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00:00 political dynasty. The Bongo family has been in power in Gabon for 55 years. Omar Bongo took
00:07 office as president in 1967, a post he would hold for more than four decades. The country's
00:14 second president since independence, as head of a single-party system, Omar Bongo consolidated power.
00:21 He emphasized educating the nation's young, but poverty was widespread,
00:25 despite Gabon being one of Africa's top producers of oil. While many Gabonese people struggled,
00:32 Omar Bongo was accused of squandering the nation's wealth for his own benefit and that
00:37 of his large family, including his 54 children. The Gabonese president was accused of receiving
00:43 kickbacks worth tens of millions of euros from a French oil company, and under growing public
00:49 pressure and unrest, he introduced a multi-party system into Gabon's politics in the early 1990s.
00:56 After Omar Bongo's death, his son Ali Bongo was elected president in 2009, a result that was
01:04 violently contested in the streets. A year later, French prosecutors would accuse the Bongo family
01:11 of fraudulently amassing a real estate empire in France and abroad worth at least 85 million euros.
01:18 Ali Bongo claimed victory in 2016, a disputed result again, with his rival
01:27 Xi Jinping claiming fraud, losing the election by just 6,000 votes. EU observers said there was a
01:34 clear anomaly in the vote, and again there was violence in the streets. Several people were
01:39 killed and hundreds were hurt. Two years later, Ali Bongo suffered a stroke while visiting Saudi
01:46 Arabia. Hospitalized in the kingdom for more than a month, he was later transferred to Morocco to
01:51 recover, and rumors swirled about his health. He finally re-emerged, putting those rumors to rest.
01:57 "Today, as you can see, I am better, and I am planning to see you again soon."
02:04 Following his stroke, Ali Bongo's bid for re-election in 2023 marked a return to the
02:11 spotlight and a now-unrealized hope to extend his family's political legacy well into the future.