The earth didn’t shake, but it felt like it. Tuesday, February 20 in the morning, some 1,800 students from Yopougon-Gesco, an outlying district in the north of Abidjan, discovered their school buried under rubble. The same day and the next day, dozens of homes and businesses were also gutted by bulldozers. Since then, bewildered families have been wandering outside, carrying in their suitcases what they were able to save at the last minute.
Three weeks earlier, the authorities of the autonomous district of Abidjan had already launched an initial “eviction” operation to evict people residing on sites exposed to landslides, leaving several hundred residents without a solution. “We received no information, no letter to warn us, nothing! “, shouts a young person in the middle of other excited citizens, Thursday near the ruins. “After having organized the most beautiful CAN [African Football Cup of Nations], we are coming to destroy our houses,” continues, indignant, one of them.
The blow, which arouses turmoil in the neighborhood and consternation on social networks, is essential, according to the town hall of Abidjan, determined to clean up the city and “to dissuade populations from occupying areas vulnerable to collapse and to floods, especially as the rainy season approaches,” explains Klotioloma Yeo, vice-governor of the country’s economic capital. Of the 176 risk areas identified, 77 are considered critical and must be “treated as quickly as possible”, namely in the coming days, asserts the elected official.
“An elephant in a china shop”
For four days, road blockages and tire fires have continued in this immense popular commune of 1.5 million inhabitants. On Thursday, protesters barricaded access to the Gesco district while the gendarmerie tried to quell their anger with tear gas. At the end of the two eviction operations, “nearly 2,500 people found themselves homeless,” laments Yaya Doumbia, first deputy mayor of the commune of Yopougon.
Despite protests, these evictions and destructions will increase. They are part of a long-term political desire to modernize Abidjan, an overpopulated megacity whose population is increasing by nearly 4% per year. Yopougon faces the same fate as several of its neighboring towns before it.
If the reason put forward by the central town hall – “saving human lives” – seems hardly questionable in view of the fourteen local residents who died in 2023 in floods, it is the operating method which is strongly criticized by the populations and the municipal team of Yopougon.
The autonomous district of Abidjan assures that “awareness campaigns” were carried out in advance with the evictees, but “this in no way constitutes a legal act”, underlines a deputy of the affected municipality. Even if the occupied sites belong to the public domain and certain definitive concession acts brandished by the populations seem “inconsistent”, “there should have been a formal notice and prior compensation”, explains this former lawyer, for whom the authorities acted “like an elephant in a china shop.”
For the moment, no rehousing solution has been announced. “The question is being examined,” promises, tersely, the Abidjan town hall. For students without classes, the municipality of Yopougon urgently requested the Regional Directorate of National Education for their reassignment. Once again on Friday, evictions without warning continued in Attécoubé, another district of Abidjan.
The visits of Michel Gbagbo and Tidjane Thiam
These fields of ruins have transformed into a terrain of political confrontation, with on one side the mayor of Yopougon and president of the National Assembly, Adama Bictogo, and on the other the governor of Abidjan, Ibrahim Bacongo Cissé, two leaders of the Rally of Houphouëtists for Democracy and Peace (RHDP), the presidential party.
A few days after the first evictions, at the end of January, the two men met and their warm handshake served as a promise to “act together”, even if the land along the main roads is the responsibility of the district. The mayor of Yopougon assured the population that nothing more would be done “without his authorization”. But once outside the country for a visit to Egypt, the machines returned. A scenario strangely similar to what happened during the first operation, Adama Bictogo then also found himself visiting abroad.
Difficult to believe in the coincidence for his municipal team. “We stuck a knife in his back, it’s a political betrayal,” denounces Yaya Doumbia, who worked hard on Thursday to convince residents that the town hall is not complicit in these operations. For Ibrahim Bacongo Cissé, making Abidjan an economic success comes at an unavoidable cost. The issue of evictions remains “worrying, but we must have the courage to initiate these actions,” confides those around him.
Several political figures, including Michel Gbabgo, MP for Yopougon and son of former President Laurent Gbagbo, met with the people as a sign of support. During his visit to Gesco on Thursday, Tidjane Thiam, the president of the Democratic Party of Côte d’Ivoire (PDCI, the leading opposition force), regretted that “no adequate arrangements” had been taken beforehand. After the façade of unity displayed during the CAN, political rivalries resurface.
