When Gabon Brings Bad News To CEMAC Sit-Tight Methuselahs

By Yerima Kini Nsom

The crash of what was gradually emerging as the Bongo dynasty in Gabon for 56 years, was swift and cataclysmic. Minutes after Gabon’s electoral commission declared that the incumbent President Ali Bongo had won a third term on Wednesday August 30, senior military officers announced a coup and annulled the August 26 election.

The interval between the declaration of Ali Bongo’s victory that was highly contested by the main opposition leader, Albert Ondo Ossa, and the announcement of the military coup, was thirty minutes. Small wonder that observers are saying mockingly that President Ali Bongo’s third term lasted only thirty minutes.

General Brice Clothaire Oligui Nguema, the Commander-In-Chief of the Gabonese Republican Guard, emerged as the front man of the military coup that deposed his cousin, Ali Bongo from power. Hailed in triumph by soldiers, the man has installed himself on the saddle of the Central African country for a yet to be defined transitional. According to local media reports, the kaki boys have put the ousted President under house arrest and detained his son, some close aides and collaborators. The ordinary citizens greeted this development with a near all-out jubilation in the streets of Libreville and other areas of the country.

The CEMAC commission is yet to react to the coup. What is peculiar is that there has been fence-sitting and very subtle condemnation of western countries, including France. Analysts say the coup was the best way to stop the spate of electoral coup d’états that the Bongo family have carried on in its self-perpetration bid for close to 60 years in Gabon. Political watchers say the overthrow of Ali Bongo who succeeded his father, Omar Bongo in 2009, is not strictly a Gabonese affair. To them, its bearings lurk ominously over the entire Central African Economic and Monetary Community, CEMAC that has been the treasure trove and citadel of president-for-life exuberance, the personalization of power and the violation of the people’s sovereignty and aspirations. According to a renowned Cameroonian political scientist, Dr. Aristide Mono, the coup in Gabon, is a tacit warning to the political Methuselahs who have continued to reign in self-perpetration at the helm of some CEMAC countries. To him, the fact that the Gabonese Military has put paid to the reign of the Bongo family that grabbed power in 1967, is setting a jurisprudential stepping stone that could trigger events in other CEMAC states.

For, the gravamen of contention and grouse of the Gabonese people against the Bongo family, consists of governance pathologies that stalk the breadth and length of the sub region. For one thing, Gabon is a small country in the Central African sub region with enormous natural resources such as oil, manganese, timber as well as cash crops like cocoa. Going by the 2021 official statistics, Gabon has a population of 2.241 million people. It is a wealthy country that enjoys a per capita income four times than most of the countries in sub-Saharan African nations.

Due to high inequalities, a large proportion of the population of Gabon remains extremely poor. The wealth of the nation that is endowed with huge oil reserves, in the hands of the ruling class while the majority of the population wallows in want and deprivation.

It is reported that the average Gabonese lives on half a dollar a day. Economic analysts hold that, like most countries in the CEMAC region, Gabon cuts a clean image of what is often referred to as the “paradox of poverty”. For, it remains enigmatic to many an observer that a very rich country is home and haven to some of the poorest people in the world. World Bank statistics indicate that Gabon is the fifth largest oil-producing nation in Africa, which has helped drive its strong growth in the later 20^th century. The oil sector in that country now accounts for 50 percent of the Gross Domestic Product, GDP and 80 percent of exports.

While a large part of the population has been barely existing in penury that is compounded by the acute lack of social amenities in the country, the Bongo family and the rest of the ruling class have been living in opulence from the public purse. A glance at the fast-food reportage of events, shows that the same chaotic situation holds sway in almost all the six countries of the CEMAC region. The political history of this sub region is that of opportunism, sit-tight dictatorship, corruption and a callous negation of democratic values and the aspirations of the masses. It is a region accursed with strong leaders that toy over weak institutions. This explains the absence of free, fair and transparent elections as well as the separation of powers that would have ushered in checks and balances for the peoples’ sovereign will to triumph in every situation.

Going by the recent reports of Transparency International, the region has never ceased to be a cesspool of corruption, characterized by the embezzlement of public funds. The population of these countries are seething with anger and frustrations due to the electoral swindles that bar them from choosing leaders that are accountable to them. To them, they need pro-people leaders that would hearken to the visionary clarity of embracing democracy, the rule of law, respect of human rights, the sovereignty of civil polity, public accountability and developments as many parts the same coin of general wellbeing.

Experts hold that the absence of these governance virtues has left the population of the six CEMAC countries boiling with rage. And this represents a potentially explosive situation that needs only a spark. Political pundits are urging the leaders of other CEMAC countries, namely, Chad, Cameroon, the Central African Republic, Congo Brazzaville and Equatorial Guinea to heed their peoples’ entreaties for the general good or face the music sooner or later. The gravamen of their admonishment is that the governance malaise in the region is so commonplace that what has happened in Gabon and some Francophone West African countries, like Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger, is likely to happen anywhere in the CEMAC region. In other words, the entire sub region is so intricately linked that these common ills provide an enabling environment for military coups.

The most fundamental of these ills, is the tacit message that democracy, the rule of law, free, fair and transparent elections are plants that are too frail to survive in the dictatorial soil of the CEMAC sub region. For, CEMAC bears the unenviable blight of a sub region that providence blessed with enormous natural resources, but it paradoxically remains home for some the poorest people in the globe. Governance experts posit that such a paradox is not unconnected to the fact that this region harbors some of the world’s reigning nonagenarians and sit-tight Methuselahs who have been in power for close to half a century at the expense of their countries’ development. They have virtually emerged as traditional rulers at the helm of their various states.

The former US Under-Secretary in charge of African Affairs, Tibor Nagy, is one of those who reacted promptly to the development in Gabon in a tweet by warning other sit-tight leaders in CEMAC. Hear him: “The military takeover in Gabon will be hard to criticize given the series of votes-can’t call them democratic elections- which kept Bongo family in power for 56 years. I am sure that the Biyas and the Obiangs are paying close attention”. The Equato Guinean President, Teodora Obiang Nguema Mbassago is the dean of sit-tight leaders in the CEMAC region with 44 years of monarchical reign. He leads a ruling class that lives high and big on mineral resources like gold, uranium, diamond, tantalite, gas and oil that that the country is blessed with. Living standards in that are low as compared to the resources.

Obiang Ngema is trailed in that logic by President Paul of Cameroon who has been in power since 1982. Despite the enormous resources of the country, life is hard and brutal for the ordinary citizen. A huge chunk of the country’s resources goes into the private pockets of officials through acts of corruption.  Idriss Derby reigned supreme in Chad for several decades and was succeeded by his son a few years ago. Congo and the Central African Republic are in similar situation. Added to this conditions that fuel discontent, one of the main governing factors of military coups is neocolonial manipulation.