For several weeks, a wind of protest has been blowing within the PDCI / RDA, carried by movements close to the party. These slingers deplore a sclerotic party and call for the rapid holding of a congress to clarify a strategy and choose a candidate for the 2025 presidential election. Among them, Noël Akossi Bendjo, former mayor of the Plateau commune, by elsewhere special adviser to President Henri Konan Bédié, in charge of national reconciliation and social cohesion according to whom, the PDCI-RDA is full of countless executives who have the human, material and relational capacities internally and externally, to lead the party towards new destinies. Despite this internal crisis, the former head of state, who clearly intends to be the sole candidate for his own succession, keeps the upper hand over his party. Posing as the sole guarantor of the survival of a weakened party, the one who already said “not to have friends but followers”, says he is always ready for “service” and does not hesitate to warn all those who will act contrary to the strengthening of cohesion within the party. In view of all these facts, the question that we might ask ourselves is the following: what still makes Henri Konan Bédié run so much at 88 years old?
Bédié must have the courage to mourn his irrepressible ambition to take revenge
Indeed, of all the heavyweights of the Ivorian political scene, the Sphinx of Daoukro, as it is nicknamed, is the oldest. Ambassador, mayor, minister, president of the National Assembly, head of state… he had his moments of glory. “Nzueba” has given so much to the PDCI and to Côte d’Ivoire that it would now be judicious and wise on his part to know how to let go of ballast by agreeing to assert his retirement rights. May he now agree to be, as many activists wish, the “MANDELA OF COTE D’IVOIRE” from whom anyone in search of wisdom will come to drink, regardless of their political affiliation. In any case, if the PDCI-RDA wants to give itself a chance of redirecting Côte d’Ivoire, following 40 years of managing state power and 23 years in opposition, its contested current leader must have the courage to to mourn its irrepressible ambition to take its revenge, to play the “return match” following a power loss at the end of 1999. Otherwise, the party of Houphouët Boigny runs the risk of becoming more fragile, to the great happiness of the party in power.
Seydou TRAORE
