– Comrade President of the Party,
His Excellency Laurent Gbagbo
– Comrades Representatives or Delegates representing holders of accreditation positions absent, not having been able to travel to the Country, often due to the COVID pandemic,
– Comrades Members of the Cabinet of the President of the Party,
– Comrades Members of the Protocol of the President of the Party,
– Comrades Members of the Cabinet of the Vice-Presidency Responsible for the Supervision of FPI Representatives Abroad,
It is a great honor and a great privilege for me to speak. To speak twice in less than 3 weeks in front of our Chief, President Laurent Gbagbo. For the first time before the historic enlarged Extraordinary Central Committee, August 9, 2021. And for the second time, today, leading the Delegation of External Party Representations to this hearing. Honor and privilege that you share with me, I am sure, Comrades Representatives, Delegates of Representations, and all of you members of the Office of the Vice-Presidency, we had wished for this moment so much.
Comrade President, we would all like to thank you for showing your attention to us. Because we know your very busy program at this turning point in the history of our struggle and of our Party.
We would like to solemnly present to you our extreme compassion and our deep sorrow for all the misfortunes that struck you in your absence, in particular the departure of our Mother, our grandmother, the Matriarch Gado Margueritte – to whom I had the opportunity and honor to visit Ghana every year, upon my return from exile at the end of 2011-2012.
Comrade President, in a personal capacity, this is the opportunity to express to you all my gratitude and my infinite gratitude for the choice you have made on my humble person, so that I can take charge of this Department of Supervision of the Representations. An exhilarating challenge, if any, which requires an in-depth knowledge of the world as it is and as it is going. In terms of geopolitical and geostrategic configurations and developments.
Comrade President, how can I not remind my delegation of the esteem, oh so motivating, and the great honor that you have shown me, by appointing me Deputy National Campaign Director in order to lead your internal electoral campaign, as a substitute for the SG Assoa Adou, then arbitrarily retained in the bonds of detention by a justice at the orders of the one who had made his club. Campaign and internal election which confirmed your plebiscite at the head of our Party on August 4, 5 and 6, 2018 at the Moossou Congress, after that of the 3rd historic Extraordinary Congress of Mama on April 31, 2015.
Thus, in accordance with the prerogatives recognized by our statutory and regulatory framework, have you, Comrade President, by DECISION N ° 003-2018 / PP / FPI appointing external representatives, entrusted the management of 22 Representations, with 22 Comrades, in 22 countries and regions of the world.
Comrade President, by my voice, all the Representatives thank you. They express their feelings to you
deep gratitude and gratitude for the trust you have shown in them by appointing them to these oh so important and strategic positions of Party Representatives on the outside.
This meeting today, scheduled for a long time in Brussels in order to introduce you to your “ diplomats ” in May 2019, to allow you to put a face on each and every one of these Comrades, could not take place for the health reasons I mentioned above. Last but not least, Comrade President, your Representatives are there in front of you. And best of all, this is happening in the country, in the land of our ancestors after a decade of bitter fighting, which led to your acquittal and your total liberation.
We are happy. Happy and proud to see you among us, taking your place to lead your people. Happy and proud of the new dynamic that you have given to our common struggle. The Front being just a platform created with the aim of achieving goals on trans-ideological bases – the
multiparty system and democracy, essentially – its destiny was inscribed and sealed in its essence and its existence once these objectives had been achieved.
For our part, the courageous and brilliant decision that you took on August 9, 2021 is presented as the best thing that could happen to activists, and the appropriate outcome that awaited us in the face of the political-legal imbroglio of makes perfidy and actions deniers of the obvious. This decision has relieved all comrades, as it brings us back to our ideological homogeneity.
Ideological homogeneity without which our fight would be futile. And today we all have the evidence before us of the dodging and crawling of these deniers of the obvious.
We had said and written to expose these facts, we whistleblowers within the party – and there were many of us on this ancient platform. We had fought it fiercely, we who were often treated as radicals, where the demands and the harshness of the fight required rigor, constancy, loyalty, honesty and vigilance.
This radicalism, this lack of flexibility and flexibility for which we were accused, we had demanded for ourselves in order to comply with the ethics of the struggle for your liberation. Because it is – this radicalism – the antidote to self-denials, attempts to alienate our struggle, compromises of all kinds, and betrayal in a shameful denial of the past. Comrades Representatives, engaging in an ideological struggle is no fun. It’s not a zero-sum game either.
And this fight cannot tolerate fighters who look at the “leader’s finger instead of looking at the moon he is pointing to.” This fight requires a state of mind and soul. It requires virtuous dispositions, the least of which are certainly not courage, fidelity, sincerity towards oneself and one’s comrades – as Mathma Gandhi said to his comrades -, and faith in ideal for which we are fighting.
Comrade President, all these Comrades here present, and those who could not be there, have sufficiently demonstrated these virtues. I am very grateful to them. Comrades President, we will not present to you here the results of the execution of our three-year action plan drawn up since our appointment. We will do this assessment, together with my Comrades, and present it to the authorities of the new Party, if the opportunity is given to us.
I would only like to share with you my joy at having had the opportunity to work with these Comrades whom you have appointed to these Representation Posts. All of them deserve our trust and our encouragement to continue the fight by your side. Indeed, after my meeting with them in March 2019 in Paris, we jointly launched a major political lobbying movement from Asia to America via
Africa and Europe. Doors were opened to us in the Philippines, in Italy, in Metropolitan France, in Spain, in the USA, in Sweden, in the Benelux, in Russia – even if, in this last performance, we did not have the opportunity to go there as planned, to invest our Representative, the COVID having made the mission practically impossible.
Finally, in Africa precisely in Benin, South Africa, the Maghreb, and Senegal. With faith, courage and abnegation, we have managed to access doors that had until then been closed to us in the most unsuspected political circles in Europe and America, including the United Nations and the United States Department of State. .
Be that as it may, in a world where International Relations are governed by realistic theories which impose on us power relations and conflicts as vectors of cooperation between peoples and nations, your vision is that of an idealist in the best sense. more altruistic of the term, very far from liberalism and closer to the democratic socialism with which it forms a body, which poses as an anthropological postulate that the human being is endowed with reason, capable of empathy and able to cooperate.
And that therefore International Relations must be marked by cooperation, dialogue, the promotion of democracy and human rights for the happiness and well-being of populations. And there is, Comrade President, the meaning and the vision of your political struggle.
Also, informed of your exceptional experience which has shaped the Ivorian political and popular imagination, all the representatives take note of the change of name of our instrument of political combat without altering its
ideological content.
And the metaphor of the emptiness of the envelope, left to the deniers of the obvious, takes on its full meaning here. Comrade President, all of your Representatives overwhelmingly subscribe to this decision, give their unwavering support to this salutary decision, and place themselves at your disposal for the constitutive Congress of the party which will be carried out on the baptismal font in a few weeks.
Thank you