2023-08-30 13:24:39
While President Ali Bongo has just been re-elected as head of Gabon, soldiers announced on Wednesday August 29, 2023 that they had put an end to his regime.
Are we heading towards an unconstitutional change of regime at the head of Gabon in the middle of the electoral process? This is what is taking shape in view of the coup led by soldiers who appeared this Wednesday morning on the public television channel Gabon 24, housed within the Gabonese presidency.
“We, the defense and security forces, gathered within the Committee for the Transition and the Restoration of Institutions (CTRI), on behalf of the Gabonese people and guarantor of the protection of institutions, have decided to defend peace by putting an end to the regime in place. To this end, the general elections of August 26, 2023 as well as the truncated results are cancelled”announced one of the soldiers, an army colonel.
Ali Bongo under house arrest
In a press release read on television, the soldiers announced that Ali Bongo “is kept under house arrest, surrounded by his family and doctors”. The same statement mentions the arrest of several close associates of the ousted president, including his son Noureddin Bongo Valentin. These personalities are arrested in particular for “high treason against State institutions, massive embezzlement of public funds, international financial embezzlement in an organized gang, forgery and use of forgery, falsification of the signature of the President of the Republic, active corruption, drug trafficking“, according to the statement of the military.
Re-election for a 3rd term
This coup intervened in the middle of the electoral process marked by a curfew and an Internet shutdown throughout the country, two measures decreed by the government on Saturday before the closing of the polling stations in order to ward off, according to him, possible “violence”.
According to the results of the presidential election published a few moments before the irruption of the soldiers on the screens, the outgoing president had won 64.27% of the votes cast and was therefore re-elected. His main adversary, opponent Albert Ondo Ossa, credited with 30.77% of the vote according to the results, had denounced “fraud orchestrated by the Bongo camp” before the close of the poll and was already claiming victory.
2019 coup attempt
Ali Bongo, in power since 2009 after the death of his father, Gabon’s second head of state having spent more than 41 years in power, was re-elected in 2016 for a second term in a ballot marred by violence. At the beginning of January 2019, while the president who suffered a stroke was recovering in Morocco, a commando had unsuccessfully tried to overthrow it. After a coup statement on national public radio, the group of putschists had been arrested.
With AFP
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