Of all the promises of reform made by General Brice Oligui Nguema during his address to the nation on Monday, September 4, there was one that brought the audience to its feet and provoked the most clamor on the Hassan-II esplanade: revising the conditions for granting Gabonese nationality. "I pledge," stated Gabon's new transitional president, who had led the coup five days earlier, "that the age-old relations between the Gabonese and our foreign brothers will always be relations of great friendship, tolerance and harmony, [but] politics and administration in a country are areas of national sovereignty, to say so is in no way xenophobia."
In Libreville, there's no need to be more explicit. Everyone has in mind what the opposition denounced 10 years ago as the "foreign legion" – non-Gabonese advisors placed by Ali Bongo Ondimba in the highest offices of the state. Mainly within the presidential administration or at the head of specialized public agencies, they have built up over time a veritable parallel power, operating in an opaque manner and supplanting the powers of the government.
Shortly after General Oligui Nguema's takeover, several videos shot by the new authorities continued to fuel anger. In one of them, the main figure is none other than Mohamed Aliou Oceni, former deputy chief of staff to Noureddin Bongo Valentin, the son of the deposed president, who was catapulted to the position of coordinator of presidential affairs in 2019, just after his father's serious stroke. The investigators who arrived at the Beninese-born son's residence in the early hours of the morning not only discovered a very luxurious home, well beyond the means of a deputy cabinet director. They also opened several safes overflowing with cash. The same scene was witnessed at the home of Kim Oun, a Korean chargé d'affaires in the office of the French-Gabonese first lady, Sylvia Bongo Ondimba.
Others before them had made the headlines: Maixent Accrombessi, of Beninese origin, and Brice Laccruche Alihanga, who's French-Gabonese, were successive directors of Ondimba's cabinet and the talk of the town before falling from grace.
"We need to introduce new, more restrictive regulations for sensitive positions which, in most countries of the world, cannot be filled by foreigners," said Justine Judith Lekogo, former minister for the economy and finance. "But, in the end," she explained, "these examples stigmatize above all the dysfunctional governance and a corrupted regime."
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