Plagued by civil wars, coups and massive foreign debt, life in the Ivory Coast has not been in easy in recent years.
It’s one saving grace, as its citizens look to nearby countries like Mali and Nigeria, is that they have spared the kind of extremist terrorism that is tearing much of the rest of west Africa apart.
Now, though, courtesy of Sunday afternoon’s bloodshed at the country’s Grand Bassam beach resort, Ivory Coast joins the growing club of nations to have experienced random mass slaughter by jihadist extremists.
The attack has been claimed by al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), whose main operating bases are far away in the Sahara desert, more than 1600km north of the lush palms of Grand Bassam.
Nor does the group have any particular quarrel with the Ivory Coast, whose coup-wracked army these days is much too weak any way to play any major part in the regional counter-terror programmes.
Instead, the reason AQIM sent its gunmen to rampage there was simply to make their presence known - just as they did in November’s Radisson hotel attack in Mali, and January’s similar atrocity in Burkina Faso.
“They are trying achieve a kind of domino effect, starting with Mali, then Burkina, Ivory Coast, and next it will probably be Ghana or Senegal,” said Yan St Pierre, of the German Modern Security Consulting Group. “It is simply about expanding their zone of influence as much as possible.”
The reason for this, he says, is partly down to a growing rivalry between the Mokhtar Belmokhtar, the leader of AQIM, and the growing Dae’sh presence in Libya, where the group now controls the country’s former dictator Muammaer Gaddafi’s home city of Sirte.
While the two groups share many similar aims, Dae’sh’s presence serves as a constant reminder to AQIM that unless they too produce regular terrorist spectaculars, would be-recruits may lose interest in joining them.
Nor is Ivory Coast a particularly hard target. None of west Africa’s poverty-stricken states are blessed with particularly strong borders and elite counter terrorism forces.
A model of stability in the 30 years after independence from France in 1960, it has been marred for the last two decades by coups and post-election violence.
Laurent Gbagbo, the former president, is currently in the dock at The Hague over bloodshed that killed some 3,000 people when he refused to step down in 2010.
A 7,000-strong UN peacekeeping force - sent to Ivory Coast after a previous outbreak of violence in 2002 - does its best to maintain stability, while efforts have also been made since last year to tighten the border with Mali.
But weapons remain easy to get hold of on the Ivory Coast’s black market.
Until now, those conflicts have owed more to local grievances rather than some grand imported cause of transnational jihad. But AQIM would be only too happy to give Ivoirians another reason to squabble.