His influence, real or imagined, is matched only by his discretion. Just once, Hadia Nadiany Bamba – “Nady for short,” she slips – brought together on Friday October 7 at Laurent Gbagbo’s office in Abidjan, families of political, military and civilian detainees arrested since 2011 for their support of the former president. She offered back-to-school kits to their children.
The elite of the African People’s Party-Côte d’Ivoire (PPA-CI) were present and the scene gave rise to the publication of a string of images showing the photogenic benefactress in her green and blue dress. Nothing unusual, except that Nady Bamba has no official political role within the PPA-CI. “She is the wife of the president of the party, nothing more,” underlines her spokesperson, Justin Koné Katinan.
Supporters of Laurent Gbagbo have long nicknamed her “little mom.” Because during the ten years spent at the head of Côte d’Ivoire, the president had two women at his side. Simone Gbagbo, the first lady, companion in the struggle of years of trade unionism and demonstrations, heavyweight of his party at the time, the Ivorian Popular Front (FPI), his wife in the civil registry since 1989, with whom he no longer shares bedroom. And Nady Bamba, the shadow wife.
Laurent Gbagbo, then opponent of President Félix Houphouët-Boigny, met him in the early 1990s during a trip to France. The young woman, twenty-nine years his junior, is from Touba (northwest). A journalist who graduated from the French School of Press Attachés, she then worked as a correspondent for Africa N° 1 radio in Abidjan.
Unrepentant seducer
Her romance with Laurent Gbagbo was revealed after the 1999 coup d’état. Nady Bamba then lived in “220 Logements”, a famous neighborhood in the commune of Adjamé, built for the middle class that emerged after independence, and where Laurent Gbagbo is often seen. The “woody” (“valiant boy”, in Bété language) then has a reputation as an unrepentant seducer and Nady Bamba does not attract attention.
But this time, the matter is more serious. For more than twenty years, “Laurent has loved Nady like a teenager, he is crazy about her,” says a close friend of the couple. As a political journalist, she covered the presidential campaign and the 2000 election, won by Laurent Gbagbo against the outgoing president, General Robert Gueï. In the first year of his mandate, he married her according to Malinké customary rites and the couple gave birth to a son, David Al Raïs, in July 2002, two months before the rebellion broke out.
In 2003, at the head of the Cyclone communications group, Nady Bamba founded a pro-FPI daily, Le Temps, which is still one of the main opposition newspapers today. Little information has filtered out about his political role during Laurent Gbagbo’s years in power. We just know that after the Ouagadougou agreement, in 2007, and until its fall, in 2011, she was among the privileged emissaries of the Head of State in the north of the country, where she tried in vain to mobilize voters in his favor for the 2010 election.
On April 11, 2011, Simone Gbagbo was arrested at the same time as her husband. She is placed under house arrest in Odienné (north-west), he is incarcerated in Korhogo (north) before being transferred to The Hague, in the Netherlands, to be tried by the International Criminal Court (ICC). The “little mom” must take the path of exile, first towards Equatorial Guinea, then Ghana. The European Union (EU) then sanctioned her for “obstructing the peace and reconciliation process by publicly inciting hatred and violence and by participating in disinformation campaigns in relation to the 2010 presidential election “. She is deprived of a visa and her assets are frozen.
But in June 2011, the Court of Justice of the EU lifted these sanctions, deeming the accusations too vague. Nady Bamba and her son fly to Europe to get closer to Laurent Gbagbo. While he was imprisoned in The Hague, they moved to Brussels. They visited him at the Scheveningen penitentiary every weekend, until his acquittal by the ICC in February 2019, after which he joined them in Belgium.
First lady of the PPA-CI
The scene of their return to Ivorian soil, on June 17, 2021 after ten years of absence, is widely publicized and dissected. When, inside the Abidjan airport, Simone Gbagbo tries to approach the man who is still her husband, she is unceremoniously rebuffed – unless, as others interpret the scene, the former president simply wanted to keep him away from the tear gas and the surrounding chaos.
Still, a few days later, he returned to the Catholic faith, a way of signaling his break with evangelists like Simone, and requested a divorce. Both left the FPI to each create their own party: the PPA-CI for him, the Movement of Capable Generations (MGC) for her. The divorce was finalized on June 29, 2023 and Nady Bamba now occupies the position of first lady of the PPA-CI.
Some close to the former president cannot digest his new marital situation and, above all, the role that Nady Bamba would play. They accuse her in particular of maintaining a cordon around her husband, filtering calls and requests for visits. Laurent Gbagbo would have always refused to acquire a cell phone. To contact him, anyone you contact must therefore go, without difference in treatment, through his professional landline, therefore his secretariat, or through his personal landline, therefore Nady Bamba, with whom he lives.
“Fantasy,” says a friend of the Gbagbo family. To think that Laurent is the type to be led around by his wife is to know him very badly. » “These rumors give Nady Bamba more power than she really has,” confirms a PPA-CI executive, who sees in them the work of former relatives from the 2000s disappointed not to find the courtesan dynamic that the Gbagbo couple had with their circle. “The ICC blamed Laurent Gbagbo for this, recalls this executive, because this fueled accusations of maintaining a personal militia. He knew how to take this into account when he returned. »
The opponent now separates his professional life from his private life. His ambitions for the 2025 presidential election are not yet known, but it is already certain that he will be able to count on his precious and discreet “little mother”.