Protests have been banned and opposition figures sidelined as 83-year-old president ignores calls to step down
“This is worth several more terms,” the Ivorian president, Alassane Ouattara, joked while opening a bridge named after him in the country’s commercial capital, Abidjan, in 2023.
The appearance in recent years of several new bridges in west Africa’s second most populous city has been hailed by the president’s supporters as symbolic of an era of modernity and stable leadership under his watch.
Infrastructure building has ramped up around the country and the economy has grown rapidly since Ouattara first took office in 2011 – proof, his camp says, that decades of violent crises have been left in the past.
On a Saturday earlier this month more than 200 protesters were teargassed and arrested across Abidjan, including in neighbourhoods within a mile of the bridge opened by Ouattara two years earlier.
