I found 42 locations that have been demolished since 2011.

On March 15, 2019, Bruno Koné, Minister of Construction, Housing and Urbanisation in Côte d'Ivoire, announced that the government would demolish several “precarious districts” in the capital city and will not allow citizens to be part of the rehabilitation project.

Abidjan has about 5 million inhabitants, in which 1,2 million live in 132 of those “precarious districts”. This is roughly one fifth of the population.

In August 2013, President Alassane Ouattara’s plan to build the Abidjan-Grand-Bassam highway and the plan to embellish the littoral have led the economic capital Abidjan to massive evictions. Ever since then, there has been an increase in the speed and frequency of residence destruction. Their main target are local markets and marginalized neighbourhoods.

Location: Abidjan-Grand Bassam littoral

Reason for destruction: Construction of a highway, littoral embellishment

Number of people affected: 22,000

Number of houses demolished: 4,000

Number of kilometers demolished: 6.7km

In January 2015, bulldozers and caterpillars arrived along the littoral between Abidjan and Grand-Bassam and started demolishing houses. In only two weeks they had already finished demolishing the littoral. Over time, the citizens spread around the city: Some moved to close neighbourhoods such as Anani and Adjouffou, others decided to go to Adjahoui, while the more adventurous crossed the river to live in Vridi Ako.

On July 30, 2018, the Ivorian government decided to demolish the neighborhood in order to build a fourth bridge in the area, situated on the shores of Ebrié Lagoon.

Location: Boribana

Population: 60,000

Number of people affected: 14,000

Reason for destruction: Construction of a 1.4km-bridge

Total estimated compensation: €51M

The proposed bridge would link the Plateau, a business district, with Yopougon, the largest communes in the capital's suburbs, which has 5 million residents. In 90% of all households in Yopougon and Adjamé, namely 7,817; are renters of the housing they inhabit, as opposed to only 8% of owners and 2% living for free. According to a report by the Group of the African Bank of Development, only a few house owners have a legal property rights.

On November 30th, two bulldozers arrived in the neighbourhood and started destroying the houses and markets for which the owners had already received compensation for. About 10% of the neighbourhood was expected to be demolished for the project by January 15th, 2020, but only the destruction of the mosque has been done since November. However, all citizens have already abandoned their houses and sold everything they could to afford their new housings: doors, windows, roofs.

According to Koné, Boribana’s neighborhood Secretary of the Collective for the demolitions, land owners were given the opportunity to relocate in either Songon or Adyiama where alternate housings will be built by the government, as well as money compensation that ranged from 50,000 CFA to 3,000,000 CFA. This is about 40 minutes further away to the capital than Boribana.

Koné affirms that about 95% of the people whose house will be demolished have received their money. However, no source can corroborate this information.

Renting a house in Boribana costs on average 50,000 CFA per month. This is one of the cheapest neighbourhoods in Abidjan’s suburbs.

Komara Issif, President of the Syndicat National de Petit et Moyen Commerçant de Côte d’Ivoire, had signed a deal with the former mayor of Koumassi to develop the local markets in the area. When the new mayor arrived to the head of the municipality, Issif was evicted without prior notice and his market was demolished.

Several markets and houses in Koumassi are built on top of pipelines, which causes severe floods during the rainy season. To fix this issue, officers and caterpillars often come, unannounced, to free the way through demolitions. However, this is not the only reason why such evictions can take place. On December 12, 2020, several markets were demolished to embellish the streets upon the arrival of French President Emmanuel Macron on December 22nd.

“The market will be rebuilt and all marketers will get their job back,” said Cissé Ibrahima Bacongo, mayor of the district on May 2019. To this day, no one has gotten their jobs back.

Location: Koumassi Market

Reason for destruction: City embellishment and sanitation

Total estimated compensation: None

“All of our savings are used to find a new place to live,” explains Komara Issif. “We don’t have the means to revendicate your rights, we have no rights.” According to Issif, forced evictions would make the poor, poorer. “If you compensate the people, it is comprehensible,” he adds. “But they evicted us as if we were animals.”

To earn money for his family after loosing his business, Issif did some underwork in several countries in West Africa: Ghana, Togo, Nigeria, Tunisia and Libya. However, when he was not able to afford his life abroad anymore he came back to Abidjan. Today, he works at Longrich International, a Chinese pyramid scheme that has gained popularity in marginalised neighbourhood in Africa, especially in Namibia and Kenya

It was 5 A.M. in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire. Highschool senior students were on their way to their institutions to present their Baccalaureate, workers were waking up and the rest of their families were still asleep. On July 2nd, 2018, the population of the Abattoir neighbourhood woke up with the smell of tear gas and were forced to leave their houses. Only a few minutes later, several bulldozers started demolishing everything that was on its way without leaving anything behind.

Location: Abattoir

Reason for destruction: Flooding area, sanitation, installation under high voltage pylons, risk of epidemic, installation on waste water pipes from the slaughter room

Number of people affected: 6872

Unusual event during the eviction: 1 death, 1 seriously-wounded and 1 early labor

The members of the collective accuse the district of Abidjan of attempted corruption. "The town hall of Port-Bouet offers 8.250.000 CFA to the office of the collective of the evacuated to the effect of dropping their claim to shed light on the evacuation" read the report written by the inhabitants. "The amount which was politely declined and refused in the presence of our council".

Minister of Tourism Siandou Fofana promised he would offer an alternative housing to 100 families out of the 429 affected. However, by 2020 the families had still not seen those houses.

According to a government press release, there were “no recorded incidents” that day.  Citizens of the Abattoir neighbourhood were censored that day: phones were confiscated and officials played on fear to prevent them from talking about it on the media. However, a group of 16 victims from this forced evictions decided to create a Demolition Collective, which gathered testimonies and images from the incident in a memoir. That day, they were able to document a house being demolished with an old man inside, a woman coming into early labor and several injuries. They sent their complains to the municipality, which has not responded to the date. Since that day, several teenagers have abandoned their high schools and turned into drug addiction. Citizens believe this a is a direct cause of the demolitions, as parents have lost control over their children.

The reason for this forced eviction remains unclear. At first, it was described as an area a risk, but citizens recall no incidents of floods and deaths during heavy rains.

Location: Adjouffou

Population: 25,000

Reason for destruction: Proximity to the airport landing runway

On Jan. 8, 2020, Laurent Barthélémy Ani Guibahi, 14, was found dead in the undercarriage of an Air France jet from Abidjan to Paris. He was trying to illegally get on the plane.

The government announced that the young man had been able to access the landing runway by crossing a wall in Adjouffou, a neighbourhoods that has significantly grown over the year next to the airport.

A few days later rumours spread around Adjouffou confirming that the citizens had 24 hours to leave their houses before being forcibly evicted.

On Thursday, Jan, 16, the government said they would postpone the eviction for the following 6 months. Most citizens had already abandoned their houses.

Adjouffou is a inhabited by a marginalised community on the other side of the littoral along the Abidjan-Grand Bassam highway. Several citizens used to live in the neighbourhood that was demolished in 2015. Adjouffou was demolished later in February.

Location: Aéro Canal

Population: Unknown

Reason for destruction: Expansion of the airport, Proximity to the airport landing runway

On January 23rd, 2020, several bulldozers arrived in Aéro Canal, a small neighbourhood behind the airport, and demolished hundreds of houses. In the following days, they came back with about 80 policemen and militaries to finish what they had started.

As it has been done in prior evictions, some people take advantage of those demolitions to resell the remains of the houses: roofs, woods and metal, all materials of high value.

Evictions have been used since the colonial times in the African continent as a way to control urbanization. Under French’s colonial rule, land registration and titling was imposed by law. For Ocheje (2007), there are three reasons to explain the frequency growth of massive evictions over the years: inappropriate planning laws of colonial origin, corruption and failure of development and land reforms.