Protesters blocked roads with barricades and burning tyres for a second day as violent demonstrations over the high cost of food in West Africa spread to once prosperous country. President Laurent Gbagbo, whose government is meant to be leading the former French colony to national elections this year following a 2002-2003 civil war, appealed for calm after an emergency meeting at his palace yesterday.
"I launch this appeal for calm so as finally to lead our country towards peace," Gbagbo said in an address broadcast on state television. The man was killed on Tuesday when police fired live bullets and teargassed protesters. The body of the man, said by demonstrators to have been shot in the head in the economic capital Abidjan, was carried by an angry crowd through the seaside city's Port-Bouet area on the Atlantic coast.
"Given the urgency," the government issued a statement announcing "temporary suspension of import duties on rice, cooking oil, milk, wheat flour, sugar, fish, canned tomatoes and cement." It would also "reinforce measures to fight racketeering which send up the prices of local goods, especially basic items and sugar." Police fired live bullets to disperse around 200 youths demonstrating in the Port-Bouet district, where Abidjan's international airport is located, but the government then moved to calm the situation.
Many of the demonstrators were women or youths who set up barricades and burnt tyres on roads, screaming: "We are hungry" and "We want to eat." They also chanted slogans against Gbagbo.
People blocked the main road from Cote d'Ivoire's to neighbouring Ghana and held similar protests in the upscale Abidjan neighbourhoods of Cocody and Deux Plateaux, home to several embassies as well as the presidential palace.
The previous day, at least 10 people were injured in the sprawling working class Yopougon district, when riot police moved in against hundreds of people, mostly women. The Ivoirien government has blamed the price spiral on the global surge in oil prices. Similar protests have rocked other western African nations such as Burkina Faso and Senegal. Prices in Cote d'Ivoire, which was split in half after a failed 2002 rebel uprising, have more than doubled in the past year.
One kilogramme of rice used to cost a maximum of 200 CFA francs (0.47 dollars / 0.30 euros) last year but currently sells for about 400 CFA francs. "No African country, particularly in ... west Africa, has been spared this generalised price hike, caused by a strong rise in world prices for these essentially imported products," a statement said on Tuesday.