By Isaac Asabor
In the month of November, 2015, a startling revelation emerged that President Ali Bongo Ondimba of Gabon that was ousted in Gabon in the wee hours of yesterday is a Nigerian of the ethnic Igbo stock, and adopted by a former leader of the country during the Biafran war.
The disquieting disclosure was made as a Court in western France at the time allowed a family member of Ali Bongo Ondimba to view the birth certificate of the leader after accusations that he lied about where he was born.
The queer exposé about the origin of Ali at the time was then necessitated as the country’s presidential elections was approaching, and there was an urgent need to clear the controversy which was brewing over Ali Bongo’s place of birth, particularly as critics were saying he falsified his birth certificate to hide the fact that he was adopted from another country. It was then believed that if the allegations prove true, it could keep him from running for another term and cost him his wealth.
It will be recalled in this context that the Court in Nantes, a city in France, at the time allowed 25-year-old Onaida Maisha Bongo Ondimba, a daughter of former president Omar Bongo, to view the documents in full, even as her lawyer Eric Moutet hailed the decision as “enormous”, though “diplomatically complex. Ostensibly to authenticate the somewhat conspiracy theory that surrounds his paternity, Ali Bongo was at the time confirmed to be the only one of ex-president Omar Bongo’s 54 declared heirs not to have produced the identification documents.
However, as fate would have it, Ali Bongo assumed the presidency following the 2009 death of his father Omar Bongo, who had presided over the political and economic affairs of Gabon and its oil and mineral wealth since 1967.
At this juncture, it is expedient to clarify that the Gabonese constitution says one must be born Gabonese to serve as the head of state, but French investigative journalist Pierre Pean at the time the controversy was raging alleged in his book that the president (Ali Bongo) was actually a Nigerian adopted during the Biafran war in the late 1960s, even as Bongo himself claimed he was born in Brazzaville in 1959, former capital of French Equatorial Africa.
At the time, investigations had it that the Nantes civil registration Centre was responsible for all birth certificates of people born in French Equatorial Africa up to 1960, when the former colonial countries in the region gained independence to become Gabon, Congo, Chad and the Central African Republic.
At this juncture, it is expedient to opine that even if the controversy was cleared for him to become the president that the somewhat conspiracy theory that surrounds his birth stuck.
However, given the realism of the fact that is inherent in an African proverb that says, “No one rules forever on the throne of time”, Gabon officers on August 30, 2023, declared a military coup against Bongo, and consequently detained him.
The Military officers in the oil-producing Gabon said they had seized power on Wednesday, placing him under house arrest and naming a new leader after the Central African state’s election body announced that Bongo had won a third term.
The military juntas said they represented the armed forces, and declared on television that the election results were cancelled, borders closed and state institutions dissolved, after a tense vote that was set to extend the Bongo family’s more than half century in power.
In fact, within hours, generals met to discuss who would lead the transition and agreed by unanimous vote to appoint General Brice Oligui Nguema, former head of the presidential guard, according to another televised address.
Without doubt, Bongo’s plight can be said to be a dramatic reversal from the early hours of Wednesday when the electoral commission declared him the winner of Saturday’s disputed vote.
Meanwhile, hundreds of Gabonese are celebrating the military’s intervention in the streets of Gabon’s capital Libreville, while the United Nations (UN), African Union (AU) and France, Gabon’s former colonial ruler which has troops stationed there, condemned the coup.
At this juncture, it is expedient to recall that the military takeover in Gabon is the eighth in West and Central Africa since 2020, and the second, after Niger Republic. It will also be recalled in this context that military officers have also seized power in Mali, Guinea, Burkina Faso and Chad, erasing democratic gains since the 1990s and raising fear among foreign powers that have strategic interests in the region, and without doubt, his ouster marks the fall of a confirmed Igbo man in Gabon.
