Ousted Gabonese President Ali Bongo has begged for intervention after the military overthrew him.
Bongo has appeared in a video calling for his “friends” to “make noise” after military officers in the oil-rich Central African state staged a coup.
“I’m sending a message to all friends that we have all over the world to tell them to make noise for (…) the people here who arrested me and my family,” he said, looking worried, in the clip posted on social media. AFP was not able to determine where or when the video was captured.
Also read: Gabonese military sacks President Ali Bongo
Recall that the members of the Gabon Armed Forces announced that they had taken over power in the country in a broadcast via national television on Wednesday, August 30.
According to the military, they were setting aside the results of the country’s election on Saturday, August 26, in which President Ali Bongo was declared the winner.
Bongo had won 64.27 percent votes in the election, and that his main opponent, Ondo Ossa had followed with 30.77 per cent of the votes.
However, observers had said that it was fraudulent as numerous polling stations opened hours late, amid claims of ballot slips not being deployed correctly and the authorities cutting internet service and imposing a night-time curfew after the vote. The country suspended broadcasts by French television on the election results.
During the announcement, AFP journalists heard gunfire ring out in the Gabonese capital, Libreville.
While announcing the cancellation of the vote results, one of the officers said “all the institutions of the republic” had been dissolved.
The address was read by an officer flanked by a group of a dozen army colonels, members of the elite Republican Guard, regular soldiers and others.
It came moments after the national election authority said Bongo had won a third term in Saturday’s election with 64.27 percent of the vote.
Meanwhile, the embattled Gabonese President is under house arrest and one of his sons has been arrested for “treason,” military officers said Wednesday.
In a statement read out on state TV, the military officers said Bongo was under house arrest “surrounded by his family and doctors.”
Bongo has been in power since 2009, when he succeeded his father, Omar Bongo, who ruled Gabon for 42 years.
Bongo’s son and close adviser Noureddin Bongo Valentin, his chief of staff Ian Ghislain Ngoulou as well as his deputy, two other presidential advisers, and the two top officials in the ruling Gabonese Democratic Party (PDG) “have been arrested,” a military leader said.
They are accused of treason, embezzlement, corruption, and falsifying the president’s signature, among other allegations, he said.
Tinubu, FKK React
President Bola Tinubu has condemned the coup carried out in Gabon in the early hours of Wednesday, August 30.
Speaking to State House correspondents, the Special Adviser to the President on Media and Publicity, Ajuri Ngelale, expressed Tinubu’s belief that the rule of law and a faithful recourse to the constitutional resolution of electoral disputes must not be allowed to perish in Africa.
“President Bola Ahmed Tinubu is watching developments in Gabon very closely with deep concern for the country’s socio-political stability and the seeming autocratic contagion apparently spreading across different regions of our beloved continent.
The president, as a man who has made significant personal sacrifices in his own life, in the cause of advancing and defending democracy, has all of the unwavering belief that power belongs in the hands of Africa’s great people, and not in the barrel of a loaded gun.”
Ngelale added that Tinubu affirmed that “the rule of law and a faithful recourse to constitutional resolutions and instruments of electoral dispute resolution must not at any time be allowed to perish from our great continent”.
He added that President Tinubu is “working very closely and continuing to communicate with other heads of state in the African Union towards a comprehensive consensus on the next steps forward with respect to how the crisis in Gabon will play out into how the continent will respond to the contagion of autocracy we are seeing spread across our continent”.
Former Minister of Aviation, Femi Fani-Kayode has reacted to the report of a coup in Gabon.
Bongo inherited power from his father who was also French-backed, in 2009, and both father and son have been in control of the country for more than half a century.
Fani-Kayode stated that the hegemony of the French in Africa is almost over.
He added that France has been challenged, humiliated, ridiculed, diminished, demystified, and rubbished by most of their erstwhile African colonies and the hatred, contempt, opprobrium, and disdain that they attract from the overwhelming majority of Africans is mind-boggling and unprecedented.
He tweeted; “With events in Gabon today it is fair to say that the hegemony of the French in Africa is almost over. They have been challenged, humiliated, ridiculed, diminished, demystified and rubbished by most of their erstwhile African colonies and the hatred, contempt, opprobrium and disdain that they attract from the overwhelming majority of Africans is mind-boggling and unprecedented.
“If they don’t submit to the will of the African people, put their little French tails between their legs, bow down to the local population and beat a hasty and dignified retreat back to France with at least a measure of their dignity still intact they will be thrown out by the force of arms just as they were in Viet Nam and Algeria.
‘‘The cry on the African continent today is liberty and freedom from the tyrannical bondage and venomous yoke of the French and deliverance from their perverted, pervasive and corrosive ways and systemic oppression.
“Simply put, Francophone Africans are no longer interested in being slaves or in being ruled by a series of vicious, corrupt, perfidious and barbaric puppet leaders, pseudo monarchs and life-time dictators who have sold their bodies, spirits and souls to the devil and their French masters. Kudos to them!”
(AFP and other agency’s reports
