Abidjan — On November 14, President Alassane Ouattara of the Ivory Coast opened the Council of Ministers meeting with a surprising announcement: the government had been dissolved and all daily business was to be conducted by Prime Minister Jeannot Kouadio Ahoussou until further notice. President Ouattara then left for the Vatican to meet with the Pope.
A communiqué read by Ouattara’s secretary cited “tensions with coalition partners” for the dissolution and no further official details were released until a week later on November 21, when the president appointed Daniel Kablan Duncan as the new prime minister. A new Council of Ministers was named the day after.
The nomination of Duncan did not come as a shock as rumours predicting his nomination had been circulating all week. The Council of Ministers remained more or less the same, with four newcomers, ten being pushed aside and a minor reshuffling among the others. President Ouattara will retain control over the security forces, with the help of Paul Koffi Koffi as Deputy Minister of Defence. Hamed Bakayoko remains interior minister.
As Venance Konan, one of Abidjan’s most famous columnists, summed up: “A new head, same body”.
A marriage bill on the rocks?
The week of silence between the government’s dissolution and the nomination of Duncan left plenty of room for interpretation.
The “source of tension” mentioned by government officials referred to a controversial marriage bill that would make husbands and wives equals as head of the family. Certain members of the ruling opposition, most notably from the Parti Démocratique de Côte d’Ivoire (PDCI), strongly opposed the bill. Following the reshuffle, however, the bill was voted through with little opposition.
A local journalist proposed an interesting theory during the Ivory Coast’s week without government: a clash between the two coalition partners could have been a way for Ouattara to enforce the creation of an opposition. Laurent Gbabgo’s Ivorian Popular Front (FPI), which was forcibly removed from power in 2011 after it rejected the election results, boycotted the last legislative elections leaving Ouattara’s government without opposition. Some saw this forced dissolution as a Machiavellian move to create a constructive opposition which has been badly lacking in Ivorian politics.