IN GABON, a central African country of 1.8m people, it is not easy to avoid president Ali Bongo Ondimba’s face. At the airport, his portraits hangs behind the immigration desk, Mr Bongo leaning on an expensive chair. In government offices, the same, and private businesses too. When your correspondent visited, he beamed out of posters for the latest copy of the French magazine, Jeune Afrique. In the local papers, he is generally the main feature on the front page.
The pictures seem unlikely to change soon. On August 27th, Mr Bongo, who has been president since 2009, following his father who ruled for 42 years, submitted himself to re-election. Few expected him to lose, and he did not disappoint. But the outcome was far closer than most analysts expoected. In the end, the results took four days to come out, and when Mr Bongo was declared the winner—beating Jean Ping, a former chairman of the commission of the African Union—it was by just a few thousand votes.
It was far from a clean result. The European Union declared that the vote “lacked transparency”. This would seem an understatement. To get to his final winning tally, Mr Bongo took 95% of the...Continue reading
Source: Middle East and Africa http://ift.tt/2bUuXD5
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