Gabon coup brings abrupt end to Bongos’ improbable 56-year dynasty
Veteran president removed this week inherited the huge wealth of the oil-rich country and the lavish tastes of his father
By the time Omar Bongo Ondimba died in 2009 after 41 uninterrupted years as president of Gabon he had fathered as many as 50 children. In that crowded field it was the French-educated Ali Bongo, one of seven “official sons” and a jazz-funk musician, who emerged as his successor.
Ali, now 64, was elected president a few months after his father’s death, a position he held until this week when he became the latest African head of state to be swept out of office in a coup. Thousands poured on to the streets of Libreville, the seaside capital, to celebrate the apparent demise of the Bongo dynasty.
“The army has decided to turn the page,” said Brice Oligui Nguema, a longtime confidante of both Bongos and head of the presidential guard, who led the coup. Nguema, a cousin of Ali, said the president, who had a stroke in 2018, was not competent to run the country and that the elections he had supposedly won — after an internet shutdown and a delay in counting — had not been transparent.
Ali, born Alain Bernard, struggled throughout his 14 years as president to shake off the impression that Gabon, a densely forested country of 2.4mn people, was little more than a family slush fund.
His father became president in 1967 when Ali was eight-years-old and the young boy was dispatched to Neuilly, a wealthy suburb of Paris, to be educated. Fluent in French and English, but not in the languages of Gabon, he later graduated in law from the Sorbonne.
“In life, children are going to be influenced by what their parents do,” he told the Financial Times in a 2012 interview, rejecting the idea that he should have refrained from following his father into office. “How many doctors’ sons become doctors? How many lawyer’s sons become a lawyer?” he asked.
Yet Omar Bongo, born into a peasant family in Gabon’s Bateke region, was no doctor or lawyer. After an improbable rise to the presidency, he lived like a king and renamed Lewai, the town of his birth, Bongoville.
As his country got rich on oil, producing about 230,000 barrels a day, he spent prodigiously on mansions, cars and, reputedly, on women.
Ivette Santa Maria, a 22-year-old Miss Peru, described how she had been flown to Libreville and propositioned by the then 67-year-old Gabonese leader. “He pressed a button and some sliding doors opened, revealing a large bed,” she told the Associated Press.
Bongo senior amassed a huge portfolio of property in France. A 2007 French police report said the Bongo clan had 39 properties in France, including some exclusive addresses. Prized possessions included a luxury Paris property acquired from the aristocratic Pozzo di Borgo family on Rue de l’Université and a fleet of luxury cars, including Ferraris and Mercedes.
Bongo senior was the personification of the close relations that persisted between African leaders and France, which came to be known as Francafrique. So close were the ties that, even after independence in 1960, postboxes in Libreville carried three headings: Gabon, France and Foreign Countries.
Omar, who was alleged to have funded the presidential campaign of French politicians, including Jacques Chirac and Nicolas Sarkozy, was quoted as saying of the symbiotic relations: “Gabon without France is like a car with no driver. France without Gabon is like a car with no fuel.”
After his father’s death, Ali, more diffident and earnest, worked hard to reshape his country’s image. He sought to widen Gabon’s ties by joining the Commonwealth last year. A committed environmentalist, he staked his reputation on protecting the abundant gorillas and elephants that inhabit the vast forests, which cover some 90 per cent of the country.
In 2010, he banned the export of unprocessed logs and encouraged investments to process wood into furniture and finished products. As oil reserves began to dry up he sought to turn the country into a “green superpower”, one that could potentially receive billions of dollars in carbon credits.
Gabon is one of the few countries to absorb more carbon than it emits. Last month it negotiated a $500mn debt-for-nature swap, arranged by Bank of America, that freed $163mn for marine protection.
Still, Bongo junior hobnobbed with celebrities from the UK’s King Charles III, with whom he shared an interest in conservation, and the likes of footballer Lionel Messi and Michael Jackson, the late singer, whom he entertained in Libreville. He often played jazz piano for visiting dignitaries.
Mark Pursey, chief executive of BTP Advisers, which advised Bongo’s recent election strategy, said the president had gone some way to changing perceptions of Gabon. “You go to a newspaper stand in Gabon and you’ll see opposition newspapers. This was not a Stalinist state,” he said. “In his father’s time that was simply not allowed.”
Pursey said Bongo had personally polled well, although his government’s performance was criticised, particularly in its ability to convert the country’s large, if declining, oil wealth into infrastructure, jobs and opportunity.
Bongo’s environmental policies played better abroad than at home, he said. Domestically, farmers blamed elephants for ruining their crops and people worried that protecting forests was incompatible with development.
Pursey said Bongo liked to give the impression that he had come to the presidency reluctantly. “Ali was quite shy and unassuming. He would have been very happy being a musician,” he said.
Nguema, the transitional leader, suggested in an interview with Le Monde this week that Bongo, now under house arrest, would finally get his wish. “He is retired and enjoys all his rights,” he said. “He is a normal Gabonese, like everyone else.”