'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.

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