'Relative to resources available, Gabon had one of the worst development returns' in all of Africa
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00:00 And for more on this story, let's bring in Paul Mellie, a consulting fellow of the Africa program at Chatham House.
00:05 Thanks for being with us again here on France 24. You know, you and I spoke not long ago about the military coup in Niger.
00:11 Are the events we're seeing unfold in Gabon different in any important way? I mean, how should we be thinking about this?
00:18 I think they are really different.
00:21 One of the things that's very striking in Gabon is this is a long-standing family dynasty,
00:28 as your report just explained.
00:30 And for many Gabonese, there was a frustration, a sense that
00:34 although elections were held regularly,
00:37 basically the result was prefixed in advance.
00:40 They didn't really have a political choice. They had the freedom to speak out, they had the freedom to comment,
00:47 they had a choice of political parties, but they couldn't actually really change their government,
00:53 change the people who ruled them. And so a small elite, the Bongo family,
00:58 and a sort of wider political and administrative class around them have monopolized
01:03 not just the leadership of the country, but if you like,
01:07 the way resources are distributed over many, many decades. That's a very different situation from Niger,
01:16 where
01:18 the president who's been deposed, Mohamed Bazoum, was only elected for the first time in 2021,
01:24 and his party,
01:27 because he succeeded someone from the same party, hadn't come to power until
01:32 2011. So it's a very, very different type of situation.
01:36 As we just saw there in that report, we were seeing these images of people celebrating in Libreville.
01:41 I wonder what you make of that. Are people
01:44 celebrating because they perceive this as the end of a corrupt family dynasty, as you just made reference to?
01:50 Well, I think it's,
01:53 whether it's fully corrupt, of course, we will wait to learn from the investigations
01:58 and information, sort of full revelation about exactly
02:02 how the system was organized. But the point is the system had become tired.
02:08 Not only did Ali Bongo's father, Omar Bongo, rule for
02:13 more than four decades,
02:15 but then in 2009, when Omar Bongo died and there was an election,
02:20 Ali Bongo emerged as the winner from that election in very opaque circumstances.
02:27 Many people actually think that the main rival candidate had actually won. Then in 2016, there was another election
02:36 where, again, there was a lot of opacity or a lot of questions over the credibility of the result.
02:43 And then again,
02:45 the election whose results were announced in the very early hours of yesterday morning,
02:50 a very strange time to announce an election result.
02:54 Again, there were big questions over the conduct of that poll. So people sort of feel
03:00 tired. They felt they didn't have much choice and they felt that Ali Bongo had already served 14 years in power, two seven-year terms.
03:09 He'd suffered a stroke. So
03:12 a major health problem in 2018.
03:14 Many people wondered was it reasonable that he should be running for a third term?
03:20 Why couldn't they have an alternative choice, a wider sort of
03:25 meaningful prospect of change? Of course, there were opposition candidates and there was
03:31 one leading opposition candidate who got 30 percent according to those official results,
03:37 but nobody ever seriously thought that he would be allowed to win. So
03:42 I think people were just sort of tired by the system and felt that
03:46 Gabon, with its rich natural resources, its oil,
03:50 its other, its minerals, its rich rainforest,
03:55 ought to be able to deliver a better development result for the population.
03:59 Right. As you point out, Gabon is an oil-rich country.
04:03 Is there a sense that that prosperity has not been passed down to everyday people who've been living under the rule of the Bongo family
04:11 for more than five decades?
04:13 Yes, there's a lot of social inequality. There's a feeling that
04:18 essentially, it's not just the Bongo family, but the wider elite class were very well looked after, if you like, by the regime.
04:28 But ordinary people did not get the level of public services or the level of income
04:34 that they could reasonably have expected. Gabon has a very small population,
04:39 only one or two million,
04:41 and yet there are serious social problems. There are serious development shortcomings.
04:47 One of the major development agencies a few years ago produced a report which assessed that
04:54 relative to the resources available, Gabon had one of the worst development returns of any country in Africa.
05:01 And so that's where people feel that there were missed opportunities, that the system could have been run so much better
05:10 Of course in any society you will have inequality, but there was a feeling that
05:13 the development return for ordinary Gabonese
05:16 and for the very large migrant population in Gabon was not as good as it could have been given the resources that the country has.
05:25 Okay, we'll have to leave it there. Paul Malley, Consulting Fellow of the Africa Program at Chatham House. Always good to talk to you.
05:31 Thanks for being with us here on France 24.