Oasis in a Desert

Beginning a recent visit to the Ivory Coast, Congo President Joseph Mobutu raised his hosts' eyebrows by shrugging that he would not believe in President Houphouet-Boigny's "economic miracle" until he personally saw proof of it. A few days of touring the Ivory Coast were enough to convince Mobutu. "Now that I've visited Houphouet and his country," he said, "I wonder which of us is the real revolutionary."

There are no doubts in the Ivory Coast. Eight years after the country won its independence from France and installed him as President, Houphouet has created one of Black Africa's few real success stories, leading his tiny (127,800 sq. mi.) West Coast nation in a massive development drive that stresses solid economic achievement over showy industrial schemes. At a time when other African leaders are preaching a hazy socialism, Houphouet is a shrewd conservative who insists that "politics is the art of accommodating human and material realities."

Latest In Place. The accommodation has seemed to work very well. In the Ivory Coast's lush green countryside, agricultural production has jumped 50%, making the country the world's third largest producer of coffee, fourth largest of cocoa and fifth largest of pineapple. At the same time, the rate of new local and foreign business investment (Renault, Esso, Unilever) has more than doubled to $100 million yearly. Last week businessmen and government officials from a dozen African countries rounded off a ten-day technical exposition sponsored by France, which picked the sophisticated capital of Abidjan for its first such show in Black Africa.

Along Abidjan's wide, tree-shaded boulevards and cloverleaf expressways, new apartment houses and office buildings are rising by the score. Later this year construction will begin on the capital's biggest single project yet, part of Houphouet's plan to make Abidjan and the surrounding countryside the latest In place for the international set. Designed by Los Angeles Architect William Pereira (TIME cover, Sept. 6, 1963), it is a 10,000-acre, $300 million resort complex that will have 15 hotels, a 27-hole golf course designed by Robert Trent Jones, four shopping centers, a silk-stocking residential area for 120,000 people and a zoological garden designed not only for tourists but for Ivory Coasters, who often do not get to see the fauna of their own country.

Champagne for Opponents. Unlike his counterparts in other African countries who tend to denounce all forms of foreign influence, Houphouet has accomplished the Ivory Coast's transformation by openly luring overseas capital and know-how to fill the vacuum left by the French departure. Today, foreigners--mostly French--occupy key technical posts in many government ministries and a full 90% of the top-and middle-level administrative jobs in private business. Thousands of skilled and unskilled workers from other African lands have flocked into the country as well, until foreigners now account for more than half of the Ivory Coast's salaried urban working force and an amazing 25% of the country's 4,000,000 people.

Houphouet is just as pragmatic in his politics. A bush doctor for 15 years and later the founding father of the country's 25-year-old Democratic Party, he has a keen understanding of his people. He shuns flowery forensics and reads his speeches in a soft, professorial voice. Like any other wily African tribal chief, he also does nothing to discourage stories of his black-magic prowess, or rumors that he consults the sacred crocodiles in his palace pond.

Houphouet maintains tight press and radio censorship but is relatively gentle with his political opponents. When University of Abidjan students organized a march on his palace, protesting his conservative policies, Houphouet had the demonstrators taken to a military camp and put on a stiff regimen of calisthenics until they meekly asked to return to classes. Older opponents are summoned to Houphouet's plantation 170 miles from the capital and given a friendly, fatherly talk--and sometimes a government appointment or a case of Houphouet's favorite champagne, Dom Perignon.

Training & Loans. Houphouet's biggest problems are 1) a need for bright, well-trained African businessmen and civil servants, and 2) the envy of his neighbors. To solve the first, he is channeling 25% of the country's $263 million budget into education (v. only 10% for the army) and setting up 50 technical institutes and training schools. As for such neighbors as Togo, Dahomey, Niger and Upper Volta, he says: "I'm not interested in making the Ivory Coast an oasis of prosperity in the middle of a desert of misery. Sooner or later, my neighbors' difficulties will create trouble for me. And it's the desert that always engulfs the oasis." To help keep the desert away, Houphouet has organized and largely bankrolled a $7,000,000 development loan fund to help the less prosperous, French-speaking countries on his borders.

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