Alassane Ouattara
Alassane Ouattara has been president of Côte d'Ivoire since 2011, the IMF economist and central banker whom Houphouet-Boigny made prime minister in 1990 to run the austerity, whom Houphouet's successors kept out of two elections by ruling that his father was from Burkina Faso, who won the election of 2010 and had to be installed by French helicopters and a siege, and who has since rebuilt the economy at eight per cent a year, rebuilt Abidjan, and been elected to a third term in 2020 and a fourth in 2025 after a constitutional court he appoints ruled that a new constitution had reset the count. He was eighty-three at the fourth. He was born in 1942 at Dimbokro in the centre of the country into a Muslim family of the north with kin across the border, took a doctorate in economics at Pennsylvania, and spent twenty years at the IMF and the West African central bank, whose governor he was from 1988. Houphouet brought him home in April 1990 as prime minister to negotiate with the Fund and cut the budget, and the cuts and the fifty per cent devaluation of the CFA franc that followed his departure made him the enemy of the civil servants and the friend of the donors. When Houphouet died in December 1993 Bedie took the presidency and, with the doctrine of Ivoirite, had Ouattara's nationality questioned and his candidacy barred in 1995 and again, under Guei, in 2000. The rebellion of 2002 was made in his name by northern soldiers who said they were second-class citizens, and Gbagbo's supporters burned his house. The Ouagadougou agreement let him run in 2010 and he won the second round with fifty-four per cent, certified by the United Nations. Gbagbo refused to go, and Ouattara governed from the Golf Hotel under UN protection until the French and the former rebels took the residence on 11 April 2011. The decade since has been the roads, the bridges, the cocoa price floor, the growth that made Abidjan the boom town of West Africa, an opposition he has jailed or exiled, and the return and pardon of Gbagbo. The third term of 2020 was taken after his chosen successor died in July of that year and won with ninety-four per cent in a vote the opposition boycotted. The fourth, in October 2025, was won against candidates the courts had already excluded, Gbagbo and Thiam among them.
- Lived: 1942 CE – ?
- Nationality: Ivorian
- Roles: president, economist, politician
