An opposition-boycotted referendum to change Ivory Coast’s constitution has easily passed, electoral officials said on Tuesday, but opponents swiftly dismissed the vote as fraudulent.
Ivory Coast President Alassane Ouattara said the changes were necessary to help end years of instability linked to disputes over national identity, while critics labeled the vote an attempt to line up a successor for when his term ends in 2020.
The “Yes” camp won 93 percent of votes cast in Sunday’s constitutional referendum, but most eligible voters stayed at home, following the opposition call to boycott the vote, with the official turnout rate put at a little more than 42 percent.
The package, put to the country’s 6.3 million voters, also includes creating a post of vice president as well as a senate, a third of whom would be appointed by the head of state.
The measures have alarmed opposition leaders and prompted accusations that Ouattara is trying to instal a sympathetic successor.
“More than 90 percent ... of Ivorians have understood the need to turn the page on our shameful ways,” said Joel N’Guessan Joel N’Guessan, spokesman for Ouattara’s Rally of Republicans Party, adding that the 42 percent turnout rate was “honorable.”
However, Pascal Affi Nguessan, head of the opposition Ivorian Popular Front, said the election results were “obviously faked.”
The official numbers “do not match reality. We all witnessed an electoral desert [on Sunday],” he said, referring to the turnout.
He spoke of cases of “corruption and ballot-stuffing,” insisting that the real turnout rate was no higher than 10 percent.
“The coming battle” is to mobilize support for parliamentary elections, at a date yet to be fixed, in order to overturn the new constitution, he told reporters.
The constitutional changes notably get rid of a contested clause on national identity that took effect in 2000 and stipulated that both parents of a presidential candidate must be born on Ivorian soil and not have sought nationality in another country.
The issue has contributed to years of unrest in the world’s top cocoa producer.
Violent episodes in the west African country include a coup in 1999, a civil war in 2002 that split the nation between its north and south and a bloody post-election crisis in 2010.
Ouattara, 74, is from central Ivory Coast, but his father was born in Burkina Faso and the issue of “Ivorian-ness” raised a hurdle in his bid for the presidency.
He eventually overcame this obstacle through a decree Gbagbo was pressured to sign by the international community.
The Ivory Coast parliament had already approved the new constitution. The government claims that the introduction of a vice president is to ensure continuity if the head of state dies or is incapacitated.
The new constitution’s design bears US influences, perhaps a reflection of Outtara’s years studying in Pennsylvania — a strong executive, a senate, fixed election dates and a vice president.
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