Ivory Coast: Laurent Gbagbo puts his Pan-Africanist party on track and "prepares to leave"
A few months after his return to Côte d'Ivoire, former President Laurent Gbagbo launched his new political party on October 16 and 17 in Abidjan.
AFP - SIA KAMBOU
Text by: RFI Follow
3 min
The former Ivorian president launched his new party this weekend: the Party of African Peoples - Côte d'Ivoire (PPA-CI), of which he was elected president during the Constituent Congress in Abidjan.
Laurent Gbagbo declared that his ambition was to leave and that he was preparing his party to continue the fight.
A party that wants to be socialist, sovereignist and that emphasizes pan-Africanism.
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With our correspondent in Abidjan,
Pierre Pinto
This is the main novelty compared to the FPI: the PPA – CI will certainly be socialist and sovereignist like its predecessor, but henceforth pan-Africanist.
Laurent Gbagbo thus preempt a political current neglected until now to small groups like the Cojep.
For the former Ivorian president, the scale of states resulting from independence is unsuited to the world to come.
“
Pan-Africanism is not a slogan, it is a reality,
” he declared
.
When you are a certain size, petite, and all you have to do is cocoa, you don't strain your muscles to walk in front of people.
"
In this multipolar world, if they do not unite, African countries are doomed to be the toys of the great powers (United States, China, Europe, Russia), believes Laurent Gbagbo, invoking the first Ghanaian president Kwame N ' Krumah, champion of Pan-Africanism.
“
You have to open your eyes.
Today there is Africa and Latin America which are still fragmented.
This is why African states must unite.
This is why the PPA-CI must appeal to other progressive parties so that we unite.
"
Laurent Gbagbo did not however detail what he did not intend to “
unite
”, but cited the United States and the European Union as examples of regional integration.
"
Politics until my death
"
Without having lost any of his verve, Laurent Gbagbo blows hot and cold as to his personal intentions and recalls that he is once again master of his political destiny: “
There was a lot of speculation that was said at the time when I was coming out of prison.
No, Gbagbo will no longer be in politics, Gbagbo will go and sit in the village.
But when I started politics, did I ask their opinion?
[Cheers]
I will be in politics until I die.
[Cheers] But it is I, and I alone, who will decide in what form I do politics.
"
However, at 76 years old, the former Ivorian head of state ensures that he is preparing to hand over. He says he has worked to ensure that the new party, the PPA-CI, of which he has just been elected president, is an "
instrument of combat
" which survives him no matter what. “
In these times here, after this journey, wisdom is to prepare to leave. But I have decided that I will not leave abruptly.
"
When does Laurent Gbagbo plan to retire?
Does he think about 2025 while shaving in the morning?
The answers will come later.
In the meantime, Gbagbo assures him: neither a sentence to twenty years in prison for the so-called “breakage of the BCEAO” case, nor a possible future law on an age limit of 75 years for presidential candidates by example, will not prevent him from playing politics, one way or another.
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Ivory Coast
Laurent Gbagbo