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can this requirement be fulfilled this year? For many pressure groups like the Committee of Actions for Ivory Coast in the United States (C.A.C.I-USA), there cannot and should not be any election in Ivory Coast in 2015, unless the political body wants to trigger new violence and erase the democratic gains that Ivorians have enjoyed starting April 1990.

The second reason is that accepting a presidential election in 2015 would legitimate the regime in power, condemn Laurent Gbagbo, approve violence as a means to access power, and negate Ivory Coast’s right to sovereignty and democracy.

The relative obscurity for Ivory Coast is the uncertainty of durable peace and independence. There are two ways to end this obscurity: refraining from a presidential election in 2015 and installing a political transition. There are ample constitutional reasons to object to the presidential election now. The most important is avoiding further chaos and giving the political body sufficient time to install a political transition. Indubitably, a political transition is the golden alternative for peace in Ivory Coast.

AFRICA’S CONTRIBUTION TO EUROPEAN CAPITALIST DEVELOPMENT According to Rodney, Europeans went through several phases of desire in Africa: first it was gold, through ivory and camwood to human cargo (slavery). He sketches the slow conquest and penetration due to shipping superiority and the slow breakup of African kingdoms and states in the 16th-17th century leading to the Portuguese slave trade and decision-making role for Europeans in Africa. While dissecting the slave trade he drew parallels between the rise of the European seaport towns of Bristol, Liverpool, Nantes, Seville and the Atlantic slave trade. In a passage that vividly explains the impact of Europe on Africa and its subsequent underdevelopment Rodney asserted that: ‘the European slave trade was a direct block, in removing millions of youth and young adults who are the human agents from whom inventiveness springs. Those who remained in areas badly hit by slave capturing were preoccupied about their freedom rather than with improvements in production’. Rodney pursues the notion that colonisation gave Europe a technological edge and addresses the exploitation of African minerals important for making steel alloys, manganese and chrome, including columbite – critical for aircraft engines. Significantly, in the course of this orbit of exploitation there was incessant African resistance. But European firearms, after reaching a certain phase of effectiveness, as in the use of the Maxim (machine gun) against the Maji Maji and the Zulus and others, in concert with the use of Africans in colonial armies tipped the military balance in favour of Europe and subjugated a continent.

Rodney also attacks the notion, which unfortunately still persists, that there is some universal nexus or equal relationship between ‘hard work’ and great wealth, a myth peddled in the West today. In his tome Rodney swats away this ‘common myth within capitalist thought that the individual through hard work can became a capitalist’.

Similarly, should we not consider the implication of toxic waste dumping in Africa by companies such as Trafigura, which dumped truck loads of sulphuric sludge in Ivory Coast in 2006, and the damaging consequences it has for Africa, or the ecological damage caused by Anglo-Dutch Shell in the extraction of oil in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria? Surely any deal at Copenhagen should ensure that richer nations are made to dispose of toxic waste safely? Equally important should be fair compensation for the victims of environmental degradation and not the paltry £100 million paid by Trafigura to the Ivorian government in 2007.

African NGOs such as the Pan-African Climate Justice Alliance and Northern NGOs genuinely committed to climate justice in an egalitarian global community need to consistently mobilise post-Copenhagen to ensure that the movement for climate change does not become a business opportunity for the corporate world to profit from. There is a need for all of us to be aware of the smokescreen that will be presented by the elaborate carbon emissions accounting.

The challenge of progressive forces both in the South and North is to demand the realisation of the slogan on one placard hoisted at Copenhagen: ‘System Change Not Climate Change!’

Côte d’Ivoire is now plunged in a deadly tale of five stakeholders.

Laurent Gbagbo sought to accredit his opposition to French neo-colonialism, and his socialist and anti-imperialist credentials while strengthening a new class of rich Ivoirians including the military. Their sources of enrichment were enhanced in 2006 when oil and gas revenues supplemented the traditional cocoa and coffee incomes.

In his professional background as head of the Africa desk of the IMF, governor of the West African central bank, prime minister of Côte d’Ivoire, and deputy-managing director of the IMF, Ouattara presided over the deregulation and the liberalisation of the Côte d’Ivoire economy.

There’s no doubt, either, that both Libya and the Ivory Coast have reinforced many peoples’ opinion that the West will support “change” and “democracy” only when its own interests are advanced.

When you consider just how many seriously flawed African elections have gone by recently without the slightest objection from France, the U.S. or the U.N. — Gabon, Burkina Faso, Senegal, Uganda – it’s painfully obvious that Western support for African democracy is highly selective. With all the despots who have been in power for decades in Africa, how did Gbagbo suddenly become so terrible?