Gabon: From university to politics, Albert Ondo Ossa has become Ali Bongo's unexpected rival

From the university seraglio to the political arena, Albert Ondo Ossa, former Minister of National Education, challenges the outgoing Ali Bongo Ondimba to the presidential election on Saturday August 26 by trying to get rid of the technocrat costume to embody the “figure of change” .

With each televised appearance, few media do without shelling the extensive CV of Professor Albert Ondo Ossa, eminent 69-year-old economist, designated to everyone’s surprise “consensual candidate” of the main opposition platform, Alternation 2023, facing political tenors yet favorites, and only one week before the ballot.

“60 years of Bongo is too much! “, insists the one who has made it a program and will try to block the way to a third term of the Head of State, elected fourteen years ago after the death of his father Omar Bongo Ondimba, who had already ruled the country for more than forty-one years. Also a candidate in 2009, Mr. Ondo Ossa, father of five children, probably has a more bitter memory, with only 0.20% of the vote. An attempt “without preparation, without means and with the verb university”, recognizes Ernest Nkili, one of his closest collaborators.

Born in 1954 into a modest family in the north of the country, he has an academic profile: holder of a double doctorate in economics in France, he obtained the aggregation in Senegal. First a professor at the University of Libreville, he became the dean of the faculty of law and economics, culminating in a university career that enabled him to acquire significant notoriety among the political and economic elites in the 1990s. .

Turn it all upside down

But “the amphitheater and the presidential election are different terrains,” says Séverin Joe Malph Divassa, Deputy Secretary General of Mr. Bongo’s Gabonese Democratic Party (CEO), echoing critics pointing to an overly technocratic profile and his “lack of presence on the ground”.

It was with the status of a figure in civil society that he entered the government of Omar Bongo in 2006, inheriting until 2009 the portfolios of national education, higher education and research. “He fell like a hair on the soup of the system. Members of the government or PDG activists eyed this post. Giving it to Albert, who comes out of nowhere, aroused jealousies,” recalls Yacinthe Mba Allogo, former communications adviser to Mr. Ondo Ossa between 2006 and 2009.

Upon his arrival, he described the education sector as a “national disaster” and launched vigorous measures: fight against “the purchase of exams”, an end to “fraudulent registrations”, construction of universities and closure of 150 schools ” unsuitable”, including 90 in Libreville. This measure is generally welcomed, but the method goes badly. And while some 8,000 students out of 200,000 children in school in the country remain on the floor at the start of the school year, he is faced with a two-month strike by teachers, very followed in primary education.

Under pressure from teachers’ unions in particular, who accused Mr. Ondo Ossa’s attitude of “contempt”, Omar Bongo ended up suspending the closure of schools. “He was alone against everyone, but supported by the president, and he seemed to get used to it”, justifies Mr. Mba Allogo, praising the consistency of the candidate who “never had his card to the CEO”.

“Without Compromise”

In 2009, he left “without scandal or compromise” with power, remembers Ernest Nkili. He “did not have an open conflicting relationship” with Ali Bongo, then Minister of Defense (1999-2009), but a “different look”, which led to his presidential candidacy the same year.

After having fully returned to university life, he was the victim of a mysterious knife attack in 2014 in Libreville. The government was moved by it but, nine years later, there have been neither “trials” nor “arrests”, regrets Mr. Nkili. Asked, the Libreville prosecutor’s office did not respond to AFP’s requests.

If the designation of Mr. Ondo Ossa instilled doubt among the militants of the parties of Alternance 2023, as he seemed less well placed than other favorites, the alliance was not weakened for all that and their main leaders Alexandre Barro Chambrier and Paulette Missambo take a welded block around him.

“When you become a minister, you have a suit, a tie, you have a big car, people don’t come into your house anymore. He always kept his gate open. I don’t know what he would do as president, but minister he was never anyone other than Albert Ondo Ossa for his neighbors, “concludes Mr. Mba Allogo.