Behind his glasses sketches the mischievous look of the one who has succeeded. One more. In his villa in Abidjan, where he spends his weekends, Tiémoko Antoine Assalé, deputy and mayor of the town of Tiassalé, located a hundred kilometers north of the Ivorian economic capital, plays with his children, his two telephones proudly extinguished. For the second time in April, the former journalist called for a boycott of the telephone operators Orange and MTN, Moov being spared this time. A new “digital protest” launched with members of Ivorian civil society between 10 a.m. and 3 p.m., April 15-18, which quickly pushed back operators accused of “agreeing” to lower the volume of data included in their 4G plans without lowering the price. An “illegal” act, fulminates the one who made himself known to Ivorians as the founder in 2011 of the investigative newspaper L’Eléphant déchaîné.
Building on the success of his videos on social media, he found a new means of action with the “data strikes” – no calls, no SMS, no Internet consumption, no mobile transaction – depending on the reactions of the operators. The first boycott, from April 8 to 10, followed according to him by “nearly 400,000 people according to the regulator’s figures”, shook the government and the Telecommunications Regulatory Authority of Côte d’Ivoire (ARTCI ) who immediately asked the operators to reverse their decision of April 6. If, according to the deputy, the Moroccan group Moov then the South African MTN have given reassuring signs in this area, the French group Orange has warned that, for technical reasons, it will take several weeks to return to the old rates. “The operators will have to reimburse the customers”, judges the deputy, who threatens to “close the points of sale and then burn the Orange chips” if the Ivorian consumers were not heard.
For Tiémoko Antoine Assalé, this “agreement” between the operators would be the work of a “cartel” led by the French group which knew how to “extend its roots to the heart of the political system”. To this end, he cites the example of Roger Adom, former Deputy Director General of Orange, now Minister for the Digital Economy and Telecommunications, and calls for a parliamentary inquiry to be conducted in the presence of operators, the regulator and of the ministries concerned. “There are too many conflicts of interest in this matter: let them come before the nation, like Facebook and the big corporations did in the United States,” he said.
“Screed of lead”
Elected mayor in 2018 then deputy in 2021, the trained lawyer claims to have wanted to put “his official voice at the service of consumers”, while defending himself from any opportunism or populism. “It’s the culmination of two years of fighting,” he explains. One morning in August 2021, I discovered that mobile phone operators were forcing their customers to subscribe to packages and were charging them abusively, which the law prohibited. Since then, he has compiled thousands of consumer testimonials.
At 47, Tiémoko Antoine Assalé claims his “independence” from the state and economic powers. His first weapons in the denunciation of corruption, he made them in the newspaper Le Nouveau Réveil, after observing for himself the practices of the competition of the National School of Administration of Côte d’Ivoire. For having notably treated the public prosecutor at the time as well as other magistrates as “corrupt to the spinal cord”, he was sentenced in 2008 to a prison term. This prison experience allowed him to discover the French newspaper Le Canard enchaîné, of which he founded the Ivorian cousin L’Eléphant déchaîné, with the same taste for satire and revelations about politicians of all stripes. The weekly has not existed in print for almost a year, but should soon be available online with the ambition to follow the Mediapart model.
Tormentor of the powerful, the press boss nevertheless judges that, to make his voice heard, he cannot escape the political arena. Unlucky candidate for the 2016 legislative elections in Tiassalé, he was elected mayor in 2018 and then deputy for the constituency in 2021. Without a label, the one who defines himself as the “only true independent of Parliament”, hopes that his fight against telephone operators will resonate on other fights in front of the National Assembly, which have not yet given rise to discussions.
His most commented on bill without ever having been debated is that of the return of an age limit of 75 years to stand for the presidential election. If it were to be adopted, it would automatically eliminate the country’s last three presidents – Alassane Ouattara, Laurent Gbagbo and Henri Konan Bédié – from the presidential elections scheduled for 2025, and would free the political space from “the screed of lead that weighs on all generations”.
“No support from power”
National actor who has proposed extending the duration of paternity leave and is working on the supervision of abortion – abortion is only authorized in the event of rape or endangering the physical health of the woman – , Mr. Assalé also prides himself on his local victories. In Tiassalé, he cleared out the illegal gold diggers from the Bandama River, asked the Fruit Company, which produces and exports bananas, to review its pesticide treatment methods, lowered school fees, a municipal decision then taken up at the national level. The mayor will again be a candidate in his town during the municipal elections in September, “against a candidate RHDP, the ruling party, who ‘spends without counting'” to be elected, he said, annoyed.
At the end of 2020, the deputy had however been criticized by the Ivorian opposition for not having called for an active boycott of the ballot which had allowed Alassane Ouattara to be elected to a third term. “I didn’t want to walk with an opposition that had no credibility. I said to myself: they will not go anywhere in this fight, and I was right, ”he justifies to remove doubts about his acquaintances with power. Behind the scenes, the RHDP, which describes him as “an opponent”, concedes having proposed to the deputy, elected second best mayor in the country in 2022 by the government, to join his parliamentary group.
Tiémoko Antoine Assalé says he only met the president once in 2011 and knows that he appreciated his diary. “When he was just a journalist, he was admired by the head of state,” says Hervé Makré, former editor-in-chief of L’Éléphant déchaîné. But he has no government support. I can assure you, he is accountable to no one since he made himself. “He was always straight in his boots, always on the side of the people,” adds Marie-Paule Okri, a feminist activist who was one of the first to initiate the digital boycott.
Between citizen mobilization, parliamentary action and management of his municipality, the deputy-mayor does not rule out running for the supreme office one day. Before that, he will have to be re-elected in the municipal elections.
