Domestic Politics

The upcoming parliamentary and presidential elections had dominated the political debate for a long time before the official start of the electoral campaign. On 26 April, the one-chamber National Assembly was elected for its seventh four-year term since the country’s return to multiparty competition in 1990. Election day was marked by serenity and routine, although almost the opposite qualities had characterised the pre-election period. Heated debate about the computerised electoral roll (‘Liste Electorale Permanente Informatisée’: lepi) had long shaped the domestic debate and given rise to speculation about the potential for vote rigging. The administration bodies in charge of the elections had struggled to solve all the controversies about the lepi’s accuracy. The ‘Commission Électorale Nationale Autonome’ (cena) was unable to issue new voter cards in time.

Various civil society organisations had very efficiently joined forces in the ‘Plateforme Électorale des Organisations de la Société Civile du Bénin’. With the help of the Dakar-based Open Society Initiative for West Africa (osiwa), it set up a website, used social media tools, closely observed every stage of the electoral process and immediately pushed for solutions whenever it detected deficiencies. The cena’s solution on the voter cards issue was not much appreciated but effective. At the very last minute, the cena allowed the use of old voter cards in order to avoid the postponement of the elections. Foreign observers were less critical of the elections than domestic ones and praised the conduct of the elections as generally peaceful. On election day, the civil society platform set up a situation room and aggregated the results simultaneously with the official vote count in order to assess the accuracy of the results. The official results were largely accepted by political actors and observers.

Boni Yayi’s party, the ‘Forces Cauris pour un Bénin Emergeant’ (fcbe), won the largest share of the votes (30.3%) and parliamentary seats (33 out of 83). As in the past, no party managed to win a parliamentary majority. The two largest opposition groups together took the same number of seats as the fcbe. The electoral alliance ‘Union fait la Nation’ (un) won 13 seats with 14.3% of the votes and the ‘Parti du Renouveau Démocratique’ (prd) gained ten seats with 10.4%. The alliance led by the party ‘Renaissance du Bénin’ (rb) finished fourth, taking seven seats with 7.1% of the votes. The prd and the rb had successively left the un alliance after the last presidential election, when the alliance had failed to beat the incumbent President Yayi. The prd stayed in opposition, whereas the rb had approached the presidential camp. The new parliament remained fragmented, with another seven electoral alliances and individual parties winning seats. On 20 May, the freshly constituted National Assembly elected opposition candidate and prd party president Adrien Houngbédji as its president. Houngbédji – a leading figure in Benin’s politics for over 25 years and the un’s candidate for the helm of state in 2013 – had already twice served as the head of the National Assembly (1991–95 and 1999–2003). His election was an important victory for the opposition, although Houngbédji was not allowed to run for the state presidency because the Constitutional specified an age limit of 70 years for presidential candidates.

The National Assembly continued to use the governor’s palace in Porto-Novo, despite it being too small to conduct parliamentary business satisfactorily. The contractor and the minister in charge had repeatedly promised that the construction of the new buildings alongside the Ouémé River would be finished by 30 November. Several ministers had been dismissed in connection with corruption and mismanagement of the prestigious construction project since the launch of the project in 2009. Yayi was keen to conclude the project before leaving office and visited the site at least three times during the year (22 May, 17 October and 13 December) to put pressure on project managers. At his last visit, the completion was well behind schedule. Minister of Urban Affairs Noël Fonton’s attempts to explain the situation included references to insecurity caused by Boko Haram and the workers’ lack of motivation, but unions rejected the reproaches and pointed to ongoing mismanagement. The state had at least spent CFAfr 14 bn (more than € 21 m) on the project.

The election result meant that Yayi was unable to push through any constitutional amendments. Up to the legislative elections, allegations that he wanted to change the law so that he could run for a third term had dominated political debate. The president had been unable to create a minimum level of trust among his opponents, although he constantly affirmed his intention to leave office after ten years in Marina Palace. Having lost his majority in parliament, the third-term debate faded away and discussion turned towards the presidential candidates, who began to prepare their campaigns.

Presidential elections were due in February 2016 and so debate about the future political leadership remained centre stage and political positioning and repositioning continued after the parliamentary elections. For a long time it remained unclear whether Yayi would support any presidential candidate. Early rumours had produced the name of retired army general Robert Gbian. However, since his electoral alliance – ‘Alliance Soleil’ – underperformed in the parliamentary polls (gaining 6.7% of the vote and four mps), he no longer appeared to be a promising candidate. Yayi’s brother-in-law and long-serving minister Marcel de Souza was also considered a potential frontrunner but Yayi eventually threw his support behind Lionel Zinsou, a Franco-Beninese economist and a complete newcomer to the domestic political scene. He had been living in Paris and his appointment as prime minister by Yayi on 18 June took many by surprise. He was nominated as the fcbe’s presidential candidate only five months later.

Zinsou was a ‘Southerner’ in the terms of country’s political geography and decended from a well-respected family, being the nephew of former president Emile Derlin-Zinsou. Yayi’s rhetoric revealed his strategy to combine his own political weight as the outgoing president from the northern part of the country with Zinsou’s southern background. On 26 December, the prime minister’s helicopter crashed immediately after take-off in Parakou. The accident gave rise to speculation about a political attack but it transpired that a combination of environmental conditions and human error had caused the crash. Zinsou escaped unharmed.

By the year’s end, businessman Patrice Talon had also started his presidential campaign. A fierce political enemy of Yayi, he had returned to Benin in December after more than three years in exile in France. Talon – a financial heavyweight and influential networker with excellent relations to private media outlets – had been a key supporter behind Yayi’s election 2006 election campaign, but had later come into conflict with Yayi. In October 2012, Talon was accused of attempting to murder the president and, in February 2013, of plotting a military coup. An international arrest warrant was issued and was only lifted in May 2014 when Yayi pardoned Talon for crimes in which the latter had always sharply denied any involvement. Rumours about his candidacy emerged by midyear and, on 1 October, the weekly ‘Jeune Afrique’ published an interview in which Talon confirmed his intention to run for president. Apart from Talon and Zinsou, three other promising candidates were expected to run: former prime minister Pascal Irénée Koupaki, the well-established northern politician Abdoulaye Bio-Tchané, and Sébastian Ajavon, another millionaire and businessman – all of them opponents of Yayi.

In May, police searched the home of mp Candide Azanaï, which led to public protests, and tensions rose after the police violently broke up the demonstrations. There were no reports that anyone was seriously injured, but the incident underlined again the low level of tolerance of any government restrictions of civil liberties.

On 14 October, Mathieu Kérékou, a former military dictator (1972–91) who had later served two more terms as a democratically elected president (1996–2006), died at the age of 82. He was a political icon and had always been primarily seen as a disciplined soldier, so the first commemoration ceremony in his honour took place at Camp Guézo, the main army barracks in central Cotonou. Later, he was buried in the northern town of Natitingou in his native region. Yayi declared a week of national mourning.

In early November, the president of the national media commission, Adam Boni Tessi, stopped the publication of the daily newspaper ‘Le Matinal’, which had featured a story claiming that a court had asked the state to compensate businessman Patrice Talon for an incorrect public award process. According to the newspaper, Yayi had rejected the court order, indicating his scorn for justice. ‘Le Matinal’, which had frequently been sued for libel in the past, was run by Charles Toko, a close business associate of Patrice Talon.

The political importance of football became obvious when the Council of Ministers decided to withdraw the licence of the ‘Fédération Béninoise du Football’ (fbf) on 27 March. Two days later, gendarmes – robustly armed, according to fbf officials – occupied the fbf headquarters in Porto-Novo. The minister for sport argued that the bad management of the federation justified this draconian measure and the Confederation of African Football (caf) had indeed suspended Benin from all under-17 activities for a period of two years on 4 September 2014. The fbf under-17 team had allegedly included players past the age limit on several occasions. The fbf president, Augustin Ahoevouenbla, claimed that the government was pursuing an agenda against him because of his political background: he was a senior member of parliament in Adrien Houngbédji’s opposition prd. fifa secretary general Jérôme Valcke officially protested on 9 April, reminding the government of the fifa statutes that guarantee the full independence of national associations. Various fifa and caf officials visited the country four times during the year (4 April, 3–5 May, 22–23 July, 1–2 November) arranging for the appointment of a so-called ‘normalisation committee’ to organise fbf elections by early 2016. The seven committee members were appointed on 9 November but fifa dismissed two of them as soon as 18 December for irreconcilable internal conflict. Ahoevouenbla, who had meanwhile become head of the prd’s parliamentary party, had not been a committee member. Football consumed about one fifth of the national budget for sport.

Foreign Affairs

Benin deepened its involvement in regional politics beyond formal activities such as hosting the ordinary summit of the West African Economic and Monetary Union (waemu) on 19 January. On a bilateral level, the governments of Benin and neighbouring Niger held their first joint council of ministers on 6 January. Niger’s geographic position makes it largely dependent on the transport corridor to Benin’s port of Cotonou, and Benin started to support the government in Niamey in the fight against Boko Haram in a conjoint mission with Togolese troops. It was also agreed that Benin would contribute 800 troops to a multinational combat force of 8,700 men based in N’Djamena (Chad) to fight the jihadist terror network more effectively. When French President François Hollande visited Cotonou on 1 July, his main message was to encourage Benin to contribute more in the battle against jihadism in the region. Beyond its regional military engagement, Benin was contributing a total of 1,500 security personnel to un missions by the year’s end, almost all in the three ongoing un missions in Côte d’Ivoire, the drc and Mali.

ecowas entrusted President Yayi and Senegal’s President Macky Sall with mediating in neighbouring Burkina Faso when a military coup threatened to end the democratic transition in September. However, Sall and Yayi were unable to negotiate a proposal that would satisfy all actors: pro-democratic forces in Burkina Faso firmly refused to endorse the agreement the two presidents had drafted, claiming that it made too many concessions to the putschists. Sall and Yayi’s mission thus failed, while the coup in Burkina Faso ended without heavy bloodshed as the putschists surrendered.

Though relations with neighbouring states were generally peaceful, Foreign Minister Nassirou Bako-Arifari had to deal with two long-standing border demarcation issues. On 16 January, he travelled to Ouagadougou (Burkina Faso) to prepare for the waemu summit. In his meeting with Transitional President Michel Kafando, the border dispute in the Kourou/Koalou zone, a small area between the Pendjari River and the border triangle with Togo, became an issue because of recent allegations that Benin was not respecting the territory’s neutrality (agreed by the two countries in 2009). The status of the zone had been disputed since 1980, with the case pending before the International Court of Justice. Some 3 km of the main road between Benin and Burkina Faso cross the zone, which has meant that the issue has attracted recurring attention. The second latent border dispute re-emerged in November, when Benin’s gendarmerie entered 16 villages in the Okuta district, which Nigeria considered to belong to its own territory. Various Nigerian media outlets reported that local traditional authorities were accusing Benin of an invasion. ‘The Vanguard Newspaper’ (Lagos) cited the Emir of Okuta confirming that Beninese flags had been hoisted but later dismantled by his followers. ‘The Guardian’ (Lagos) explained to its readers that the artificial border drawn between the British and French had not taken into account the common cultural and economic activities of the Bariba, who lived on both sides of the imperialist divide. National authorities played down the conflict.

Socioeconomic Developments

On 11 December, the imf’s Executive Board applauded Benin for concluding a third consecutive year of solid economic growth, which stood at around 5%. The Fund identified Nigeria’s economic slowdown as the main risk to Benin’s development but also urged further customs and tax reforms, accelerated structural reforms (generally by privatisation), greater diversification and judicial reliability. The usa shared this generally positive assessment. On 12 September, Washington approved a second grant of $ 375 m from the Millennium Challenge Account.

International aid – mainly from the eu – brought into service the second phase of the Greater Cotonou drinking water supply system on 24 January. According to the national water supply company soneb and government sources, the project served more than 2.3 m people in the country’s largest metropolitan area, giving four out of five residents direct access to clean water. Thanks to the project, it became possible for water charges that users had to pay to soneb could be reduced by more than 50% to CFAfr 50,000 p.a. Shortly afterward, the Netherlands withheld development aid in response to large-scale corruption in a water supply project. According to the Dutch, CFAfr 3 bn (almost € 4.6 m) had been embezzled. Minister Barthélémy Kassa, a longstanding ally of President Yayi, was dismissed over the scandal. However, a motion to lift Kassa’s immunity as a member of parliament was defeated by the votes of the fcbe and four opposition mps, protecting him from prosecution. Surprisingly, the affair did not affect Benin’s bilateral relationship with other donors.

Energy production remained one of the focal points of the government’s economic policy. On 1 May, Yayi visited the Maria Glèta power plant to push for the completion of the 80 mw production site. On 6 May, the president received the representative of an international plant construction company that was to build another 200 mw power station. The government aimed at a total production of 1 gw to reach energy self-sufficiency in 2016. According to the office of the president, the Islamic Development Bank, the state of Iran and private foreign investors were proposing the construction of three more plants with a combined capacity of 650 mw. Renewable energy sources were designated to bring a minimum level of electricity supply to all 105 county towns. In October, recently appointed Prime Minister Lionel Zinsou announced an initiative to bring electricity to the three-quarters of the population who then had no access. He promised to provide solar power kits to every family in the country in addition to the installation of some 100 micro power plants. It was also planned that the energy parastatal sbee (‘Société Béninoise d’Énergie Électrique’) would introduce an electronic payment system: the prime minister estimated that time wasted at sbee counters caused considerable economic damage.

Cotton production in the 2014/2015 harvesting season rose by almost one-third compared with 2013/2014. The target of 359,000 tonnes was exceeded by 34,000 tonnes. The cotton sector remained Benin’s primary industry and largest employer. The production target for the 2015/2016 season was set at half a million tonnes. Besides cotton, re-export trade through the port of Cotonou was the most important business. Logistics and transport infrastructure were therefore a key to economic growth. A new traffic management system began to operate at the port of Cotonou which aimed at massively facilitating the process by which forwarding companies collected freight. Car drivers in Cotonou expected a welcome side effect. Extended waiting times for lorries transporting heavy freight had long obstructed road traffic in the city. The new handling scheme improved the situation. Regarding long-distance transport routes, two priority projects were central: the upgrading of the motorway from Cotonou to the Nigerian border in the east and the construction of the railway line toward the Nigérien border in the north. The presidents of Benin and Niger had jointly celebrated the inauguration of the first section between Niamey and Dosso on Nigérien soil in 2014, and they finally launched the infrastructure project connecting Cotonou with Parakou in the north and Porto-Novo in the east on 19 March. President Yayi and Prime Minister Rafini of Niger had already opened the renovated main station in downtown Cotonou on 14 January. Vincent Bolloré, the French ceo of Bolloré logistics and construction company, who had won the contract, had joined the two politicians for this event. Benino-Gabonese businessman Samuel Dossou contested the award process in court, however, and, on 19 December, the Court of Appeal in Cotonou ruled in favour of Dossou’s company, Petrolin, and the judges ordered Bolloré to immediately stop construction work. On 5 November, another French company (Geftarail) also contested the award process before the International Court of Arbitration, and the ecowas Court of Justice and Arbitration had earlier ordered Benin to pay CFAfr 131 bn (approximately € 200 m) to one of Patrice Talon’s companies in another award process case. The government had appealed and the final decision was pending at year’s end.

Despite previous government declarations that it would fight fuel trafficking from Nigeria into Benin, the informal trade in fuel, ‘Kpayo’, remained omnipresent at the roadsides. On 2 November, a truck full of Kpayo exploded in Dantokpa market, destroying more than 700 shops according to press reports. Casualties were fortunately limited because the incident occurred at 1 am.

Two cultural events attracted particular attention. On 8 February, Angélique Kidjo received her second Grammy Award for the best world music album. President Yayi had welcomed the world-famous Beninese artist at his presidential palace on 9 January. In June, the Zinsou Foundation celebrated its tenth anniversary. The charity promoted the fine arts in Cotonou and made notable efforts to bring creative education and the world of art museums to school children. The Zinsou Foundation was managed by a member of the respected Zinsou family, of which Prime Minister Lionel Zinsou and former president Émile Derlin-Zinsou were members.