The Government of Gabon announced this Saturday the curfew and suspended Internet access, after the closure of the polling stations for the national elections and due to accusations of electoral fraud by the opposition.
To prevent “the spread of calls for violence (…) and false information (…) the Government made the decision to suspend, until further notice, Internet access throughout the territory”, applied from this Sunday 27 of August (…) between 7:00 p.m. and 6:00 a.m.,” reported the Minister of Communication, Rodrigue Mboumba Bissaou, on public television.
The measures were made public a few hours after Albert Ondo Ossa, the main opposition candidate and main rival of the head of state, Ali Bongo Ondimba, who is running for a third term, denounced the existence of an “orchestrated fraud.”
“I am perfectly aware of the fraud orchestrated by Ali Bongo and his supporters (…) I even have the results that are about to be declared, in which I am the winner in only two provinces: Woleu-Ntem and Ngounié,” denounced Ondo Ossa, who has already announced that he will not accept negotiations with the president.
Ossa even guarantees that he was the winner of the elections and that, once he comes to power, he will create the conditions for members of the Bongo family to leave the country.
More than 846,800 Gabonese were called to the polls today to vote in the presidential, legislative and municipal elections.
The elections took place without the presence of foreign journalists, after the Gabonese authorities rejected all requests for accreditation to cover the media.
Nor was it possible to carry out the observation mission of the European Union, which was present at the 2016 presidential elections, when it warned of the appearance of anomalies that cast doubt on the final result.
In these one-round elections, Ali Bongo, 64, aspires to a third five-year term (allowed by the Constitution), after having come to power after the death of his father, Omar Bongo, who ruled the country since 1967 . .
There are 12 opposition candidates, including Ondo Ossa, 69, an economics professor at Libreville’s Omar Bongo University, a 2009 presidential candidate and a former minister of higher education and research.
After Ondo Ossa was elected a consensus candidate for the Alternation 2023 movement, six other presidential candidates withdrew their candidacies, but the Gabonese press today confirmed the presence of withdrawn candidates in some polling stations.
Source: TSF
