Expected for several days, the results of the presidential elections organized on Saturday in Gabon have fallen. Gabon’s President Ali Bongo Ondimba, in power for 14 years, won a third term with 64.27% of the votes cast, the national polling authority announced on Wednesday. A few hours later, in a press release broadcast on television, a group of soldiers claimed to “put an end to the regime in place”.
After noting “an irresponsible, unpredictable governance, which results in a continuous deterioration of social cohesion risking to lead the country to chaos […] we have decided to defend peace by putting an end to the regime in place”, declared a of these soldiers, saying they speak on behalf of a “Committee for the transition and restoration of institutions”. During this statement, AFP journalists heard automatic gunfire in Libreville.
Ali Bongo defeated, in a single round ballot, his main rival Albert Ondo Ossa, who won only 30.77% of the vote, as well as 12 other candidates who only collected crumbs, detailed the President of the Gabonese Elections Center (CGE), Michel Stéphane Bonda, on the air of Gabon 1ère state television. “At the end of the centralization of the results […] is elected Bongo Ondimba Ali with 293,919 votes or 64.27%”, declared Michel Stéphane Bonda.
The participation rate was 56.65%. Albert Ondo Ossa had denounced “fraud orchestrated by the Bongo camp”, two hours before the close of the poll on Saturday, and was already claiming victory. His camp on Monday urged Ali Bongo to “organize, without bloodshed, the transfer of power” on the basis of a count carried out according to him by his own tellers, and without producing any supporting document.
The official results were announced in the middle of the night, at 3:30 a.m., on state television without any announcement of the event having been made beforehand. In the middle of a curfew, therefore, and while the Internet is cut across the country, two measures decreed by the government on Saturday before the closing of the polls, in order to ward off, according to him, the dissemination of “fake news” and to d possible “violence”.