Since Wednesday this week, fake news and stories of military coup d’etat in Ivory Coast amid mounting tensions over the upcoming October general elections.
Several social media accounts in Facebook and X, posted videos of huge crowds on streets with burning buildings, which they claimed were from the country’s commercial capital, Abidjan.
GLOBAL TRACKER learned that on Facebook alone, some 9,700 users discussed the alleged coup.
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However, no violence was reported by security forces or any other government authorities in the city this week.
Ivory Coast’s National Agency for Information Systems Security of Ivory Coast (ANSSI) also denied the rumours.
In a statement published on local media sites, the agency said: “Publications currently circulating on the X network claim that a coup d’etat has taken place in Cote d’Ivoire is fake and unfounded.
However, GLOBAL TRACKER learned that the development comes as peoples fears that sitting President Alassane Ouattara might run for a fourth term, in the coming october 25 general election.
The election in the country have in the past been violent: During the October 2010 general election, former President Laurent Gbagbo refused to hand over power to Ouattara, who was proclaimed the winner by the electoral commission.
Tense political negotiations failed, and the situation eventually spiralled into armed civil war, with Ouattara’s forces, backed by French troops, besieging Gbagbo’s national army.
France is the former colonial power in Ivory Coast, and Ouattara has close ties to Paris, the development which forced the arrest of Gbagbo.
During the stand-up, over 3,000 people were killed and Gbagbo’s capture on April 11, 2011, marked the end of the conflict.
He was later tried and acquitted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for war crimes and crimes against humanity in 2019.
Also, GLOBAL TRACKER learned from Aljazeera media network that banning the leading opposition candidate Tijadne Thiam in the coming election added fuel to the fire.
The 62-year old Thiam who is a prominent politician and businessman in Ivorian political circles. He is a nephew of the revered Houphouet-Boigny and was the first Ivorian to pass the entrance exam to France’s prestigious Polytechnique engineering school. He returned from France to serve as a minister of planning and development from 1998 until 1999, when a coup d’etat collapsed the civilian government, and the army took control of the country.
Months letter, he left the country for France .
He went on to take high-profile positions, first as the chief executive of the UK insurance group, Prudential, and then as head of global investment bank Credit Suisse. A corporate espionage scandal at the bank led to his resignation in 2020 after a colleague accused Thiam of spying on him.
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After returning to Ivory Coast in 2022, Thiam re-entered politics and rejoined the Democratic Party (PDCI), the former governing party which held power from independence in 1960 until the 1999 coup d’etat, and which is now the major opposition party.
In December 2023, the party’s delegates overwhelmingly voted for Thiam to be the next leader following the death of former head and ex-President Henri Konan Bedie. At the time, PDCI officials said Thiam represented a breath of fresh air for the country’s politics, and many young people appeared ready to back him as the next president.
But his ambitions came to a halt on April 22 when a judge ordered his name be struck off the list of contenders because Thiam had taken French nationality in 1987 and automatically lost Ivorian citizenship according to the country’s laws.
Although the politician renounced his French nationality in February this year, the court ruled he had not done so before registering himself on the electoral roll in 2022, and was thus ineligible to be the party leader, a presidential candidate, or even a voter.
Analyst, believed that Thiam was behind the current rumors.
In recent years, several countries—including Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Gabon and Guinea—have seen successful military takeovers, fuelling speculation and anxiety in neighbouring states about who might be next.
SOURCE: AL-JAZEERA, BUSSINESS-DAY and NEWS AGENCies