Ivory Coast’s Ouattara wins second 5-year term

Ivory Coast’s incumbent president, Alassane Ouattara, has won a second 5-year term after garnering  83.66 per cent of the total votes cast in Sunday’s presidential poll, the electoral commission has said.

President Ouattara had a commanding lead in early results of last weekend’s election, released on Tuesday.

On Tuesday, Ouattara had won between 85.07 and 99.26 percent of votes in results for the first six of 31 regions, announced by the electoral commission on state television.

Peaceful, transparent elections could help the West African country to turn the page on a 2011 civil war and a decade-long political crisis.

Since Ouattara took power in 2011, the world’s top cocoa grower has become a regional economic powerhouse, luring in investors where other African economies have struggled under a global slump in commodities prices.

Several opposition candidates had alleged fraud in the run-up to Sunday’s vote, but observers have given the election a clean bill of health. (Reporting by Joe Bavier and Loucoumane Coulibaly; Editing by Emma Farge and Kevin Liffey)