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Military officers in Gabon said they had seized power in the oil-rich country, just hours after its long-serving president Ali Bongo was declared the winner of Saturday’s election.
“In the name of the Gabonese people . . . we’ve decided to defend the peace by putting an end to the current regime,” a group of officers, some wearing military fatigues, said in a statement read out on the Gabon 24 television channel in the early hours of Wednesday.
The country’s electoral commission had earlier said that Bongo had won a third term as president after securing more than 64 per cent of the vote, which would have extended his family’s 56-year rule. Bongo has been in power since his father Omar Bongo died in office in 2009 having run the central African country for more than four decades.
The coup in Gabon would be the eighth across west and central Africa since 2020 following two putsches each in Mali and Burkina Faso, and one each in Chad, Guinea and Niger.
Bongo, 64, appeared in a short video that circulated on Wednesday, in which he confirmed he was under arrest and being held at his residence. He appealed to “all the friends we have all over the world” for help and called on the people of Gabon to “make noise” about the coup.
Yet in Libreville, the Gabonese capital, people took to the streets to show their support for those who deposed him, according to Reuters news agency reports. Videos and photos posted on social media also showed crowds cheering the coup and people tearing down election posters with Bongo’s face.
Gabon, a former French colony, maintains close economic and diplomatic ties with Paris. A French government spokesman said Paris “condemned the military coup under way in Gabon” and “reaffirmed its wish that the result of the election, when it is known, can be respected”.
Gabon is also a member of the Opec oil cartel, producing about 200,000 barrels a day, or 0.2 per cent of global supply. This gives it one of Africa’s highest incomes per capita.
Yet its oil wealth is not distributed equally. More than a third of Gabon’s 2.3mn people live below the poverty line without access to basic services.
Bongo’s family has been accused of profiting from the state’s wealth at the expense of the country’s citizens. French authorities last year charged five of his siblings in connection with an €85mn fraud case.
Saturday’s election took place in a media blackout as the government denied entry to all foreign news outlets. International observers were also not present to monitor the vote. The government also shut down the internet at the last minute to combat what it claimed were the “dangers of false information and manipulation” and imposed a curfew.
Albert Ondo Ossa, an economics professor who heads a six-party opposition coalition, claimed victory before the results were announced and called the electoral process a “fraud orchestrated by Ali Bongo and his supporters”. Ondo Ossa, who served as a minister under the elder Bongo, received 30.77 per cent of the vote on Saturday, according to the Gabon’s electoral commission.
Gabon is among the smallest oil producers in Opec, although production cuts by the wider Opec+ group have left oil traders sensitive to any further potential loss of barrels from international markets.
London-listed Tullow produced about 15,000 barrels a day in Gabon last year, but with its operations largely offshore the impact of the coup is likely to be limited. The company said its Gabon business was “unaffected” and that production continued as normal.
Shares in French-listed energy producer Maurel & Prom, which last month completed a $730mn acquisition of onshore oil assets in Gabon, fell 19 per cent, wiping more than $200mn from its market capitalisation. Brent crude, the international benchmark, was up 0.4 per cent at $85.82 a barrel.
Eramet, the French mining group that employs about 8,000 people in Gabon, told its staff to stay home on Wednesday: “All operations have been shut down and rail traffic has been halted,” it said in a statement. The company extracts manganese ore, a key ingredient in steel production, and operates a railroad business.
This is the second known coup attempt of Bongo’s reign. A group of soldiers seized the state radio station in 2019, saying they wanted to “restore democracy”. The mutiny was quickly put down with two suspected coup plotters killed.
Josep Borrell, the EU’s chief diplomat, called the latest coup attempt “a big issue for Europe”. “If this is confirmed, it’s another military coup, which increases instability in the whole region,” he said ahead of a meeting of EU defence ministers on Wednesday.
“The whole area, starting with Central African Republic, then Mali, then Burkina Faso, now Niger, maybe Gabon. It’s in a very difficult situation.”
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