Brice Oligui Nguema

General Brice Oligui Nguema removed the Bongo family from power in Gabon in 2023, having spent his career serving it. He was an aide-de-camp to Omar Bongo, was posted abroad as a military attaché under Ali Bongo, and returned in 2018 to command the Republican Guard, the presidential protection force. He is a cousin of the family. On 30 August 2023, minutes after the electoral commission announced that Ali Bongo had won a third term, officers appeared on television to annul the result and dissolve the institutions of state, and Oligui was carried through the streets by soldiers. The coup was popular: fifty-six years of one family's rule had left a third of an oil-rich country below the poverty line. He was sworn in as transitional president, promised a return to civilian rule, oversaw a new constitution approved by referendum in 2024, and then stood in the presidential election of April 2025 and won it with about ninety per cent, having had the rules written to permit him to run. Gabon was suspended from the African Union and readmitted in 2025. It is the eighth successful coup in west and central Africa since 2020. He released Ali Bongo from house arrest within days and allowed him to leave for treatment abroad, while pursuing the former first lady and their son on corruption charges. Whether the coup was a break with the Bongo system or a rearrangement inside it is the question Gabonese politics has been arguing since. His transitional government restored the national assembly under appointed rather than elected members, and lifted the curfew imposed at the coup after several months.

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