Thread by @nyeusi_waasi

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The Bongo clan, which took control of Gabon and ruled for 50 years, their career was dedicated to dictatorship, corruption, and the defense of Western imperialism commercial and strategic interests in sub-Saharan Africa.

A consummate political survivor, the Bongo clan kept power by placing the resources of their impoverished, oil-rich country in the hands of foreign oil companies and politicians. Unable to resolve bitter internal divisions and poverty in Gabon, the legacy of French colonial rule

The father Omar Bongo performed his obligatory French military service from 1958 to 1960, serving in Air Force Intelligence, where he attained the rank of lieutenant. He briefly returned to work for the Post Office in the Gabonese capital, Libreville.

The same year Bongo was discharged from the French armed forces, Gabon was formally granted independence from France.

Bongo quickly made his first steps into politics, using his connections in Freemasonry to get involved in the first election campaign of the independent Gabon, in 1961.

He managed to be spotted and courted by both main politicians contesting for power: Léon Mba and Jean-Hilaire Aubame.

Aubame favored a parliamentary regime, while Mba preferred a strong presidency. Bongo ultimately chose to side with Mba, who was also De Gaulle's choice. Before Gabon's independence

Both Mba and Bongo expressed the wish that Gabon could become a French département, i.e. formally a part of France, like Martinique and Guadeloupe, with the French tricolor inserted into the Gabonese flag.

Having lost the election, Aubame agreed to become Mba's Prime minister. But Mba did not trust Aubame and tried to have him assassinated in 1963. This backfired, as a military coup briefly brought Aubame to power in 1964

France intervened, sending paratroopers to restore Mba to power. Bongo was jailed during the coup. From this experience, he reportedly concluded that he could not trust the Gabonese army and that it was better to rely on French troops.

Bongo became defense minister in 1965, replacing Mba when his health deteriorated the same year. He was appointed Vice-President and took the interim on Mba's death in 1967. He soon proclaimed a single-party system, ruled by his own Parti démocratique gabonaise (PDG).

Bongo turned Gabon into an outpost to serve French interests in Africa. He helped France in its support for the secessionist war in the oil-rich Nigerian province of Biafra. Foccart organized the sending of weapons to Biafra,

hiding them in aid cargo air-shipped by the Red Cross through the Libreville airport. He also sent in numerous mercenaries, including the best-known of France's guns-for-hire, Bob Denard.

The Catholic charity Caritas also took part in logistical support for Biafra fighters. At this point, Bongo converted to Catholicism, visiting Pope Paul VI in 1968.

Bongo would continue to assist French interventions in Africa. In 1977, he covered up French President Valérie Giscard d'Estaing's failed attempt at overthrowing Benin's nationalist leader, Mathieu Kérékou.

This decision was significant: Bongo might have helped his Gaullist allies like Jacques Chirac, who were political opponents of Giscard d'Estaing, by revealing the affair. However, on such matters, Bongo deferred to overall French strategic interests.

In the early 1970s, oil became Gabon's biggest export. The country joined OPEC in 1975. To prepare for this, Bongo converted to Islam in 1973, at the recommendation of Libyan dictator Moammar Gaddafi. He took Omar as his first name.

Gabon's oil industry was largely operated by French oil company Elf, now absorbed into French oil major Total. Besides a small portion used to bribe the ruling Gabonese clique around Bongo, the oil revenues were stolen by a corrupt layer of French businessmen and politicians.

Elf itself was a political creation, part and parcel of the France Afrique networks set up by de Gaulle and Foccart, designed to further French imperialism's interests in newly "independent" Africa. Deeply corrupt, it has provided funds for a variety of French political

and strategic initiatives and created a string of scandals, most notably in recent times over kickbacks in France's 1991 sale of six frigates to Taiwan.

Former Elf president Loïc Le Floch-Prigent, who was convicted of embezzling millions from Elf in 2003, testified in court: “In 1962, [Elf founder Pierre Guillaumat] convinced [Charles de Gaulle] to set up a parallel structure of real oil technicians.

[By creating Elf] the Gaullists wanted a real secular arm of the state in Africa...a sort of permanent ministry of oil...a sort of intelligence office in the oil-producing countries.”

Asked to explain Elf's relations with its African oil suppliers, Le Floch-Prigent said: "Let's call a spade a spade. Elf's money goes to Africa and comes back to France."

This money allowed right-wing forces to buy influence in French politics as well. Bongo reportedly financed Giscard d'Estaing in 1974 against the centre-right candidate Chaban-Delmas, and then Jacques Chirac in every subsequent presidential election until 2007.

In 1989, President François Mitterrand of the Socialist Party arranged that this money would now benefit both the left and the right, according to Le Floch-Prigent's testimony. He said: "I asked Mitterrand, 'Do you want me to cut the flow [i.e., of funds], yes or no?'

and Mitterrand answered, 'Ah! No, we continue what was put in place by General de Gaulle.' And he simply asked me to rebalance things, without forgetting [Chirac's] RPR party."

Bongo thus presided over a system whereby Gabon's economy was plundered in the interests of a narrow layer of corrupt French politicians and businessmen. Reflecting its oil and mineral wealth, Gabon has a substantial GDP: $21.4 billion a year, or $14,400 per capita.

This is four times that of most sub-Saharan African nations. However, with these funds siphoned off largely by France or by the ruling clique around Bongo, the Gabonese masses remain mired in bitter poverty.

Life expectancy at birth is 53 years, putting Gabon in 198th place among the world's countries, and there are only 29 doctors per 100,000 inhabitants. Only 3.8 percent of Gabon's GDP is spent on education, ranking it 118th.

The UN's IRIN news service notes that 30 percent of the population lives under the official poverty line, and that "according to the IMF, Gabon's social indicators are more in line with those of low-income countries in sub-Saharan Africa."

According to former French investigating judge Eva Joly, who led an inquiry into Bongo's affairs, Gabon builds five kilometers of roads every year, for a road network that is only 900 km long.

On the other end of the social spectrum, a tiny layer of Gabonese thrives. In a recent issue of Jeune Afrique (the international edition), one learns they travel in private jets from Libreville to Paris for a day of shopping, and that last year,

Gabon was the fourth largest African importer of champagne, with 181,000 bottles.

As a state whose wealth was largely based on oil revenues, Gabon remains desperately vulnerable to falls in oil prices on international markets.

From 1986 to 1990, low oil prices created a massive series of strikes through all economic sectors and among students. In 1988, Bongo began to discuss with his political opponents, whose most prominent figure was his father Paul Mba Abessole.

Bongo hoped they could channel the anger into safe waters, but he was still hesitating over granting a multiparty system.

On January 16, 1990, students at Omar Bongo University in Libreville struck against the lack of funding. It was called the "Diarrheal Strike," because it started over a massive food poisoning of all students at the campus canteen.

The next day, police evacuated the university by force. From the 18th on, the unrest spread into the city involving all sections of the population. 

Bongo obtained the capitulation of students by offering to pay for damages and inviting them publicly to a feast in his palace.

But only two days later, strikes erupted in air traffic control, gas stations, railways, and the electricity company. Riots began anew, and the army took up positions to protect Bongo's palace.

On March 21, workers at oil refineries accounting for 70 percent of Gabon's exports, began striking too. On March 23, Bongo tried to calm things down by calling a national conference on a multiparty system, but the strikes did not stop.

On the 27th, Bongo declared a curfew for the whole country.

The multiparty system was finally proclaimed on April 19, but the lives of Gabonese did not improve. On May 23, upon the death of opposition leader Joseph Rendjambe, a riot started at Port-Gentil, during which the French consulate was burned down.

The disturbances quickly spread to the whole country once again. On the next day, France sent in troops, officially to evacuate its 1800 citizens from Gabon. They also secured the country’s oil refineries.

On May 31, French troops regained control of the situation and again kept Bongo in power.

In the first multi-party legislative elections held in November 1990, Bongo's party won 63 seats against 57 for the various opposition parties.

The first presidential election with more than one candidate was held on December 5, 1993. Bongo was re-elected in the first round with 51.1 percent of the votes, followed by Abessole.

The troubles following this election, which was widely suspected of being rigged, ultimately led Bongo to sign the so-called Paris Agreements with the opposition.

French influence in Gabon, and more broadly in Africa, began to weaken in the 1990s. This was not the reflection of any growing independence of leaders like Bongo from world imperialism or effective political opposition to Bongo in the Gabonese ruling elite

Rather, Bongo, like other African rulers, was developing closer ties with other great powers; initially to US imperialism, and more recently to commercial competition from China.

After the collapse of the USSR in 1991 removed Soviet competition as a common enemy for US and French imperialism, Washington pursued a more aggressive policy in Paris' African "backyard."

This was reflected in Gabon's trade relations. In 1990, France was Gabon's leading trade partner, with 38 percent of exports and 60.6 percent of imports. North America accounted for 22 and 11 percent respectively.

The US played a role in removing the French-backed regimes of Mobutu in Zaire (the former Belgian Congo) in 1997, and Habyarimana in neighboring Rwanda in 1994.

Paris helped protect the Hutu regime in Rwanda, whose genocide against the Tutsis and oppositional Hutus claimed 800,000 lives. The civil war that broke out in Zaire (today the Democratic Republic of the Congo) would claim several million lives.

Bongo was too tied to France to switch alliances overnight, but he cultivated links with the US, as well. During the civil war in the neighboring Republic of Congo between 1993 and 1999, he sold weapons both to Elf's proxy,

Denis Sassou Ngesso and Pascal Lissouba wanted to switch oil contracts to the US company Oxy. As Gabon was one of the few countries in the region not to descend into civil war, Bongo portrayed himself as a helpful negotiator for peace in Africa.

By the onset of the present decade, Bongo was moving closer to the US. In 2000, A US Senate commission led by Democrat Carl Levin estimated that Bongo deposited $130 million in his accounts at New York's Citibank between 1985 and 1997.

On November 9, 2005, the New York Times reported that Bongo had given $9 million to US lobbyist Jack Abramoff to arrange a meeting with Bush. Bongo denied this.

Tensions from corruption investigations in France, such as the Elf Affair, soured Paris' relations with Bongo. In their obituary of Bongo, Le Figaro wrote that he "knew everything about everyone, that was his best life insurance policy

Bongo himself was targeted by the French justice system in the so-called "illegally acquired goods" scandal. Bongo, Pres Nguesso of Congo-Brazzaville, President Teodoro Obiang Nguéma of Equatorial Guinea were accused of embezzlement by non-governmental organizations in France.

In 2008, the daily Le Monde revealed they owned 150 million Euro in luxury apartments and houses bought with state money, in France alone. The investigation was temporarily halted in May 2009, and Bongo died before it resumed.

Throughout this period, Bongo maintained his rule by using Gabon's oil wealth to buy off a series of opposition politicians. Perhaps the most famous recent case was that of Union of the Gabonese People (UPG) leader Pierre Mamboundou

who finished second in the 2005 elections behind Bongo, with 13.5 percent of the vote. Mamboundou briefly took refuge in the South African embassy in 2006, after Gabonese security forces raided UPG headquarters.

However, in 2007 Bongo met with Mamboundou and negotiated a political truce in exchange for a development loan for Mamboundou's municipality, Ndendé.

After Bongo's death, the power struggle for his succession was concentrated inside the ruling party, the Gabonese Democratic Party (PDG), between his daughter Pascaline and his son Ali. Ultimately, Ali was chosen as the PDG's candidate and won the August 30 elections.

The election of Ali Bongo to replace his father Omar symbolizes the essential continuity of imperialist influence in Gabon. In addition, Gabon’s oil revenues are dwindling. This is bad news for a country that is resource-dependent With fewer petrodollars flowing into the economy

Ali Bongo’s expensive patronage system will suffer and he may start to lose support.

About a fifth of Gabonese live on less than $2 a day and nearly a third live below itn national poverty line

Gabon faces a financial squeeze owing to a long-term decline in oil output which shrunk GDP per capita by nearly a fifth between 1980 and 2014, according to the United Nations Development Prog, ram, and a sharp fall in the price of crude over the past two years.

Efforts to diversify into agriculture and tourism have yet to bear much fruit.
Oil wealth has flowed mostly to the elite for a period Gabon was the world’s top per capita importer of champagne and has trickled down slightly only via its bloated civil service.

gets out the authority after a group of senior Gabonese military officials appeared on national television declaring they have seized power, claiming the recent general election lacks credibility and saying they represent all Gabon’s security forces.

He has suborned the country’s constitution and is on course to make himself a life president. He’s been already in power for 14 years and has just perverted another election to stay in power for a 3rd term.