HUMAN-RIGHTS: Disabled Held Back By Discrimination

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Melvis Dzisah

ABIDJAN, Nov 16 1997 (IPS) - Jean Baptiste Angaman successfully passed the entrance exam to the elite Ivoirian School of Administration but, when he turned up for an interview, he was refused admission because of his physical disability.

“I had a blackout when the reality hit me. All my life I had worked very hard to pass my examinations without realising that my physical disability would one day become a major handicap in my social progress,” Angaman said.

He was lucky however to get re-admitted a year later, because of the pressure put on the school’s authorities by Cote d’Ivoire’s First Lady, Henriette Konan Bedie, who is patron of the Association for the Disabled.

Cote d’Ivoire’s more than one million disabled constantly face discrimination, and have been lobbying for years for the government to enact legislation to protect their human rights.

“We are discriminated against every day by society…We are always at the losing end,” said Coulibaly Abdouramane Kaman, a medical student at the National University in Abidjan.

Kaman, who leads a group of disabled students at the university, said that they are “mostly shunned by our colleagues, which makes campus life very difficult for us”. There are some 375 disabled students at the National University here.

“We bear the humiliations and try as much as possible to overlook them by not thinking about our physical disabilities,” Coulibaly said.

Earlier this month, the government proposed new legislation to ensure that the disabled have the right to education and the right to work. Introducing a proposed bill, Minister of Communication Dannielle Boni Clavierie said: “The time and moment have arrived to invent a strategy to assure a veritable, judicial protection of disabled children, adolescents and adults who also have rights to education and vocational training.

“…No one can refuse employment to the disabled because of their condition, neither can anyone discriminate against the disabled when it comes to competing for job positions,” added Minister Clavierie.

The legislation, now before Parliament, has been welcomed by the president of the national disabled organisation, but he cautions that it is only the first step. “It is a welcomed gesture on the part of the government if after all these years of ignoring and marginalising (the disabled), it has decided to take favourable action towards improving our lot,” said Oumar Coulibaly.

He stressed, however, that proposing or passing a law is one thing, while ensuring that its contents are implemented is quite more difficult.

“We have seen situations where laws are never implemented to benefit the affected persons. My sincere hope is that it is not going to be the situation in our case,” Coulibaly said.

The disabled first organised themselves into an association in 1974. For more than 23 years, they have been lobbying for their right to participate in the Ivoirian society.

“The disabled are part of our society. To treat them like outcasts is refusing to accept our societal responsibility. Now, we wait to see if their situation is going to change when the law comes into force,” said Kouassi Kouakou, a teacher in Abidjan.