PM Soro Calls on International Donors for Election Success
ABIDJAN, June 21 (Xinhua) — Cote d’Ivoire’s Prime Minister Guillaume Soro has called on international donors to provide financial assistance to ensure that the forthcoming presidential election is a success.
“It’s time to act. Everybody asked us to hold these elections…we are waiting for nothing other than funding in order to hold the presidential election on November 30 as scheduled,” Prime Minister Soro said Friday, during a meeting with foreign diplomats in Abidjan.
“So far, all political and military obstacles have been removed or are being removed. The only obstacle is the question of resources,” the head of the government was quoted as saying by the official Ivorian News Agency.
Speaking during the same occasion, Cote d’Ivoire’s Economy and Finance Minister Charles Diby Koffi said that the ongoing peace process would cost an estimated 223 billion CFA francs (about 543 million U.S. dollars).
“Out of this figure, the government will contribute some 144 billion CFA francs with international donors expected to come up with the remaining 78 billion CFA francs,” said the minister.
Currently, Cote d’Ivoire, which has been experiencing a six-year old crisis, is in the middle of implementing a comprehensive peace deal that was signed by President Laurent Gbagbo and the New Forces rebels in Ouagadougou, capital of Burkina Faso, in March 2007.
The implementation of the agreement, which is mainly aimed at reunifying the country that has been divided for the last six years, is expected to culminate in presidential election that, after much postponement, is now scheduled to begin on November 30.
The world’s largest cocoa producers plunged into a political-military crisis since the former FN rebels seized the northern part of the county, which was once seen as model of stability in Africa, following a failed coup against President Gbagbo in September 2002.
Meanwhile, Cote d’Ivoire has identified some 660,000 undocumented citizens within the framework of the so-called fair-hearing operations that are intended to issue both identity and voter’s cards to the populations ahead of the highly anticipated presidential polls.
“These operations have enabled us to issue over 658,566 supplementary judgments,” Cote d’Ivoire’s Justice Minister Mamadou Kone said during a high-level meeting with Abidjan-based diplomats.
The minister, who was speaking during the meeting that was also attended by Prime Minister Soro, further announced that the government would proceed to hold exceptional “catch-up” sessions in selected areas in two weeks time.
The fair-hearings, which are expected to lay the groundwork for the organization of the November presidential elections, are being used to issue identification papers to nationals aged at least 13 years, whose birth was never reported with the registrar.
The Ivory Coast Blog 