Ivory Coast’s Capital : An African’s Dream Rises in the Bush

This is the city with the famous crocodiles, imported from a game park to adorn the moat-like lake that stretches before the walled grounds of the presidential estate.

This is where Felix Houphouet-Boigny, president of the Ivory Coast, decreed that a modern metropolis be laid out to honor his birthplace and ancestral home and, not incidentally, to obliterate any memory of what it may have looked like eight decades ago when he first planted a bare foot upon its red soil.

Today there are probably more street lights than people in Yamoussoukro. Six-lane boulevards, utterly empty, crisscross the town, run well beyond the limits of habitation and end abruptly at the bush, where winding tracks dwindle to footpaths toward distant huts where the towering native hardwood trees, thoroughly cleared from the city itself, take over once again.

Bargain Hotel Rates Two splendidly equipped university-level schools of technology and science have been built in Yamoussoukro but await the day when there are enough Ivorian students to fill them. There is a vast marble-lobbied hotel with a circular restaurant perched on its top. Bargain rates for tour groups and frequent government conferences fail to fill it. From the restaurant tables at night, the illumination suggests a city the size of Bakersfield or Hartford. But a closer look reveals no movement.

Late in the afternoon, a groundskeeper from the presidential compound feeds a few freshly killed chickens to the crocodiles. At other hours of the day, members of the presidential guard will courteously oblige visitors by chopping up a coconut and rapping the blade of a machete on the concrete bank to attract the beasts from the water.

One of the guards relates a story. Yes, he says, the crocodiles are indeed untamed. They once grabbed a small boy by the arm, he says, and dragged him to his death. On the other hand, he goes on, he has seen the president, Houphouet-Boigny, stroll among them and even touch them, without harm.

When this statement is met with disbelief, the guard responds, “I have seen it myself.”

Firm Hold on Nation A visitor may go away with more appreciation for the guard’s devotion to his chief than for his reliability as a witness. It is hard to envision the president walking unguarded among crocodiles. He is officially 79 years old, though most people assume he is three or four years older, and he seems most at home in opulent indoor surroundings. Yet in some ways, the story illustrates the hold this man has on his country, which he has ruled for nearly a quarter of a century and has made into one of the most prosperous nations in Black Africa.

It is easy to dismiss Yamoussoukro as the expression of an old man’s vanity. Although it has officially become the nation’s capital and the president lives here perhaps half the time he is in the country, the bulk of government business is conducted in Abidjan, the capital until 1983, 150 miles to the south.

The cost of building Yamoussoukro, begun in the boom years of the middle 1970s, has never been made public, but $1 billion is an estimate accepted by most knowledgeable observers. There is no escaping that Yamoussoukro, with its grand boulevards and colossal ceremonial buildings, is Houphouet-Boigny’s monument to himself.

But the place might also be taken as Houphouet-Boigny’s vision of the African future, an Africa with the bush and tall trees bulldozed into the background. It is as if he would like to remove Africa from Africa, to pick it up and move it somewhere else, while keeping a few crocodiles as tokens of the past.

Served in French Assembly The rest of Africa seems to sense this contradiction in the president of the Ivory Coast, and to find it somewhat suspicious. Some see him as being more French than African. As was standard for a leading politician in a French colony, Houphouet-Boigny served in the French National Assembly (representing the Ivory Coast from 1946 to 1959) and, along with the young Francois Mitterrand, was a junior minister in the Cabinet of President Charles de Gaulle.

Although Houphouet-Boigny has been in power longer than any other black African leader (Sekou Toure of Guinea, who died last year, was the last of those who preceded him to power), he is seldom regarded as one of the great political influences on the continent. From the beginning, he was out of step with the political fashion of his time.

When the Ivory Coast gained its independence from France, in 1960, the leading political lights of West Africa--Kwame Nkrumah in neighboring Ghana and Sekou Toure in Guinea--had set off on a socialist course and had severed ties with their colonial masters. Houphouet-Boigny moved in the opposite direction, emphasizing free enterprise and strengthening ties with the French, whose numbers in the country doubled after independence, reaching a peak of about 80,000.

There are only about 30,000 French here now. The economic growth that held at 8% to 10% for almost two decades came to a halt about four years ago with a downturn in the prices of cocoa and coffee, two years of drought and a dramatic rise in interest payments on the nation’s foreign debt, which totals about $6 billion. The downturn in the economy led to the sharp decline in the French population here, though not the French influence.

The Ivory Coast has had to reschedule its debts and come to terms with the International Monetary Fund, which exacted a promise from the Ivorians not to spend any more money moving the government to Yamoussoukro for at least two years. An austerity budget is in force and the Ivorians, financial experts here say, are holding to it faithfully. Government salaries have been frozen for three years, housing subsidies for government workers have been cut, and the price of rice has gone up 30%.

Apart from strikes last year by university and secondary school teachers, Ivorians have taken the belt-tightening quietly. Now, as the economic climate slowly improves, Ivorians are beginning to think of politics.

Elections are due to be held this fall. Although Houphouet-Boigny has not said so officially, everyone expects him to run again for president, seeking a sixth five-year term. In 1980, he dictated a revision of the constitution, giving him the power to appoint a vice president who would succeed him in the case of death or incapacity.

In the last four years, however, he has declined to name a vice president. It is widely believed that he will have to make that choice this year, for few believe the president will survive another five years in office.

His health, for a man of his age, is generally good, but his eyesight is failing and he cannot walk very far without help. It is said that he can stand unaided for only about 10 minutes. For most ceremonial occasions he is seated. Visitors who have been with him at lengthy meetings say that he sometimes launches into rambling monologues, apparently forgetting what he set out to talk about.

But others describe him as sharp, incisive and witty. Probably, as would seem normal for a man of his age, he has his good days and his bad days.

Younger generations of Ivorians, while conscious of Houphouet-Boigny’s achievements--the principal one being political stability, so rare in the rest of Africa--are getting anxious for a change.

“He has stayed too long,” an Ivorian academic said, asking that his name not be used. “He should step down, although I have no hope that he will do so. He’ll die in office. There are important decisions that should be taken now, mainly in economics, that are not being taken. We are marking time, waiting.”

No Clue to Successor

Houphouet-Boigny has given no clue as to whom he might choose as a possible successor, but many observers suspect that a strong candidate is Philippe Yace, president of the National Assembly. Yace was the heir-apparent in the late 1970s, until Houphouet-Boigny, evidently rankled by Yace’s growing exercise of authority, stripped him of some of his powers. Since then, Yace has behaved more modestly, political observers say, and is once again in the president’s favor.

Such conciliation and compromise have been at the heart of Houphouet-Boigny’s political success. Unlike many African political leaders, he seems to have avoided holding any lasting grudges. Old enemies are rehabilitated and co-opted, and often brought into the inner circle. In one notable example, Jean Konan Banny, the minister of defense in 1963, was charged with involvement in a planned coup d’etat. He was jailed for a time, then pardoned, and is once again minister of defense.

The Ivory Coast is not a one-party state by law, but there is only one official party and it is not likely that a rival would be allowed. Persistently vocal dissidents are fairly quickly ostracized. The press, while it might investigate the implementation of government policy, would never question the policy itself. The highest officers in the labor movement are also powerful forces in the ruling party.

The result of these conditions is a tidy system in which divergent opinions can be heard but ultimately controlled. Probably above all, Ivorians say, the president prizes quiet.

Most Ivorians appreciate all this, for they recognize stability as the major reason for the nation’s general prosperity, which has given the Ivory Coast the most even distribution of wealth in Africa. And they have to look no further than the wreckage of neighboring Ghana, which began after independence with far more natural resources and money in the bank, to see the price of political instability and the general bankruptcy of most fashionable political slogans.

It is a mark of the stability of the Ivory Coast that Houphouet-Boigny, in 1983, could spend five consecutive months out of the country. (He vacationed in Europe and made official visits to the United States and Britain.) Probably no other current head of state in Africa could get away with that.

It is this 25 years of stability that will be Houphouet-Boigny’s lasting memorial, though it is hard to say what future generations of his countrymen may come to think of Yamoussoukro, his dream city in the bush.

Perhaps, in 15 or 20 years, its bizarre appearance will fade, businesses will line its boulevards, traffic will clog its well-lighted streets and visitors lucky enough to get a room in the Hotel President will complain that smog obscures their view of the sprawling city.

Perhaps, too, young students at the universities will walk in the evening by the water, marveling at the vision of their nation’s first president, a man who once served in the French Assembly but came home to build all this--and, it is said (a nice touch of African myth), could walk unharmed amid the crocodiles on the banks of his lake.