GABON: NGUEMA CONSOLIDATES POWER
Brigadier-General Brice Nguema embarks on a mission to consolidate ancien regime of Gabon in reconfigured format…
When the coup d'état occurred in Gabon, excited voices both in mainstream corporate media and alternative media outlets began to gloat about another domino crashing in the crumbling French neocolonial system known colloquially as “La Francafrique”.
After a few weeks, some mainstream media outlets seem to have ended their vacuous analysis and studied the situation more carefully. That led them to inevitably arrive at the same conclusion that I reached immediately after the August 2023 military coup d'état.
The putschists who overthrew Ali Bongo had not abolished Gabon’s ancien régime, but merely reconfigured it— removing extremely notorious members of the ruling Bongo Dynasty, while allowing other less well-known members to remain in control.
Some alternative media outlets still don’t get it and continue to delude themselves that an “anti-imperialist” revolutionary military junta—supposedly hostile to France— is currently running that country.
On 3 September 2023, I wrote the detailed article posted below to explain what had actually happened in Gabon. I highly encourage all new visitors to this blog to read :
As I have stated repeatedly, Africa is a complicated continent with countries and subregions of varying histories and political cultures. Yes, there are common themes of corruption and poverty, but it is completely wrong to assume that Mali or Burkina Faso in West Africa is the same as Gabon in Central Africa.
Generalization, oversimplification and mindless supposition are consistent blind spots for alternative media outlets when it comes to covering events in Africa.
The military coup in Gabon had nothing to do with “anti-French” sentiments. In fact, anybody who knows that country intimately knows that it is unusually Francophile, which places it in sharp contrast to other Francophone African States as explained in three previous articles, I have written.
When Emmanuel Macron visited the continent earlier this year, he began with the much friendlier Gabon, as I reported at the time. While in Gabon, he met members of the local political opposition who were angry with France for supporting the ruling Bongo Dynasty.
Now, let me quote myself from that report:
Opposition politicians aren't generally hostile to French influence in Gabon. They are merely opposed to what they construe as Macron's endorsement of incumbent President Ali Bongo in the upcoming 2023 Presidential election.
Once you exclude fringe groups, most members of the political opposition in Gabon aren’t against French influence in their country, they simply want the French government to switch its support from the ruling Bongo Dynasty to themselves. That attitude in Gabon is in sharp contrast to the situation in Guinea, Burkina Faso and Mali, which want nothing at all to do with France.
Of course, the 2023 President Election was held on 26 August 2023 and was controversially “won” by Ali Bongo to the chagrin of Gabonese populace and the alarm of the military high command, which has been quietly trying—without success— to dissuade Ali Bongo from continuing in power after a devastating stroke that left him partially paralyzed in October 2018.
For the first time in 55 years, political stable Gabon witnessed a military coup d'état on 7 January 2019. It failed, but it was only a matter of time before the handicapped Ali Bongo would be forcibly escorted to the exit door.
The successful coup d’état on 30 August 2023 was about removing an incapable national leader, President Ali Bongo Ondimba, who had caused Gabon’s standard of living to fall.
Under Ali’s late father, President Omar Bongo, the country had the fourth highest standard of living in the entire continent of 54 African nations. During the rule of Ali Bongo, Gabon slipped down the ranks to seventh place in the Human Development Index as shown below:
By African standards, the slip down in the ranking wasn’t too bad. After all, Gabon remained among the top ten in Africa with relatively decent Human Development Indices.
But the Gabonese were not satisfied with that, especially when unemployment soared to 33% — which again is nothing compared to the situation in other Central African countries with 90% to 95% of their populations mired in poverty and civil conflict.
The coup did not remove the ruling Bongo family. It merely swapped President Ali Bongo with his former bodyguard and cousin, Brigadier-General Brice Oligui Nguema, who have been deeply implicated in some of the corrupt excesses of the ruling family.
The Gabonese public knew who General Nguema actually was, and yet they did not protest his ascendancy to the status of military ruler.
In sharp contrast, back in April 2019, the protesting Sudanese people rejected the replacement of Head of State Omar al-Bashir with his formerly loyal subordinate, Lieutenant-General Ahmed Awad Ibn Auf, who had staged the coup d'état that ended the career of his boss.
Despite turning against al-Bashir, the new Sudanese military ruler, Ahmed Awad Ibn Auf, was unable to win the support of demonstrators on the streets of Khartoum. Mass protests in Sudan continued until he resigned in favour of General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, who was seen as more distant from the toppled al-Bashir regime.
The Gabonese protesters on the streets were well aware that Nguema was an integral member of the ruling Bongo family, but they still accepted him without complaint. In other words, they simply wanted an administrator more capable than the highly incompetent Ali Bongo. And if that capable administrator happened to be a close relative of Ali Bongo, so be it.
While there have been occasional incidents of protests in the past that specifically targeted French government for its tenacious support of Ali Bongo, the Gabonese aren’t generally hostile to France.
This explains all those videos online showing demonstrators restricting themselves to celebrating the removal of Ali Bongo. There were no incidents of Gabonese people burning French flags or chanting of anti-French slogans or waving Russian flags. None of the demonstrators called for the closing of French military bases inside the country.
Again, Gabon is nothing like Mali/Burkina Faso, where poverty runs so deep that it is easy to finger France for all the misdeeds and none for the local elites, both military and civilian.
And before some cognitively challenged individual says I am downplaying “imperialism”, let me add that France is partly to blame for problems in Mali and Burkina Faso. But that does not explain Guinea, which declared total independence from France in 1958 and entered the pro-Soviet orbit.
Guinea is in a worse state than some Francophone African countries that remained under French quasi-bondage. I have already explained here and there in great details how political instability ruined Guinea despite its much vaunted independence from French control.
I don’t have time for people who refuse to read proper African history and who make excuses for the failures of various African national leaders, be they elected civilian leaders or the infinitely worse military rulers (except Captain Thomas Sankara).
So what is happening in Gabon today? Well, General Brice Nguema is preparing to imitate President Teodoro Obiang Nguema of neighbouring Equatorial Guinea. (Despite having identical surnames, both national leaders are unrelated.)
With France removing the most prominent of all generally weak challengers within the ruling Bongo family by announcing the planned prosecution of Pascaline Bongo, General Brice Nguema is free to organize elections that will transform him into a civilian President in much the same way that Major-General Teodoro Obiang Nguema of Equatorial Guinea transformed himself into a civilian President in 1982 after “democratic elections”.
Let me talk a bit about the French and American-educated Pascaline Bongo. She was once the most powerful woman in Gabon, especially when her father, President Omar Bongo, was still in the land of the living. She had served in her dad’s government as Personal Adviser to the President of Gabon (1987-1991); Minister For Foreign Affairs (1991-1994); and Director of the Cabinet of the President (1994-2009).
When Omar Bongo died in Spain, after 42 years as Gabonese national leader, Pascaline was still a very powerful person. Nevertheless, she ultimately lost out in the internecine power struggle that erupted between her and younger brother, Ali Bongo.
Once Ali Bongo seized control of the ruling political party, Parti Démocratique Gabonais (PGD), and subsequently became President of Gabon in October 2009, Pascaline was thrown into a downward spiral from power and influence. Her brother gradually stripped her of positions and privileges. By early 2019, she was still clinging to her final national post—High Personal Representative of the President of Gabon.
Without advance warning, on 2 October 2019, the council of cabinet ministers chaired by the partially paralyzed Ali Bongo issued a succinct one-sentence statement declaring that Pascaline had been fired from her final national post. Shortly after that, it was announced that she would be evicted from a government-owned villa in the upscale Sablière district of Libreville city. There were also questions as to whether she would be allowed to keep her Gabonese diplomatic passport.
The overthrow of Ali Bongo did not improve Pascaline’s standing in Gabon despite unproven claims that she had orchestrated the coup d'état. She remains as powerless as she had been since October 2009. Nevertheless, she is still a prominent member of the Bongo family, and therefore, her cousin, Brice, won’t be taking any chances.
Just like any other political leadership trying to pacify the masses in order to preserve power, the ancien regime of Gabon have had to make sacrifices. If ordinary Gabonese citizens are angry about government corruption, then why not offer up certain members of the Bongo family as scapegoats?
Why not prosecute Ali Bongo, Noureddine Bongo, Sylvia Bongo and a few others while the rest of the ruling Bongo clan and allies led by General Brice Nguema carry on with ancien regime disguised a revolutionary military junta? Obviously, France would do its part with the prosecution of Pascaline Bongo.
Having consolidated power, the new Gabonese military ruler has announced that he intends to organize general elections in August 2025. This would give him two years to see if he can build up a personal base of support rather than be solely dependent on the power and influence of the extended Bongo family, both within the armed forces and in civil politics.
Announcement of the two-year-transition from military rule back to elected democratic governance has been generally well-received by members of the public inside Gabon.
Below is a brief video reporting how members of the public in the capital city of Libreville reacted to Nguema’s timetable for general elections in 2025:
A “transition-to-democracy” charter published by the military regime stipulates that members of the ruling junta are prohibited from running for political office in 2025. Of course, the charter is cleverly drafted in such as way as to exempt the head of the military junta from the prohibition, which means that Brigadier-General Brice Nguema is free to run for presidential office in two years time, if he so desires.
Although Brice has not yet indicated any interest in standing for presidential election in 2025, it is very likely that he will go for it to protect his own interests and that of the extended Bongo family. And the people of Gabon will likely tolerate his transformation to a civilian President— provided he is able to maintain political stability and keep a trickle of the petroleum wealth flowing downwards to the masses as his uncle was able to do for 42 years.
France would also be fine with a member of the Bongo family continuing as civilian President of Gabon after the planned August 2025 elections. Because, why not?
After all, the day after the coup, Brice Nguema quietly reached out to the Macron government to explain that Gabon’s diplomatic relations with France would not be affected in anyway by Ali Bongo’s removal from power.
This was very important because mainstream corporate media outlets—including those inside France—kept claiming idiotically that the Gabonese coup was similar to the putsch in Niger Republic. Nguema felt obliged to assure Macron that those media reports weren’t true.
That particular assurance was followed up with a discreet face-to-face meeting between Nguema’s emissaries and the French government officials on the sidelines of the Annual World Bank/IMF International Meetings hosted in the Moroccan city of Marrakech from 9 to 15 October 2023.
Of course, none of those latter day revelations of Nguema’s quiet assurances to France would come as a surprise to seasoned watchers of the largely Francophile nation of Gabon. But it might come as a surprise to those alt-media outlets that continue to portray Gabonese putschists as “revolutionaries who defeated French imperialism”.
THE END
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Postcript:
For other articles related to the one above, please read:
There seem to be one or two templates that are used by media for explanations as to any of these government shifts or “coups”.
Hola , Excelente Artículo. Un Saludo.