TEORÍAS REGULATORIAS DE LA UNIÓN DE HECHO.

After thirty years of steady growth fed by rising agricultural exports and inflows of foreign capital, by 1980 the Ivorian economy had begun to falter. With ready access to foreign credit, the government weathered the oil price crises of the 1970s by running up a large external debt (Crook 1990:649). Eager to maintain its credit rating by keeping up

with its debt service obligations, the state was ill-prepared to cope with the drop in world cocoa prices that began in the late 1970s, just as the supply of uncultivated forest land began to run out. Hoping to avoid a recession and sustain state revenues, Coˆte d’Ivoire was one of the first West African countries to apply for a Structural Adjustment Loan. Cuts in state spending mandated under IMF ‘conditionality’ led to declines in income and employment, especially in the urban areas (Sogodogo 1997:143).

A dozen years and four Structural Adjustment Programs later, the Ivorian economy was in worse shape than it had been in 1980 (Dio- mande 1997:121). Cocoa production continued to rise, levelling off near 800,000 tons per annum in the early 1980s, but falling world prices reduced export earnings, cutting into state revenue, forcing layoffs and reductions in government spending, and threatening the stability of the ruling regime. Struggling to reverse the downward slide in state revenue, the Caisse de Stabilisation cut the producer price of cocoa from FCAF 200/kg in 1988 to FCAF 50/kg three years later, helping to spread economic decline from the cities to the countryside. In some villages, average farm revenue fell by as much as 60-80 per cent (Ruf 1991:115; 1995:5). Devaluation of the CFA franc, mandated by the IMF and the World Bank in 1994, added to the misery, putting further downward pressure on purchasing power and standards of living. By 2000, 12 per cent of the population was living in extreme poverty (as measured by the World Bank’s standard of less than $1 per day) and half subsisted on $2 or less (Akinde`s 2004:23-24). Despite the cut- backs, government spending continued to rise (Sogodogo 1997:143), and the country’s dependence on cocoa increased.20

Unlike Coˆte d’Ivoire, where structural adjustment coincided with and accelerated falling income and employment, in Ghana the first Structural Adjustment Loan brought a measure of relief after the col- lapse of imports and basic food supplies in 1983/1984. With the help of good weather and a rise in the world price of cocoa in 1985/1986- 1986/1987, staple food crops and other basic commodities reappeared in the markets, and income stabilised, especially in the rural areas. Re- covery was modest, however. Under structural adjustment, price con- trols were removed, state employees were laid off, and the modest gains in rural income were offset by sharp declines in average real earnings in the urban areas (World Bank 1986:19). World cocoa prices fell continuously from 1987 through 1992, undercutting the effects of cocoa rehabilitation projects financed with structural adjustment loans. Gold mining showed the biggest gains from market deregulation, leav- ing the country dependent on a few resource-based exports (gold, co- coa, and timber) for access to foreign exchange. Persistent trade deficits weakened the cedi, limiting gains in real income for the majority of

the people. A decade after structural adjustment was introduced, half the population was living in poverty.

Memories of the crisis remained fresh, however, and Rawlings gained popularity, despite unease with the continuation of military rule, in part by investing money from structural adjustment loans in road repair and rural electrification. When civilian rule was restored in 1992, his party gained control of the National Assembly, and Rawlings was elected Pre- sident with strong support from the rural areas. During the rest of the decade, political openness gained momentum. Press censorship was lifted, local government reorganised, with elected District Assemblies in charge of service provision in their respective jurisdictions, and an in- creasingly vocal population engaged in vigorous debate over the perfor- mance of state officials and politicians. Driven in part by increasing evi- dence of corruption in the ruling regime, voters rejected the President’s hand-picked successor in elections at the end of 2000, bringing the leading opposition party to power in one of sub-Saharan Africa’s first peaceful electoral changes of regime in the post-colonial era.

In Coˆte d’Ivoire, political stability unravelled in the 1990s despite – or because of – the introduction of multi-party elections in 1990. Although Houphouet-Boigny and the PDCI held on to power in 1990, and again in 1995 under Houphouet’s successor, Henri Bedie, the con- tinued deterioration of the economy generated widespread discontent, much of it directed at the ruling party and its leaders. When Prime Minister Alassane Ouattara broke with the regime after 1995 to emerge as a leading contender for national power, popular frustration crystal- lised along ethno-regional lines. Drawing his main support from the northern regions, Ouattara became a symbolic target for southerners’ fears of permanent displacement at the hands of foreign immigrants and migrant northerners long favoured under PDCI rule (Dembe´le´ 2003:36). These anxieties were especially acute in the former cocoa frontier areas of the southwest, where ‘autochthonous’ communities felt themselves doubly disadvantaged, not only by immigrant ‘Burki- nabes,’ but also by members of the President’s own Baule ethnic group and ‘Dioulas’ from the savanna regions, who had led the first wave of ‘cocoa pioneers’ into the southwestern forests in the 1950s and 60s (Chauveau and Le´onard 1996, and many others).

Bedie’s efforts to recoup his party’s fortunes did nothing to calm po- litical tempers. Reacting to popular criticism, he repudiated his prede- cessors’ liberal treatment of immigrants, replacing ‘houphouetisme’ with an ethno-nationalist rhetoric of ‘ivoirite,’ effectively transforming the basis of citizenship from residence (‘droit du sol’) to descent (‘droit du sang’) (Dozon 2000:17). Having barred Ouattara from the presidential elections in 1995 because he did not meet legal residence require- ments,21 Bedie then moved to disqualify him permanently on the

grounds that his grandfather had been born outside the country and that Ouattara was therefore not really ‘ivoirien’.22

Bedie’s manoeuvres served to heighten ethno-regional tension throughout the country. Suspicions about Ouattara’s national origin spread to northerners in general: those who could not prove that their parents were born in Coˆte d’Ivoire found themselves relegated to ‘legal second class citizenship’ (ibid:18). Fearful and angry, northerners ral- lied behind Ouattara and the RDR, raising the likelihood of an RDR victory in the next round of elections scheduled for 2000, and feeding xenophobia in the south (Dembe´le´ 2003:38).

If Bedie anticipated that southerners would unite behind the PDCI to stop the threat of a northern takeover, however, he failed to reckon with the PDCI’s own unpopularity, especially in the southwest. Rather than vote for the party that, in their view, had sent northern migrants and foreigners to take over their land, Bete and other southwestern- based peoples threw their support to one of their own, a professor named Laurent Gbagbo, known for his socialist sympathies, who al- ready commanded a significant following among university students and urban youth. By the late 1990s, the next electoral contest appeared to be shaping up as a three-way struggle between the RDR, the PDCI and Gbagbo’s FPI, none of which appeared able to muster much sup- port outside of the leader’s home region (Crook 1997:238-239 and pas- sim). When the National Assembly finally enacted a new rural code in 1998, replacing the ‘legal anarchy’ of land tenure arrangements under Houphouet-Boigny with a statutory system of private ownership in ful- filment of a long-standing demand from the IMF and the World Bank, the effects were explosive.23Limiting rights of land ownership to ‘ivoir- iens,’ the law played directly into the hostilities between autochtones

and etrangers in the southwest, reinforcing ethno-regional party loyal- ties and driving another nail into the coffin of political stability, not only in the former frontier areas, but throughout the country as a whole.

Concluding thoughts: Land conflict, politics and citizenship in the