The vice-president of Côte d’Ivoire, Daniel Kablan Duncan, has resigned, President Alassane Ouattara’s office announced on Monday.
Patrick Achi, chief of staff at the presidency, told reporters that Kablan Duncan, who previously served as Ouattara’s prime minister, was leaving for personal reasons.
Kablan Duncan “handed his resignation to the president on personal grounds on 27 February”, the presidency said on Monday in a statement read by Achi.
“After several conversations, the latest of which took place on 7 July, the president accepted [it] and on 8 July signed the decree ending Kablan Duncan’s duties.”
Rumour mill
Rumours that Duncan, 77, would be leaving office had been circulating for several days.
Duncan served as foreign minister from 2011-2012 and then as prime minister in charge of the economy and finance from 2012-2017.
In January 2017, he became the first vice-president in Côte d’Ivoire’s history, taking up a post created under a constitution adopted in 2016.
President Ouattara “would like to pay tribute to a great servant of the state, a man of power and commitment”, the statement said.
His departure was announced after the shock death on 8 July of Amadou Gon Coulibaly, a popular figure seen as Ouattara’s anointed successor for elections due in October.
Standoff
Coulibaly, who was 61, had just returned to Côte d’Ivoire after a two-month stay in France, where he had a coronary stent implanted to alleviate heart problems.
One of the world’s major coffee and cocoa producers, Côte d’Ivoire still bears the scars of a brief civil war that erupted nearly a decade ago.
In 2011, Ouattara ousted the then-president, Laurent Gbagbo, who refused to leave office after he lost elections. About 3,000 people were killed in the months-long standoff.
Eight days of national mourning for Coulibaly began on Friday, after which he will be buried in his home town, Korhogo, in the north of the country.
An emerging option for Ouattara, 78, is that he may seek to run again a choice that could spark accusations of abuse of democracy under the country’s two-term presidential limits.
In March, he decided not to seek a third term in office but previously argued that the constitutional change reset the clock, enabling him to do so.