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