New peace hitch as African heavyweights fail to overcome stalemate on PM

Despite their combined political clout, three of Africa’s most prominent heads of state failed to clear the way to peace by securing agreement on the name of a new prime minister for war-torn Cote d’Ivoire on Wednesday. Presidents Olusegun Obasanjo of Nigeria, Thabo Mbeki of South Africa, and Mamadou Tandja of Niger, returned home empty-handed Wednesday after a lightning 24-hour visit during which they were unable to deliver on a promise of finding a new head of government acceptable to all sides in the divided nation. Though the African trio, which has been tasked with overseeing the implementation of a UN peace proposal, succeeded in chipping away at an original list of 16 names to bring it down to only two, consensus over a new prime minister remained out of reach. “Neither of those two persons met the UN resolution’s conditions for acceptability by all parties,” Obasanjo told reporters before boarding his plane home. “We don’t see that as a failure, but as a challenge …The methodology we used has not met the expected goal and so we will adopt another methodology and we hope that in the next ten days we will be back.” He did not elaborate. The mediation by the three was the latest hiccup in a three-year peace process aimed at wresting an accord between President Laurent Gbagbo, who controls the south, and rebels who have held the north of the country since a failed coup in September 2002. With Gbagbo’s mandate up last month, presidential elections were to take place on 30 October, but rebels and pro-government militia failed to disarm, voters’ lists were not updated and the country remains split across the middle. With a constitutional crisis looming, the UN stepped in with Security Council resolution 1633, which maintained Gbagbo in office for up to 12 more months and called for the appointment of a new prime minister with full authority over the cabinet and the military. But as the new prime minister could tip the power balance in government, settling on a name has proved tough. Over the course of the last month, mediators brought the candidates down to four, two proposed by opposition parties and rebels, two by Gbagbo and his ruling Ivorian Popular Front (FPI). Following another round of talks with Nigerian Foreign Minister Oluyemi Adeniji last week, two more names were scrapped, limiting the choice for the primeministership to General Ouassenan Kone and banker Tiemoko Yade. Kone currently is chairman of the parliamentary group of the former ruling Democratic Party of Cote d’Ivoire (PDCI), but in 2003 was the rebels’ preferred candidate for defence minister in a then new power-sharing government. However, Gbagbo vehemently refused his candidacy. Kone is extremely unpopular in Gbagbo’s home region where, as an army officer, he violently suppressed an uprising in the 1970s. The other final candidate is banker, Tiemoko Yade, who is close to the opposition Rally of the Republicans (RDR) party and has been accused of bank-rolling the rebels by Gbagbo's supporters. In the wake of the mediators’ departure, the political opposition known collectively as the Houphouetist Alliance after the country’s first post-independence president, issued a statement condemning Gbagbo’s rejection of the final two candidates and called for decisive action. “[The Alliance] urges Presidents Obasanjo, Mbeki and Tandja, in liaison with the secretary general of the United Nations, to appoint a new prime minister from the list of two personalities,” said a statement. A western diplomat told IRIN he was “disappointed but not surprised” over the latest blow to the UN-backed peace plan. According to analysts, the appointment of the new prime minister could be a big political hurdle over the coming months. According to the opposition coalition, the failure to find a consensus was not due to the method the mediators used, but rather to Gbagbo flatly refusing to accept the last two candidates, a spokesman said. “The names of Ouassenan Kone and Tiemoko Yade had been retained [but] Gbagbo opposed the nomination as prime minister of either one of the two personalities,” said Cisse Bacongo of the RDR. But the chairman of Gbagbo’s Ivorian Popular Front (FPI), Pascal Affi N’Guessan, blamed his opponents, saying the coalition should have accepted the president’s preferred candidates. “We must continue to look for [a prime minister] as long as we haven’t been able to find a person acceptable to all,” N’Guessan said. “But if the opposition had accepted the names that we had proposed, we wouldn’t have had any problems.”