The End of the Bongo Dynasty in Gabon
Gabonese officers seized power in August 2023 minutes after the electoral commission declared the president re-elected. The Bongo family had governed for fifty-five years. Omar Bongo took power in 1967 and ruled until his death in 2009, and his son Ali Bongo Ondimba succeeded him and won contested elections in 2009 and 2016, the second by fewer than 6,000 votes with one province returning 95 per cent turnout and 95 per cent for him. The country has oil, manganese and some of the densest forest in Africa, a population of about 2.3 million, and a third of it living in poverty. The 2023 election was held with the internet cut, a curfew imposed and foreign observers excluded, and the announcement came at three in the morning. Officers of the Republican Guard, commanded by General Brice Oligui Nguema — a cousin of the president who had been his father's aide-de-camp — appeared on television within the hour, annulled the result, dissolved the institutions and put Bongo under house arrest. Crowds celebrated in Libreville. The coup was the eighth in west and central Africa in three years, after Mali, Guinea, Burkina Faso, Chad, Sudan and Niger, and it differed from the others in being made by the ruling family's own security apparatus rather than against it. Oligui was sworn in as transitional president, promised elections, and won them in 2025. The pattern across the region is the same in each case and the causes are not. Elections that produce no alternation, security forces that have been given the means to intervene, and populations that celebrate a coup because the alternative on offer was another twenty years of the same family.
- Year: 2023 CE
- Category: Coup
