Mathieu Kérékou

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Mathieu Kérékou

Time in Office

October 26, 1972–4 April 1991
4 April 1996–6 April 2006

Predecessor

Justin Ahomadegbé (first time)
Nicéphore Soglo (second time)

Successor

Nicéphore Soglo (first time)
Yayi Boni (second time)

Date of Birth

2 September 1933

Place of Birth

Kouarfa, Dahomey (now Benin)

(Ahmed) Mathieu Kérékou (born 2 September 1933^[1]) was President of Benin from 1972 to 1991 and again from 1996 to 2006.

Kérékou was born in 1933 in Kouarfa, in the north-west of the country;^[1] his father was a Bariba. After having studied at military schools in Mali and Senegal,^[1] Kérékou served in the military, obtaining the grade of major. He seized power in Benin in a military coup on 26 October 1972,^[1] ending a system of government in which three members of a presidential council were to rotate power (earlier in the year Hubert Maga had handed over power to Justin Ahomadegbé).^[2]

During his first two years in power, Kérékou did not appear ideological; he expressed only nationalism and said that the country's revolution would not "burden itself by copying foreign ideology ... We do not want communism or capitalism or socialism. We have our own Dahomean social and cultural system." On November 30, 1974, however, he announced the adoption of Marxism-Leninism by the state.^[3] The country was renamed from Dahomey to Benin a year later, and the banks and petroleum industry were nationalized. The Popular Revolutionary Party of Benin (Parti de la révolution populaire du Bénin, PRPB) was established as the sole ruling party. In 1980, Kérékou was elected president by the Revolutionary National Assembly; he retired from the army in 1987.^[4] Kérékou survived numerous attempts to oust him, including an attack by mercenaries at the airport in Cotonou in January 1977 as well as two coup attempts in 1988.

It has been suggested that Kérékou's move to Marxism-Leninism was motivated mainly by pragmatic considerations, and that Kérékou himself was not actually a leftist radical; the new ideology offered a means of legitimization, a way of distinguishing the new regime from those that had preceded it, and was based on broader unifying principles than the politics of ethnicity. Kérékou's regime initially included officers from both the north and south of the country, but as the years passed the northerners (like Kérékou himself) became clearly dominant, undermining the idea that the regime was not based in ethnicity.^[2] By officially adopting Marxism-Leninism, Kérékou may also have wanted to win the support of the country's leftists.^[5]

It was hoped that the nationalizations of the 1970s would help develop the economy, but it remained in a very poor condition, with the state sector being plagued by inefficiency and corruption. Kérékou began reversing course in the early 1980s, closing down numerous state-run companies and attempting to attract foreign investment.^[2] He also accepted an IMF structural readjustment programme in 1989, agreeing to austerity measures that severely cut state expenditure.^[2]^[5] The economic situation continued to worsen during the 1980s, provoking widespread unrest in 1989. A student strike began in January of that year; subsequently strikes among various elements of society increased in frequency and the nature of their demands grew broader: whereas initially they had focused on economic issues such as salary arrears, this progressed to include demands for political reform.^[5]

In the period of reforms towards multiparty democracy in Africa at the beginning of the 1990s, Kérékou moved onto this path early, faced with the popular discontent of 1989. Benin's early and relatively smooth transition may be attributed to the particularly dismal economic situation in the country, which seemed to preclude any alternative.^[2] In the midst of increasing unrest, Kérékou was re-elected as president by the National Assembly in August 1989,^[4] but in December 1989 Marxism-Leninism was dropped as the state ideology,^[6] and a national conference was held in February 1990. The conference turned out to be hostile to Kérékou and declared its own sovereignty; despite the objections of some of his officers to this turn of events, Kérékou did not act against the conference.^[2] Although he remained president, Kérékou lost most of his power.^[5]^[7] World Bank economist Nicéphore Soglo, chosen as prime minister by the conference, took office in March, and a new constitution was approved in a December 1990 referendum. Multi-party elections were held in March 1991, which Kérékou lost, obtaining only about 32% of the vote in the second round against Prime Minister Soglo;^[8] while he won very large vote percentages in the north, in the rest of the country he found little support.^[2] Kérékou was thus the first mainland African president to lose power through an election.^[2]^[9]

Kérékou reclaimed the presidency in the March 1996 election. Soglo's economic reforms and his alleged dictatorial tendencies had caused his popularity to suffer.^[4] Although Kérékou received fewer votes than Soglo in the first round, he then defeated Soglo in the second round, taking 52.5% of the vote.^[8] Soglo alleged fraud, but this was rejected by the Constitutional Court, which confirmed Kérékou's victory.^[10] As in 1991, Kérékou received very strong support from northern voters.^[11] When taking the oath of office, Kérékou left out a portion that referred to the "spirits of the ancestors" due to his Christian beliefs. He was subsequently forced to retake the oath including the reference to spirits.^[12]

Kérékou was re-elected for a second five-year term in the March 2001 presidential election under controversial circumstances. In the first round he took 45.4% of the vote; Soglo, who took second place, and parliament speaker Adrien Houngbédji, who took third, both refused to participate in the second round, alleging fraud and saying that they did not want to legitimize the vote by participating in it. This left the fourth place finisher, Bruno Amoussou, to face Kérékou in the run-off, and Kérékou easily won with 83.6% of the vote.^[8]^[13] It was subsequently discovered that the American corporation Titan gave more than two million dollars to Kérékou's re-election campaign as a bribe.^[14]

During Kérékou's second period in office his government followed a liberal economic path. The period also saw Benin take part in international peacekeeping missions in other African states. The constitution of Benin prohibited Kérékou from running again in March 2006, since he was older than 70 years, the limit, and the constitution also would not allow him to run for a third term. Kérékou said in July 2005 that he did not want the constitution to be changed;^[15] there was, however, speculation that he had wanted it to be changed, but faced too much opposition.^[16]

On 5 March 2006, voters went to the polls to decide who would succeed Kérékou as President of Benin. Yayi Boni defeated Adrien Houngbédji in a run-off vote on 19 March,^[8] and Kérékou left office at the end of his term, at midnight on 6 April 2006.

Kérékou's motto was "the branch will not break in the arms of the chameleon".^[1] On 28 September 1980, he converted to Islam and changed his first name to Ahmed,^[17] but he later started to use the name Mathieu again. He also later became a born-again Christian.