The coup in Gabon has been compared to the coups that have swept across West Africa since 2020.
While there are similarities it is probably incorrect to compare them too closely - even if they have shaken the African Union and West African leaders' commitment to see the end of military seizures of power.
The coup in Gabon has been compared to the coups that have swept across West Africa since 2020.
While there are similarities it is probably incorrect to compare them too closely – even if they have shaken the African Union and West African leaders’ commitment to see the end of military seizures of power.
So what do we need to know, now that General Brice Clotaire Oligui Nguema, chief of the Republican Guard, has been designated president of the transitional committee?
First: the Gabonese government was correctly termed a a “dynastic republic”.
As Douglas Yates argued:
In dynastic republics, presidents have concentrated power in their hands and established systems of personal rule. They transmit state power through nepotism to their family and kin. This includes sons and daughters, wives and ex-wives, brothers and sisters, half-siblings and step-siblings, cousins, uncles and aunts, nieces and nephews, in-laws, illegitimate children and so on.
Under this system, the classical ideal of a legal-rational state – where position and rank are distributed based on merit in the name of the rational (efficient and effective) functioning of government -– is corrupted.
In all dynastic republics around the world – including Togo, Equatorial Guinea, Syria, Azerbaijan, North Korea, Turkmenistan and most recently Cambodia –- an institutionalisation of traditional family power through the modern vehicle of a single ruling party has been critical.
In Gabon, this is the Parti Démocratique Gabonais. The party holds the presidential palace and has a majority in the national assembly (98/143 seats) and in the senate (46/67 seats). It also controls the courts, and the regional and municipal governments.
It is critical to understand that no man rules alone. Only with a large party apparatus can a man and his family rule a republic with millions of people.
Gabon: how the Bongo family’s 56-year rule has hurt the country and divided the opposition
Second: The Bongo family has been accused of being deeply involved in corruption
Last year four children of Gabon’s late president Omar Bongo were charged in France with embezzlement and corruption.
This is what RFI said at the time:
The siblings – Grace, Betty, Arthur and Hermine Bongo, all in their 50s – were charged between 25 March and 5 April by financial investigators.
The allegations include concealing embezzlement of public funds, corruption and misuse of company assets.
Investigators believe members of the Bongo dynasty – including Omar, his son Ali, 64, who is now President of Gabon, and his daughter Pascaline, 66 – knowingly benefited from a fraudulently acquired real estate empire worth at least 85 million euros.
All four of Omar Bongo’s children, who have now been charged, denied any knowledge of the allegedly fraudulent origins of the assets, the source said.
They told investigators they had received the properties – apartments in the well-heeled 15th and 16th districts of Paris – as gifts from their father between 1995 and 2004.
France files graft charges against children of late Gabonese leader Omar Bongo
There were also allegations in the Pandora Papers that the ousted President, Ali Bongo, had unexplained holdings in the British Virgin Islands.
Third: Brice Clothaire Oligui Nguema, who has taken power, is a cousin of Ali Bongo, whom he overthrew
As al-Jazeera reported:
Brice Clothaire Oligui Nguema, the commander-in-chief of the Gabonese Republican Guard – the country’s most powerful security unit – and a cousin to Bongo, is the ringleader of the attempted coup.
Nguema is one of the most influential and enigmatic figures in the country today. The son of a military officer, he trained at the Royal Military Academy of Meknes, in Morocco.
Nguema then served as Bongo’s “aides-de-camp” to a commander in former President Omar Bongo’s Republican Guard, until the former Gabonese leader’s death in 2009.
When Omar Bongo’s son Ali Bongo rose to power in October 2009, Nguema was sent to Morocco and Senegal for diplomatic missions. A decade later, he took over as the head of the guard.
The guard, whose military officers are recognisable by their green berets, is responsible for presidential security. As its head, Nguema tried to fortify Gabon’s internal security systems with reforms that were seen as elongating Bongo’s stay in power.
According to a 2020 investigation by The Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) on the Bongo family’s assets in the United States, Nguema invested in real estate, paying in cash.
“He bought three properties in middle- and working-class neighbourhoods in the Maryland suburbs of Hyattsville and Silver Spring, just outside the capital, in 2015 and 2018. The homes were purchased with a total of over $1 million in cash,” the OCCRP report said.
When reporters questioned Nguema about these properties, he said it was a private affair.
“I think whether in France or in the United States, a private life is a private life that [should be] respected.”
Who is Brice Oligui Nguema, Gabon’s interim leader?
If these allegations are all correct, and Brice Nguema consolidates his hold on power, the real question will surely be: is this not just a continuation of the “dynastic republic” described above?