The remains of the Prime Minister of Côte d’Ivoire, Hamed Bakayoko, who died Wednesday at the age of 56 in a hospital in Germany from cancer, arrived in Abidjan on Saturday. Ivorian President Alassane Ouattara, strapped in a dark suit, wearing a black bowler hat, welcomed in mid-afternoon at Félix-Houphouët-Boigny international airport in Abidjan, the coffin covered with the national flag orange-white-green. A few moments later, the Head of State, surrounded by his wife Dominique, the widow Yolande Bakayoko and the children of the deceased, bowed on the coffin, placing his hands on it for a long time.
After the Muslim prayers, the funeral procession set off in the direction of Ivosep (funeral directors of the Ivory Coast) under the sad looks of several hundred young people gathered in places, wearing white T-shirts with the effigy of the deceased, on which we could read: “Farewell HamBak (nickname of Mr. Bakayoko), our inspirer!” Or “HamBak forever in our hearts”. On Thursday, the government decreed an eight-day national mourning period, from March 12 to 19.
National funeral
The official funeral program provides for tributes from the nation on Wednesday, followed by the transfer of the body the next day to Séguéla (North) where it will be buried Friday “in strict family privacy”.
Hamed Bakayoko, who was also Minister of Defense, was evacuated to France on February 18 by special plane for “health reasons”, before being transferred to a hospital in Germany last weekend, when the legislative elections in his country. Despite his absence, he was largely re-elected as a deputy in his stronghold of Séguéla (north). Hamed Bakayoko succeeded in July 2020 as Prime Minister to Amadou Gon Coulibaly, who died a few days after his return from hospitalization and a two-month convalescence in France for heart problems.
Figure appreciated in all camps of a country marked by strong political tensions, the opponents wished to salute his memory. Former Ivorian President Laurent Gbagbo, on parole in Brussels after his acquittal at first instance by the International Criminal Court (ICC), “postponed” his return to the country scheduled for mid-March to “fully associate, in the pure African tradition, in the mourning which strikes the Ivory Coast, with the brutal disappearance ”of Hamed Bakayoko, underlines a press release of the secretary general of the Ivorian Popular Front (FPI), Adou Assoa. Hamed Bakayoko was one of the most powerful men in Côte d’Ivoire and one of the most serious contenders for the succession of the current head of state, Alassane Ouattara.
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