Ali Bongo Ondimba has faced several struggles in recent years to maintain the power inherited from his father, including a coup attempt, which is now repeated and threatens to topple the dynasty that has ruled Gabon for 55 years.
Hours after the announcement of the dissolution of the country’s institutions by a group of soldiers on the Gabon 24 television channel, installed in the presidency itself, the fate of the 64-year-old head of state is still unknown.
Ali Bongo had just been announced as the winner of the Gabonese presidential elections last Saturday the 26th and re-elected for a third term by the country’s national electoral commission with 64.27% of the vote, but the coup leaders claimed that the results had been ” truncated”.
In 14 years in power, the President, elected in 2009 after the death of his father, the immovable Omar Bongo, has revealed himself in recent years as a hunter of “traitors” and “free riders” at the top of the State, little little by little to reverse the perception installed among the population that the days of the Bongo dynasty had come to an end with the stroke that killed him in 2018.
Ali Bongo’s intense convalescence and rehabilitation then lasted ten months, during which time he disappeared abroad, and his reappearance was seen as a miracle, although his absence weakened his power.
Since then, his opponents have regularly questioned his intellectual and physical ability to lead the country, with some even claiming that he will be replaced by a lookalike.
However, if a stiffness in his right leg and arm prevents him from moving easily, his head remains intact, according to regular visitors, diplomats and others.
During his first term, Ali Bongo was the antithesis of his father: without the charisma and inventiveness of the “patriarch” – who reigned undisputedly for 41 years in the small, very rich oil state in Central Africa – it was difficult for him to assert his authority , particularly in the face of the restless members of the all-powerful Gabonese Democratic Party (PDG).
His re-election in 2016, already hotly contested by the opposition and officially won by just 5,500 votes, was a first shock for Ali Bongo, followed by a second – the stroke – that precipitated his transformation.
His convalescence was marked by a failed coup, of vague outlines, on January 7, 2019, and by an attempt by his then omnipotent chief of staff, Brice Laccruche Alihanga, to remove him.
Laccruche has been jailed for more than three years, along with several ministers and senior officials, the target of a ruthless “anti-corruption” operation.
In a Gabon plagued by endemic corruption since the decades in which Omar Bongo was its most emblematic pillar, Ali Bongo has in recent years presented ministers and councilors as the “father of rigor”, subjecting them to audits and dismissing them to the minimum . suspicion.
For the opposition, however, the gap between rich and poor is growing in one of the richest countries in Africa in terms of GDP per capita and where the absence of policies capable of diversifying an economy that is too dependent on oil pushes one in every three people below the poverty line.
Heir to part of his father’s immense fortune, “Mr. Son” or “Baby Zeus”, as he was known at the time, was portrayed during his first term by the opposition as a ruler distant from his people, taking refuge in luxurious properties in Gabon and abroad or behind the wheel of numerous luxury cars, handing over the country’s politics and affairs to the direction of councilors and ministers, who confused them with their own interests.
However, in recent years, in addition to assuming himself as the “father of rigor”, Bongo has also become a political strategist, just like his father, adding victories both in his field and in that of a disunited opposition, of the one that eliminated ministerial portfolios and prominent titles.
Today, his followers see him as a phoenix that rises from the ashes, after painful re-education sessions. His critics, on the other hand, accuse him of letting himself be carried away by the interests of his followers, who do not want to give up power and the conquests obtained in 55 years of the “Bongo dynasty.”
Source: TSF
