationals stay in their homes.”

(AP)

France is looking to reform its policy on aid to Africa – making it both more generous and more efficiently targeted – as part of a strategy to counter China’s rising geopolitical influence.

Africa’s booming economies and population have created lucrative opportunities for international players, making the continent a hotbed of geopolitical competition over the past decade. The International Monetary Fund found in 2019 that Africa had become the world’s fastest-growing region, with the World Economic Forum predicting its population would double to around 2.2 billion by 2050.

China is Africa’s biggest bilateral trading partner, having surpassed the US in 2009. Before the coronavirus crisis hit the world economy, the value of Sino-African trade reached €161 billion ($192 bn) in 2019.

“Right now you could say that any big project in African cities that is higher than three floors or roads that are longer than three kilometres are most likely being built and engineered by the Chinese,” Dave Roggeveen, the founder of specialist publication MORE Architecture, told Forbes in 2018.

As well as infrastructure, China has invested massively in media in Africa – with state-run Xinhua News Agency developing the continent’s biggest network of correspondents. Nairobi is at the centre of China’s African media presence, with Xinhua moving one of its headquarters from Paris to the Kenyan capital in 2006.

France is now also seeking to make new inroads on the African continent by tweaking its strategy towards developing nations. Paris has managed to increase its global aid budget even amid the coronavirus crisis, with development spending rising from €10.9 billion in 2019 to €12.8 billion in 2020.

On March 2, French MPs approved a bill increasing France’s aid budget to 0.55 percent of GDP by 2022. President Macron’s government is also stepping up efforts to ensure the aid money is effective. The draft law enshrines five key objectives – “to fight against poverty, to counter climate change, to bolster public health, to expand education services and to achieve gender equality” – focused on Sub-Saharan Africa and also Haiti.

“International solidarity has never been more necessary than it is now,” said Louis-Nicolas Jandeaux, a spokesman for Oxfam France. “The Covid-19 pandemic shows us how so many major challenges – like fighting poverty and protecting public health – are connected. Given that France is a leader on these multilateral issues, and given that French President Emmanuel Macron has spoken so much about boosting international co-operation, France really has to set a good example on issues like aid spending.”

The bill also seeks to give France more bang for its aid buck by merging its two development agencies. The French Development Agency – which bestows loans and grants – will be merged with France Expertise – which focuses on the nitty-gritty of development project logistics. This merger will allow French aid workers to “respond better and more directly to the needs of the countries we’re working in”, said Jérémie Pellet, director of France Expertise.

The law includes a plan to repatriate “ill-gotten” assets the French justice system has confiscated from foreign leaders. France has made efforts to go after corrupt politicians who have stashed millions on French soil. In 2020 a Paris court sentenced Teodorin Obiang, vice president of Equatorial Guinea, to three years in prison and a €30 million fine for laundering money through French properties.

Redirecting illicit money back to the people is also part of a diplomatic strategy to boost France’s image in Africa.

“This aspect seems so morally sound that it’s almost impossible to be against it,” said Magali Chelpi-den Hamer, the head of the humanitarian and development programme at Paris-based think-tank IRIS (the French Institute for International and Strategic Affairs). “However, the volume of money concerned will be relatively low.” 

Avoiding the debt trap

France has had a long and complicated relationship with Africa. It gained control of vast swaths of the continent – mainly by seizing most of western Africa – in the competitive conquest of the continent launched by European powers from the 17th century.

After a wave of successful independence movements in the 1950s and 1960s, France maintained close relations with many Francophone ex-colonies in a policy that came to be known as Françafrique. Advocates of this approach saw France as a guarantor of stability on the continent, but critics saw France as loath to give up its colonial-era influence and continuing to play a clientelist role.   

The French state’s focus on Africa waned in the 1990s as it turned its attention toward European integration. But France has once again set its sights on the continent to counter China’s rising influence.

And this time France seeks to ensure that its activities on the continent do not carry any reminiscence of neo-colonialism, with a new aid policy favouring grants over loans.

Analysts have become increasingly concerned about China creating debt traps with its hefty loans to African countries, for which it is the biggest bilateral lender. Chinese loans to underdeveloped countries are even bigger than indicated by the official figures: around half of them are not reported to the International Monetary Fund or World Bank, a report for German think-tank the Kiel Institute for the World Economy found in 2019.

Until now, France has not had a stellar record on loans either: in 2018, half of its development aid was in loans instead of grants, according to Oxfam. Nevertheless, while “Western countries also use debt to gain influence in African countries, unlike China they’re very keen to avoid setting debt traps,” said IRIS’s Chelpi-den Hamer.

“We’re fighting China in a battle for influence – and a battle over what system of government countries should see as their model,” French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian told France Inter radio last month.

China’s increasing involvement in Africa threatens to “end up being negative over the medium to long term”, Macron warned at a press conference in Djibouti on his 2019 African tour.

“I wouldn’t want a new generation of international investments to encroach on our historical partners’ sovereignty or weaken their economies,” he added.

France’s aid reform bill now goes to the Senate and is expected to become law this summer.

Source: France 24

Legislative elections take place in Ivory Coast on Saturday overshadowed by a figure in distant Europe – former president Laurent Gbagbo.

Nearly a decade has passed since Gbagbo was forced out of office by today’s president Alassane Ouattara before being flown to The Hague to face war crimes charges.

Acquitted since then but living in Brussels pending an appeal, Gbagbo plans to come home, thanks to an olive branch offered by his erstwhile rival.

His Ivorian Popular Front (FPI) party has ended a years-long electoral boycott, becoming the engine behind an alliance battling for seats in the National Assembly.

The elections “mark the return of Laurent Gbagbo and his political organisation in institutional politics,” said Gbagbo’s eldest son, Michel, a university academic running in a constituency in Abidjan.

“It has to be seen as the return to calmer democratic life and lasting peace,” he said optimistically.

Ouattara overture

Ouattara, 79, ignited political unrest last year when he announced he would seek a third term in office – a scheme that critics said sidestepped constitutional limits.

Clashes claimed 87 lives and left nearly 500 people injured, while most of the opposition snubbed the October 31 ballot.

Ouattara won by a landslide – but to his critics, the victory had scant credibility and the country remained deep in crisis.

Seeking a way forward, Ouattara reached out to Gbagbo, signalling his assent for his return home and issuing him with a diplomatic passport.

The runup to Saturday’s vote has seen a jolt run through Ivorian politics as the well-organised FPI strives to get out the vote.

Thousands of supporters wearing T-shirts with Gbagbo’s face took part in a campaign launch rally in Yopougon last Saturday.

“Gbagbo yesterday, Gbagbo today, Gbagbo tomorrow – Gbagbo forever, or else nothing,” were the words on a poster.

The pro-Gbagbo alliance, Together for Democracy and Sovereignty (EDS), is fielding candidates across most of the country.

The left-leaning coalition has forged an unprecedented electoral deal with the biggest centre-right party – the Democratic Party of the Ivory Coast (PDCI) headed by Henri Konan Bedie, a former president and former Ouattara ally.

The self-described goal is to win enough legislative seats to prevent Ouattara and his RHDP party from “consolidating (their) absolute power.”

The RHDP won a thumping majority in the December 2016 legislative elections with 167 out of 255 seats.

“We don’t share the same ideology” with the EDS, said Djedri N’Goran, a senior PDCI official.

“But whether you like it or not, Gbagbo has an aura – there are whole areas, including Abidjan, where it’s ‘Gbagbo or nothing’.”

Outsider

Gbagbo was president from 2000 to 2010, a time of turmoil, division and economic destruction in this major cocoa and coffee producer.

He was ousted by force of arms in April 2011 after a months-long conflict that claimed several thousand lives, sparked by his refusal to accept electoral defeat at Ouattara’s hands.

His long trial at the International Criminal Court in The Hague was over charges that he abetted the post-electoral violence.

Despite Gbagbo’s turbulent record, he remains for many Ivorians a plucky and inspirational figure, said political analyst Rodrigue Kone.

He likened Gbagbo’s odyssey to that of “a poor child fighting the bourgeois system represented by leaders from aristocratic families.”

Reconciliation Minister Kouadio Konan Bertin last month paid tribute to Gbagbo, 75, as “a major player” in national politics, “whose views should be taken into account.”

Exactly when Gbagbo will make his return is unclear.

The ICC has authorised him to make foreign trips if the host country accepts him, pending the outcome of the appeal, which is due by March 31.

He previously said he hoped to return in December, but his increasingly frustrated supporters now say it will be in mid-March and have set up a committee to prepare a spectacular welcome.

(AFP)