With fighting near the end between the armies of two presidential aspirants in Ivory Coast, that country is at the bottom of a descent that began in 1993 with the death of the long-time strongman Félix Houphouët-Boigny.
Mr Houphouët-Boigny’s autocratic rule was indirectly an extension of French colonialism. He was helped by a French bureaucracy and soldiery, as well as by a francophone Lebanese business community. In the mid-1990s the French and Lebanese left, and crime soared in a country whose annual population growth rate was 3.5 per cent. Whereas Ivory Coast’s population in 1994 was 13.5m, it is now 21m, with 41 per cent of the population under the age of 15. Roughly half the population lives in slum cities.
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