ABIDJAN: Ivorian sandwich seller Nadege Oulaye watched her livelihood being smashed up as police took a sledgehammer to her small stall in the city of Abidjan before her eyes. Her kiosk is one of many informal businesses fallen prey to a new police brigade devoted to fighting “urban disorder” in Ivory Coast’s economic capital.

Since the end of July, nearly 300 police officers have been crisscrossing its main thoroughfares, hammer and truncheon in hand, to smash the booths of telephone credit vendors or dispute with street vendors who resist them. Those officers are also in charge of enforcing a recent ban on begging, fly-posting and urinating in the streets — a rule they themselves sometimes flout publicly. Oulaye, who admits never seeking permission to set up her sandwich stall, is now out of work. Her business brought in between 35,000 and 40,000 CFA francs (58 and 67 dollars) a month — or nearly a quarter of her household’s income. “What are we going to do?” she despaired.

Like Oulaye, nearly seven million urban-dwelling Ivorians make their livings off the informal economy, according to the World Bank, outstripping the number of those formally employed in the country of 29 million people. They have become just one of the victims of a government drive — of which the urban disorder force is just a part — carried out in the name of “cleaning up” and “developing” Abidjan, a metropolis of six million people.

‘Excessive use of force’

Since January, authorities have carried out mass demolitions of precarious shantytowns, expelling their residents. Launched by new governor Ibrahim Cisse Bacongo, an ally of President Alassane Ouattara, the campaign has drawn condemnation from the country’s opposition and rights groups.

As similar expulsions have taken place in the past, the dispossessions are defended by the authorities as a means to reduce the toll from floods and landslides, which kill dozens each year. But Amnesty International, which said that “tens of thousands of people” have been evicted since January, condemned the police’s “excessive use of force”. In a survey of four Abidjan districts, Amnesty said that all the people it spoke to “said they were not properly consulted on the conditions of the evictions nor duly notified of the day of the demolitions”.

In July, clashes broke out in the Adjame district between security forces and hundreds of residents of expelled to make way for the widening of a road, with at least one mechanical digger set ablaze. Two people died at the scene, Ivory Coast’s ruling party said shortly afterwards, without giving details about the deaths. “We’re not against what the government is doing, but there’s a better way to go about it,” Adjame resident Melissa Adoba said.

Besides homes and businesses, at least two schools were destroyed, preventing around 1,300 students from attending classes “with no solution in sight”, Amnesty said. After an outcry, the government announced in March it would help people expelled from their homes find alternative accommodation, with assistance including a 250,000 CFA franc per household payment.

But by August, “thousands of forcibly evicted families remained to be rehoused and/or compensated,” Amnesty said, urging an “immediate end” to the expulsions. Ivory Coast’s National Council for Human Rights has denounced the “operations carried out in disregard of fundamental rights” and “without consultation”. 

On August 6, President Ouattara declared that he wanted to “minimize the consequences” of the policy. But he also said: “In our march towards development, the difficult decisions we have to take will sometimes provoke incomprehension or even anger.”

The mass expulsions are taking place against an economic backdrop of ever-increasing rents for urban-dwelling Ivorians, a majority in the country since 2020 according to the World Bank. Of those, half lived in shantytowns, the South Africa-based Centre for Affordable Housing Finance in Africa estimates.

To relieve congestion in Ivory Coast’s largest city, Jean-Pierre Amon, an urban planning researcher at the University of Bondoukou, believes “we need to counterbalance Abidjan’s overwhelming demographic weight and create other centers”. Among other examples, he suggested the central city of Bouake, which at “only” 800,000 inhabitants still stands as Ivory Coast’s second-most populous. — AFP