Gabon coup: A blow for democracy – or to it?

Early Wednesday morning, Armel Mickala was hiding in a hut in the forest outside Gabon’s capital, Libreville. An opposition social media activist and local government candidate in last weekend’s elections, he had fled his home the night before on rumors that a friend of his had been arrested.

Isolated from his colleagues and the rest of the world since President Ali Bongo Ondimba cut off the internet in the wake of the vote, Mr. Mickala was anxiously waiting for news that would determine the future of his country. 

Then his phone rang. Unsurprisingly, Mr. Bongo – the man he had been denouncing for years to his online social media community of thousands of supporters – had been declared the winner of the presidential race.

Shortly afterward, gunshots rang through Libreville’s streets. Then another call came: The longtime president had been ousted; the military had taken power.

When hundreds of people poured into the streets, cheering and chanting, Mr. Mickala waited a little longer before trusting the crowds. “The coup saved my life,” he says. 

Mixed reactions

The Bongo family had ruled the oil-rich Central African nation of Gabon for more than five decades; Ali Bongo took over on the death of his father, Omar in 2009. Generations of Gabonese citizens have known no other rulers than the Bongo dynasty, widely accused of enriching themselves from the country’s vast resources, while most Gabonese struggle to make ends meet.

“We are supposed to be rich,” says Mr. Mickala, who worked at a market stall selling second-hand clothes before becoming a candidate in local elections last Saturday. “But while they drive around in sports cars like Cristiano Ronaldo, we live in poverty.” 

In a post-coup statement, the military said Mr. Bongo and his entourage had been arrested for “serious betrayal of state institutions, massive embezzlement of public funds, [and] international financial embezzlement.”  He would be replaced as interim president by the coup leader, General Brice Oligui Nguema, the head of his presidential guard who is also his cousin.

Some experts warn that the takeover would not necessarily improve the lives of Gabonese citizens.

“Hunters will be hunters, and some may be nicer than others, but at the end of the day they will drag out the formal transition process,” cautions Nathaniel Powell, a West Africa expert at the Oxford Analytica consultancy. “They will keep the networks of corruption alive.”

International reaction to the coup, however, was not as scathing as it had been after the recent military coup in nearby Niger, which overthrew a democratically elected president.

“Military coups are not the solution, but we must not forget that just before this, Gabon held elections full of irregularities,” the European Union foreign policy chief, Joseph Borrell, said Thursday. “If I rig elections to take power, that is also an irregular way of getting power.”

In Gabon, the coup appeared to be widely popular, and the mood has been largely celebratory. A video of Mr. Bongo under house arrest, calling on his “friends” to “make noise” to secure his release, soon prompted playful remixes and parodies online. 

New hope?

Many young people in Gabon, as elsewhere on the continent, trust men in uniform to bring good governance to their countries. The country is the fourth-largest oil producer in sub-Saharan Africa, but 34% of its citizens live below the poverty line and nearly 40% of young Gabonese are unemployed, according to World Bank figures. Corruption is rife; Gabon ranks 136th on Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index.

But young Gabonese, although disillusioned by their leaders clinging to power and failing to provide economic opportunities, have not given up hope. And a new wave of young politicians has emerged in recent years seeking improvements through democratic means.

Around 100 young people put themselves forward as candidates in the local and legislative elections that took place at the same time as the presidential race last weekend. Among them was Mr. Mickala, and also Jean Yeno, a 34-year-old accountant from Libreville who spent weeks knocking on doors and encouraging people to register to vote while campaigning for a seat in parliament and his municipality.

“We knew that we wouldn’t get the true results from this election, but not voting is giving up,” he says. “It’s our country, we have to do something to stop it from going down.”

Mr. Yeno says he was astonished and inspired when, during a study abroad program in South Africa, he saw his classmates organizing in political groups. On his return home, he became an activist himself, shocked by the number of his friends with university degrees who could only find work driving taxis or selling food on the side of the road.

“There are so many good things in this country,” he says. “We just lack good management.”

“Army is doing justice”

Although he has been pushing for democratic change in Gabon, Mr. Yeno says he is relieved about the outcome of the elections. Young people have been showing increasing levels of political engagement, he says, and “the army took power based on our engagement.” He hopes the coup leaders will soon hand power to the opposition, who reports suggest may in fact have won the vote, and is glad that violence was kept to a minimum. 

Mr. Yeno vividly recalls the deadly protests that broke out when Ali Bongo was declared the winner of presidential elections in 2016. “Maybe today I would have been the one to lose my life,” he says.

“Full satisfaction would be to see the person we have voted for [declared the new president], but for now the army is doing justice,” he adds.

Mr. Powell, the Oxford Analytica analyst, is not so sure. The fact that the coup leaders have shown no sign yet of reaching out to the opposition, he says, suggests that “this is a palace coup aiming to protect patronage networks and the functioning of a corrupt system. The people at the top have changed, but everything else is preserved.”

Mr. Mickala also has his doubts. “The military said the [election] results were wrong. But that means the right numbers must be somewhere,” he says. “Will they establish the true president or not?”