Gabonese woke up this Wednesday, August 30 with two announcements that rocked their country. The first came late on Tuesday night, when Ali Bongo was declared the winner of the August 26 presidential election with 64.27% of the vote, his main rival Albert Ondo Ossa winning 30.77% of the vote. The second fell almost immediately, when a group of a dozen soldiers appeared on the screens of the Gabon 24 television channel, housed within the presidency itself, to announce that they had “put an end to the regime in place” and placed in “House arrest” President Ali Bongo Ondimba, 14 years in power. Laurence Ndong is a teacher-researcher and president of “Debout Peuple Libre”. After having been at the heart of the Bongo-PDG system (the Gabonese Democratic Party), she has since campaigned for her country to regain its credibility. She confided in Point Afrique on the current events.
Le Point Afrique: The Gabonese army burst into the political game on Wednesday, August 30 and announced that it was taking power, are you surprised?
Laurence Ndong: It is a real relief to know that an electoral coup was averted in Gabon. Because in reality the Gabonese were about to take to the streets, and it was the same army that would have shot at them as in 2009 and 2016, except that the soldiers decided to end the reign of the “Bongo”.
Ali Bongo was never elected, the power in place steals the elections, it reverses the results, the winner is declared the loser and vice versa, and when the people take to the streets, they are simply shot.
That being said, it’s not the best way to come to power, it’s not the democratic alternation we dreamed of. The regime is deposited but not in the way we would have liked because we fought for this to happen through the ballot box. But never mind, the coup that happened today in Gabon is considered by Gabonese as an act of public health because since 2016, the country was blocked, nothing was done, the situation was become unsustainable for Gabonese and for Africa. The military therefore stepped in as an arbiter to put an end to a chaotic situation.
Why do you think now?
A third electoral hold-up would have been unbearable and unacceptable for the population, because the Gabonese fought so hard to bring down the Bongo-PDG regime. The mobilization was very strong in recent days during the election campaign and the theft of this presidential election would have been really difficult to digest. We were on the verge of civil war.
Can you both be a democrat and be happy with a coup?
In my view, democracy is respect for the sovereignty of the people, respect for fundamental rights, including the right to freely choose and elect these leaders.
Where has democracy been in Gabon since the Bongos came to power and since we voted? A democracy is not just about organizing elections. Gabon has never been a democracy. The Bongos have been organizing constitutional coups, institutional coups, electoral coups for nearly 30 years in Gabon in plain sight, and everyone is silent. When we condemn coups, we must condemn all coups, including institutional coups.
However, it is the lax attitude toward constitutional and institutional coups that means that the Gabonese today owe their salvation to a military coup.
To simply condemn this coup would be grandstanding because what the people want is liberation and no matter where it comes from. Today, I affirm, Gabon has avoided a bloodbath thanks to these soldiers.
Military taking power doesn’t mean the end of problems for Gabonese people, are you confident?
Today, the question of trust does not arise, it is time to take stock. We saw on television a group of soldiers from different army corps who took the decision to carry out a putsch against the chaotic governance of the country, which we protest against. They said they were against truncated elections, which we are against. And then they say they’re going to restore the institutions, that’s what we expect!
Because the institutions in Gabon do not exist. We have a Constitutional Court which was constituted by the Bongo family, led by the same woman for 33 years, and it has, each time, decided all the elections in favor of Omar Bongo and then of his son, Ali Bongo. As a result, the Gabonese nicknamed it the Tower of Pisa.
European Union observers wrote an observation report of the 2016 elections which claims that they were tainted with fraud, they write that Ali Bongo did not win the elections. Yet no one condemned this constitutional coup.
The Gabonese were tired of the Bongos. 56 years of Bongo power was too much.
The soldiers say that they are getting rid of them, we are happy that the Bongos have fallen and we expect them to go through with their approach, that is to say that they restore to the people their dignity and sovereignty.
This putsch is reminiscent of that of 2019, which aborted… What about today?
The difference with 2019 is that we are dealing with senior officers. I remind you that among the soldiers who appeared on television, there is the number 2 of the Republican Guard, we had the head of the intelligence service of the presidency, senior officers of the gendarmerie, of the army of earth etc. So that’s another level.
The crisis of 2016 never passed, the Gabonese did not digest the electoral hold-up of 2016. In 2018, we were still very very numerous on the ground to demand that Ali Bongo go away, he had his stroke, he disappears, he comes back, we don’t know who manages Gabon. We don’t know who makes the decisions.
The living conditions of the Gabonese have deteriorated considerably, we have witnessed a phenomenon that we had never seen before. Foreign nationals who come to despoil the Gabonese of their ancestral lands because these have been sold by the regime, not to mention the conditions of the last election which was held behind closed doors, without foreign observers, without foreign journalists. The day before the election, we institute a curfew, we close the borders, on election day we cut off the Internet, at some point, we must not abuse it, what is the transparency we want to establish in putting the country under glass! All of this exasperated. Not to mention the Covid-19 crisis which has done a lot of harm to the populations.
We expect the international community to follow the Gabonese people because it has never followed them. The Gabonese people have rejected Bongo since 1993 when we had the first multi-party elections. The Gabonese people have always voted overwhelmingly against the Bongos. The Bongos stayed in power only by force of arms and rigged elections and the international community fell silent.
The Gabonese will chart their own course and a transition will perhaps take place, in any case, let’s observe what will happen. Gabon to the Gabonese. We could not obtain democratic alternation because the Bongos infiltrated and confiscated all the institutions, they instrumentalized them to stay in power for life. From now on, there is another way which opens, we will explore it hoping that the country will finally become a true rule of law.
