It is not unduly cynical to suppose that Laurent Gbagbo \u2013 the former president of Ivory Coast, who was last night clinging to power in the face of a final onslaught on his presidential palace by rebel forces \u2013\u00a0 has a few bob tucked away in some foreign bank accounts in faraway places. He would not be the first African leader to do so.<\/p>\n
The same is probably true of Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe, Colonel Gaddafi in Libya, Ali Abdullah Saleh in Yemen and a goodly number of other Arab leaders currently maintaining a finger-tip hold on power.<\/p>\n
That being so, a rational person might wonder why they don\u2019t just do a deal, take the money and run off to a comfortable retirement in the congenial backyard of some other unsavoury dictator.<\/p>\n
But we are not dealing with reason here; we are talking about power. And power is not just, as Lord Acton so memorably observed, corrupting. It is also addictive.<\/p>\n
Muammar Gaddafi, like so many other charismatic despots, almost certainly has come to believe in his own indispensability. He is, after all, as he so often suggests, not a man with any official office. But he is the father of the nation. Without him the centre cannot hold. Things will fall apart.<\/p>\n
Such fantasies are fed by the acolytes who surround powerful men. You find them in democracies too \u2013 which is why nations like the United States limit their top office to two terms \u2013 but they are to be found in their most quintessential form around dictators.\u00a0 They are flatterers who refused to taint their hagiographical obeisance with anything so unpalatable as the truth \u2013 especially when they know the truth is not what the Big Man wants to hear.<\/p>\n
They have too much to lose. Nowhere is that more so than in Ivory Coast \u2013 a land where the leader\u2019s sycophants have pumped up unnecessary ethnic conflicts in an attempt to find personal and sectional advantage.<\/p>\n
In the days when that country was rich and stable it opened its arms to neighbouring foreigners from the countries to the north \u2013 Burkina Faso and Mali \u2013 to work its vast cocoa, coffee and sugar plantations. But when drought struck, commodity prices plunged and global recession hit there was no work for these immigrants.<\/p>\n
Ivorian politicians, like knavish politicians everywhere, began to talk of \u201cforeigners\u201d who were stealing the jobs of \u201ctrue Ivorians\u201d.\u00a0 They divided the nation between northerner and southerner, Muslim and Christian, immigrants and those of \u201cla vrai Ivoriti\u00e9\u201d. Where previous generations of politicians had done their best to de-emphasise ethnic difference Gbagbo and his followers played them up.<\/p>\n
Imagine their horror when the northerners\u2019 candidate Alassane Ouattara, whose parents were originally from Burkina, won the election \u2013 and then, after months of trying to find a negotiated solution, sent his forces sweeping down from the north in a terrible onslaught on Abidjan in which massacres were committed on both sides.<\/p>\n
It is not just Laurent Gbabgbo who clings desperately to power to the end. It is his inner circle who, if their boss were to flee, would be left staring into the naked possibility of losing everything.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It is not unduly cynical to suppose that Laurent Gbagbo \u2013 the former president of Ivory Coast, who was last night clinging to power in the face of a final onslaught on his presidential palace by rebel forces \u2013\u00a0 has a few bob tucked away in some foreign bank accounts in faraway places. He would […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,40],"tags":[705,718,278],"class_list":["post-3790","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-africa","category-ethics","tag-africa","tag-ethics","tag-ivory-coast"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3790","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3790"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3790\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8011,"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3790\/revisions\/8011"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3790"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3790"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3790"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}