Omar Bongo
Omar Bongo was president of Gabon from December 1967, when the first president died and the thirty-one-year-old vice-president whom the French had chosen and trained took over, to June 2009, when he died in a Barcelona clinic after forty-one and a half years, the longest of any ruler in Africa then. He was the small man from the Téké minority who converted to Islam in 1973 to please the Arab oil producers. He ran a country of a million people and the oil of Elf as the central pillar of Françafrique. The Elf money paid his family, the French parties, the Gabonese opposition and the presidential guard that French officers commanded. There were the Transgabonais railway, the Libreville of the marble palace, and the four hundred million dollars a year of oil revenue divided between the state, the family and the French so that Gabon had one of the highest incomes per head in Africa and a third of its people under the poverty line. He made the country a one-party state in 1968, was re-elected unopposed until 1993 and against opponents afterwards in elections that the opponents did not accept. He mediated, with the money, in Congo-Brazzaville, Chad, the Central African Republic and Angola, which made him the dean of the francophone presidents. He was born in Lewai in 1935, the ninth child of a farmer, was educated in Brazzaville, and served in the French air force. He was the president's chief of staff when the French paratroopers restored him after the coup of 1964, which was when Paris chose him. The Elf trial in Paris in 2003, the Bourgi confession of 2011 about suitcases of cash to Chirac's and Villepin's campaigns, the biens mal acquis case brought by Transparency International in 2007 over thirty-nine properties in France, the Senate report in Washington in 1999 on the Citibank accounts, and the annual bill from the Paris tailors were the record. His daughter married the Congolese president's son. His son Ali succeeded him, in the election of August 2009 that the opposition called stolen. The family held the country until the coup of 2023, fifty-five years. He is buried in Franceville, in his own province, in a mausoleum. The stadium, the university and the airport carry the name.
- Lived: 1935 CE – 2009 CE
- Nationality: Gabonese
- Roles: president, politician
