ABIDJAN: Four prominent opposition figures in Ivory Coast have been excluded from the final electoral list, officials announced on Wednesday, leaving them ineligible to contest presidential elections later this year.Tidjane Thiam, leader of the main opposition party, the Democratic Party of Ivory Coast (PDCI), was struck from the voter roll in April after a court ruling cast doubt on his Ivorian nationality at the time of registration.Ex-president Laurent Gbagbo, his former right-hand man Charles Ble Goude and exiled former prime minister Guillaume Soro have been barred for years over past convictions and were not reinstated.None of the four will be able to run in the October 25 presidential race or vote.President Alassane Ouattara, 83, who has been in power since 2011, is included on the electoral register but has yet to announce if he will seek a fourth term.In 2015 and 2020, Ouattara won with more than 80 percent of the vote.Electoral commission head Ibrahime Kuibiert Coulibaly had announced on Monday that no revision of the electoral register would take place before the vote.“My elimination from the electoral list by the independent electoral commission is a sad but eloquent example of Ivory Coast’s drift towards a total absence of democracy,” Thiam said in a statement on Wednesday.The former international banker, who has been away from Ivory Coast for more than two months, has appealed to the UN Human Rights Committee, his party said.His lawyer Mathias Chichportich said in a statement sent to AFP that depriving the opposition leader of “his political rights” was “a serious violation of Ivory Coast’s international commitments”.For its part, Gbagbo’s African Peoples’ Party – Ivory Coast (PPA-CI) complained that the authorities “did not choose to listen to the advice, the calls for discussion, for reason”, its secretary general Jean-Gervais Tcheide told AFP.“It’s a shame they chose to force their way through,” he said, adding: “We’re not going to let them do it.”
End all disagreement:
Other opposition figures who have announced they will run for the presidency are featured on the final electoral list.They include former first lady Simone Ehivet Gbagbo, who, speaking on behalf of an opposition coalition, said that the conditions were not met for a “peaceful, calm election”.Kuibiert Coulibaly, the electoral commission chief, has called for court decisions to be respected to “put an end to all disagreement” and to make Ivory Coast “a state governed by the rule of law”.Previously, during the 2020 presidential election, a revision of the electoral list took place in June ahead of the October polling day.The final electoral register for this year’s ballot includes the names of 8.7 million voters, in a country with a high immigrant population and where nearly half of the 30 million inhabitants are under the age of 18.Authorities deny any political interference in the electoral process, insisting that they respect decisions made by an independent judiciary.
