Soldiers in Gabon say they’ve seized power and detained Prez

Mutinous soldiers claimed to have seized power in Gabon on Wednesday and put the president under house arrest, hours after he was declared the winner in an election extending his family’s 55-year rule in the oil-rich Central African nation.

In a video apparently from detention in his residence, President Ali Bongo Ondimba called on people to “make noise” to support him. But crowds instead took to the streets of the capital and sang the national anthem to celebrate the coup attempt against a dynasty accused of getting rich on the country’s resource wealth while many of its citizens struggle to scrape by.

“Thank you, army. Finally, we’ve been waiting a long time for this moment,” said

Yollande Okomo, standing in front of soldiers from Gabon’s elite republican guard, one of the units that staged the takeover.

Bongo, 64, has served two terms since coming to power in 2009 after the death of his father, who ruled the country for 41 years, and there has been widespread discontent with their reign for years.

Another group of mutinous soldiers attempted a coup in 2019 but was quickly overpowered. The former French colony is a member of OPEC, but its oil wealth is concentrated in the hands of a few and nearly 40% of Gabonese aged 15 to 24 were out of work in 2020, according to the World Bank.

Several members of the Bongo family, meanwhile, are under investigation in France, and some face preliminary charges of embezzlement, money laundering and other forms of corruption, according to French media reports.

A spokesman for the soldiers who claimed power Wednesday said that Bongo’s “unpredictable, irresponsible governance” risked leading the country into chaos.

In a later statement, the coup leaders said people around the president had been arrested for “high betrayal of state institutions, massive embezzlement of public funds (and) international financial embezzlement”.

The coup attempt came about one month after mutinous soldiers in Niger seized power from the democratically elected government, and is the latest in a series of coups across West and Central Africa in recent years.

The impunity those putschists enjoyed may have inspired the soldiers in Gabon, said Maja Bovcon.