Ivory Coast: Investors stalk African tiger

ABIDJAN: Ivory Coast is winning the stripes of an African tiger with economic growth of nearly 10 percent less than three years after a bloody crisis, but this performance depends on continued peace and stability. There is talk of an economic “miracle” taking place in the west African country.

The economy expanded by more than 9.8 percent in 2012, by 8.7 percent in 2013 and is expected to achieve 8.0-10.0 percent this year. The government recites these figures to justify its economic strategy, driven by heavy investment in infrastructure financed with credit.

A motorway from Abidjan to Yamoussoukro, linking the economic capital to the political capital 230 kilometres (144 miles) away, was opened at last in November. That was 32 years after the first 140 kilometres of the road were opened in 1981. An even more powerful symbol of this development is the third bridge straddling the Abidjan lagoon. This should reduce traffic jams in the city and should add an estimated 1.0 percentage point to annual gross domestic product once construction is finished at the end of this year, a diplomatic source said. French group Bouygues, the top name representing the former French colonial power, is the main company involved in the construction of this enormous example of civil engineering.

‘Remarkable progress’

“The new economic miracle, after the one from the 1960s to 1980s, is evidently possible,” Prime Minister Daniel Kablan Duncan said last month when he opened a forum on investment in Ivory Coast aimed at attracting foreign investment. The head of the International Monetary Fund, Christine Lagarde, in remarks by teleconference to the 3,000 people attending, said that the country had achieved “remarkable progress” since 2011.

A diplomat who declined to be named commented that this was not merely a process of “catching up” after poor performance during years of rule by Laurent Gbagbo, who came to power in 2000, but was two years later challenged by an uprising that long split the country in two. —AFP