What changed hands: nothing financial, and that is the story. On 7 May 2026, Cote d’Ivoire’s Ministry of Culture and Francophonie installed a new interim director general at BURIDA, the country’s sole collecting society for music copyright, with an explicit mandate to make the institution transparent. Twenty-two days later, BURIDA’s own member-artists said they still could not get a straight answer about where 2 billion FCFA (roughly $3.3 million) of royalty money had gone, and the society’s own insiders could not agree among themselves who was responsible.
No master recording changed owner. No catalogue was bought or sold. What this record documents is simpler and, for the tens of thousands of Ivorian musicians who rely on BURIDA to collect what radio stations, bars, telecoms and broadcasters owe them, more consequential: an institution that has spent years promising reform cannot currently produce one account of its own books that its own members accept.
The handover: a promise of transparency#
BURIDA, the Bureau Ivoirien du Droit d’Auteur, has existed in some form since 1981, when Decree 81-232 created it as the national body collecting and distributing royalties for music, literary and artistic works. It operates today under Decree 2015-271, under the Ministry of Culture’s oversight, as Cote d’Ivoire’s only government-recognised collective management organisation. In practice, that means if a nightclub in Abidjan plays a Yodé & Siro track, or a radio station in Bouaké spins a coupe-decale hit, BURIDA is the body legally positioned to collect a fee on the songwriter’s behalf and, eventually, pay it out.
On 7 May 2026, at BURIDA’s Abidjan headquarters, Minister Francoise Remarck’s office handed the interim director general’s chair to Professor Hien Sie, until then the ministry’s own director of cabinet. The appointment traced to an arrete the minister had signed on 18 March 2026. He replaced Apkatou Koffi Serge, who had himself only been filling in after the previous director general, Karim Ouattara, left the post to take up a seat in the National Assembly, a chain of three director generals inside roughly a year.
At the handover, the outgoing Apkatou Koffi Serge framed the institution’s task in a single sentence: the job was to “transformer durablement le BURIDA en une institution moderne, performante, transparente”, to durably transform BURIDA into a modern, high-performing, transparent institution. Incoming director Hien Sie struck the same note, pledging to follow the minister’s roadmap and to restore BURIDA’s standing internationally. Transparency was not an incidental word at that ceremony. It was the word.
Three weeks later: a 2 billion FCFA question nobody could answer#
On 29 May 2026, at a press conference at the Centre Culturel d’Abobo, BURIDA’s own sociétaires, the registered member-artists the society exists to pay, put that word to a direct test. Speaking for the group, the comedian and spokesman Nestor Eboua, known professionally as Akowe, said an internal audit had identified a hole of 2 billion FCFA in the institution’s accounts, tied to the period when singer and board chairman Gadji Celi presided over BURIDA, before the country’s 2010-2011 post-electoral crisis. “Cet argent n’appartient ni a l’Etat ni a une personne privee,” Eboua said: this money belongs neither to the state nor to a private person. He gave Gadji Celi three days to come and explain himself publicly, warning that the matter would otherwise be referred to the Procureur de la Republique, Cote d’Ivoire’s public prosecutor. The same press conference put BURIDA’s wider institutional debt at close to 4 billion FCFA, though it was not stated whether that figure includes the 2 billion or sits on top of it.
A second outlet, Connectionivoirienne, covered the same press conference the same day and recorded the same figure, the same three-day deadline and the same prosecutor threat, with its own quotes from Eboua: “Nous avons accepte des sacrifices avec douleur, mais avec responsabilite, parce que nous voulions sauver le BURIDA.” We accepted sacrifices with pain, but with responsibility, because we wanted to save BURIDA. Two independently reported accounts of one press conference, in close agreement with each other, is the strongest form of local corroboration available for an event like this.
The response nobody expected: a dispute inside BURIDA itself#
What neither outlet anticipated was that the pushback would come from inside BURIDA’s own membership, not from Gadji Celi. On 31 May 2026, two days after the ultimatum, Serge Kassy, a reggae artist who says he served on BURIDA’s board of directors during Gadji Celi’s presidency, posted a rebuttal that L’Avenir reported on 1 June 2026. Kassy did not dispute that 2 billion FCFA was missing. He disputed who lost it. He said the audit that found the gap was one the board itself had ordered, that the shortfall traced to events before Gadji Celi’s own presidency began, and that responsibility belonged instead with “ceux qui ont precede Gadji Celi a la tete du BURIDA”, those who preceded Gadji Celi at BURIDA’s head, naming former director general Barouan Michel specifically. Kassy added that the matter had already been examined once before, under a previous Culture Minister, Maurice Bandama, and treated as settled.
That is a genuine, named, on-the-record contradiction between two people who both say they sat on the same board: one says the money disappeared under Gadji Celi; the other, who served alongside him, says it disappeared before he arrived. Neither account can simply be adopted. Gadji Celi himself, for his part, did not appear in any source checked for this record responding to the 29 May allegation specifically. He has a documented history of disputing earlier, differently sized accusations: Cote d’Ivoire’s trade press reported in 2016 that colleagues had accused him of diverting 5 billion FCFA, a figure he rejected at the time. But that 2016 article sits behind a paywall beyond its headline, and no primary source for his later radio remarks on the subject could be independently located, so neither is treated here as a verified fact. What can be verified is narrower and, in its way, more telling: Gadji Celi was BURIDA’s board chairman, not its chief executive, he spent twelve years in exile in France before returning to Cote d’Ivoire on 26 July 2023, and as of the most recent reporting checked for this record, no one has produced a document that settles who, if anyone, is accountable for the 2 billion FCFA.
What this means for artists#
For an Ivorian songwriter, none of this is academic. BURIDA is not one option among several for collecting airplay and public-performance royalties; it is the only legally recognised route. If BURIDA cannot reconcile its own books, the practical effect is not an accounting footnote, it is money that a working musician is owed and cannot independently trace, administered by a body whose own leadership has changed three times in roughly a year and whose own former board members cannot agree on where a documented shortfall originated.
The broader pattern should also be named plainly, because it recurs across this desk’s reporting on African collecting societies: an official statement promising reform, modernisation or transparency, followed within weeks or months by a development that either contradicts it or reveals the underlying problem untouched. BURIDA’s case adds a wrinkle those other cases did not have: the contradiction here is not simply officials versus artists, or promise versus outcome. It is a dispute between two people who both claim first-hand knowledge of BURIDA’s own board, unable to agree on a basic fact about their own institution’s history.
What could not be established#
No audit document was obtained or read by this desk; the 2 billion FCFA figure rests on the public characterisation of an unnamed, undated audit by two sources who disagree about everything except its existence and its size. No source checked after 1 June 2026 records whether Gadji Celi answered the ultimatum, or whether BURIDA’s sociétaires followed through on referring the matter to the public prosecutor. BURIDA’s current annual collection and distribution totals, separately reported elsewhere, are not part of this record and have not been merged with the shortfall figures above. Readers should treat the responsibility question as genuinely open, not as a story this desk is declining to finish; it is a story where the documents available, as of publication, do not yet resolve it.
