Gabon votes on Saturday to pick a president with junta chief Brice Oligui Nguema the hot favourite to become the oil-rich country’s first elected leader since his August 2023 coup.
Nineteen months after he ended more than five decades of Bongo dynastic rule widely viewed as corrupt, the 50-year-old career soldier has predicted a “historic victory” for himself against seven hopefuls.
Voters are expected to head to the polls between 7:30 am and 6:00 pm (0630 and 1700 GMT) on Saturday, with Alain-Claude Bilie By Nze, the last prime minister under ousted leader Ali Bongo, widely considered Oligui’s most credible challenger.
The central African nation’s interior ministry has promised to release the results by April 16 at the latest.
Oligui, throughout a truncated campaign, has sought to shed his military strongman image, tapping into social media dance trends while styling himself as the “candidate of the people”.
To comply with the new electoral code voted on in January, the junta chief has even temporarily hung up his general’s uniform to run for a seven-year term.
“He has brought change. We’ve noticed that in a year and a half he has done what the others had not been able to do in 50” years, said 49-year-old teacher Karen Minkoue, attending a rally on the Saturday before the vote.
But critics accuse Oligui, who had promised to hand power back to civilians, of failing to move on from the years of plunder of the country’s vast mineral wealth under the Bongos, whom he served for years.
Oligui’s image has been plastered all over the capital Libreville alongside his campaign slogan “C’BON” — a play on the French words for “It’s good” and the junta chief’s initials — while those of his rivals are nowhere to be seen.
‘Cult of personality’
Each time Oligui ventures out to greet supporters, crowds of Gabonese clad in T-shirts and baseball caps emblazoned with his likeness have given him a rapturous welcome.
Those in attendance are treated to the sight of Oligui as entertainer, singing, dancing, acting as compere, bowing to traditional rites and gifting a pair of trendy trainers to a young supporter.
The junta chief has adopted legendary Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt’s signature lightning bolt pose, while footage of his public appearances has gone viral on the internet, spawning a dance challenge.
Yet his communication strategy resembles that of Oligui’s longtime former masters, the Bongo family, political analyst Lysiane Neyer Kenga told AFP.
Oligui was leading “an American-style campaign on big bucks”, with massive rallies and a large-scale billboard strategy “that tends towards a cult of personality”, Neyer Kenga added.
By contrast, his main challenger Billie By Nze has led a sober presidential tilt, door-knocking in poorer neighbourhoods and braving flooded districts to sound the alarm over “dictatorship on the march”.
Despite his long years in the Bongo government, Billie By Nze has positioned himself as the “clean break” candidate, publicly admitting the failings of the administration he served under.
On the campaign trail he has accused Oligui, who served as patriarch Omar Bongo’s former aide-de-camp before becoming chief of the presidential guard under his son Ali Bongo, of continuing the Bongo dynasty’s legacy of poor governance.
The other candidates are tax inspector Joseph Lapensee Essingone, doctor Stephane Germain Iloko Boussengui, senior civil servant Alain Simplice Boungoueres, and three entrepreneurs in Axel Stophene Ibinga Ibinga, Thierry Yvon Michel Ngoma and Zenaba Gninga Chaning — the sole woman in the race.
‘Within the rules’
Whoever wins will have to meet the high hopes of a country where one in three people lives below the poverty line despite its vast resource wealth, according to the World Bank.
Voters will expect their future president to fix the outdated electric grid and road network, create jobs, diversify the country’s petrol-dependant economy — all while labouring under Gabon’s hefty debt burden.
Gabon’s debt rose to 73.3 percent of GDP last year and is projected to reach 80 percent this year.
Analyst Neyer Kenga likewise pointed to “the return to constitutional order” as one of the key campaign issues, in the hope the vote puts an end to the country’s strife.
In the past weeks, the interior ministry has been at pains to insist Saturday’s vote will be “a transparent ballot and an election accessible” to all.
“Today all Gabonese are firmly in favour of a democratic game that is played within the rules,” said Neyer Kenga.
Following years marked by a post-vote crisis in 2009 and 2016’s bloodily repressed protests — not to mention the August 2023 coup — “the people’s response at the ballot box is never known in advance”, she added.
