David Dacko

Twice president of the Central African Republic

David Dacko, politician: born Bouchia, Oubangui-Chari 24 March 1930; President, Central African Republic 1960-65, 1979-81; died Yaounde, Cameroon 20 November 2003.

David Dacko, twice President of the Central African Republic (CAR), was one of Africa's nearly men. He was the first leader of the country at the moment of independence in 1960. But it was very well known that he was there by chance, as the true founding father of the country was the charismatic Rev Barthélemy Boganda, who was killed in a plane crash in 1959. If Dacko had risen to the top of the heap of Boganda's party (the ambitiously named Mouvement D'Evolution Speciale d'Afrique Noire, or MESAN) it was in part because he was a close relative of Boganda.

Dacko's place in the history of his troubled country, one of the poorest in Africa, with an unenviable record of political instability, is of having been twice overthrown in military coups. If the first coup, in 1966, might almost now look good for him, as it was the monstrous Jean-Bedel Bokassa who threw him out, the second, in 1981, only two years after he had been brought in by the French to replace Bokassa, looked like carelessness.

David Dacko was born in 1930 in Bouchia, some 70 miles from the capital Bangui, when the country, then known as Oubangui-Chari, was a part of the African Equatorial Federation (AEF). Educated at the Ecole Normale in Brazzaville, he bcame a teacher, but was catapulted into the new nationalist politics, and elected to the National Assembly in 1957.

Two years later he found himself chief minister at the age of 29, and a year later president of the newly independent CAR, with the backing of the French, who found him more malleable than his main rival Abel Goumba. Dacko took the autocratic course, locking up his opponents and establishing a one-party state. But his inexperience and lack of real political authority soon brought him into trouble with trade unions and students, and when he tried to impose austerity on a declining economy, and cut the military budget, he came up against another of his cousins, whom he had installed as army chief, Colonel Bokassa, who overthrew him in a coup on New Year's Eve 1965.

At the time, Gaullist France cynically accepted the arrival in power of Bokassa, estimating that a poor and remote country like CAR probably needed a strong man, but Bokassa's cruel dictatorship made Dacko's authoritarianism look liberal. The French, like the British with Idi Amin, found they had a monster on their hands in Bokassa, who first promoted himself Marshal and then Emperor, staging a farcical coronation in 1977. It was the massacre of schoolchildren in early 1979 that created the climate for France to stage "Operation Barracuda" while the emperor was out of the country, and reimpose Dacko on the throne, thus restoring a sort of constitutionality.

Dacko had, unfortunately, as little idea of controlling a government as he had had in his first period in power. On the one hand he was expected by the French and other donors to impose austerity on a bankrupt country, on the other to manipulate a restless political class in a multi-party situation that had had its lid lifted off with the departure of the dictator. Dacko survived an assassination attempt by wearing a bullet-proof vest. Although multi-party elections were held in March 1981 (he was re-elected with just over 50 per cent of the vote), they solved nothing, and a wave of strikes and protests once again created a pre-coup situation.

As if predicting his own demise, Dacko said on 4 August 1981 that "when an army calls for a president to step down, it is a coup d'état". Four weeks later, the military under General André Kolingba threw him out in a bloodless coup. After that, he played little part in public life, even with the return of multi-party politics in the 1990s. He stood as a presidential candidate in 1992 and 1999, leading his own Mouvement pour la Démocratie et Développement (MDD), but gaining only a modest share of the vote both times.

Kaye Whiteman