Gabonese president Ali Bongo came to power in elections held two months after the death of his father Omar Bongo in June 2009 at the age of 73. The vote was marred by fraud allegations and the result was strongly contested by the opposition.
But beyond the doubts over the vote-counting, Ali Bongo is suspected of having faked his own birth certificate in order to stand in the elections. Now the issue has returned to the fore as Ali Bongo prepares to stand for a second seven-year term of office in elections to be held on August 27th.
Up until his death, Ali Bongo’s father Omar Bongo had reigned over the West African state for 42 years in an iron rule that was marked by corruption scandals and personal enrichment. The oil-rich former French colony, where a third of the 1.5 million population live in poverty, has long occupied a key place in French economic activities in Africa. As such it was a bastion of what is called the “Françafrique”, the term used to describe France’s veiled political and economic interference in its former colonies, fuelled by corruption and protected through scores of military interventions.
Officially, Ali Bongo was born in the Gabonese capital Brazzaville on February 9th 1959 – one year before country gained independence. However, according to French investigative journalist Pierre Péan, Ali Bongo is in fact originally from Biafra, in Nigeria, from where he was adopted by Omar Bongo at the end of the 1960s.
What might otherwise be an anecdotal controversy has major political importance because under the Gabonese constitution established during Omar Bongo’s rule, “any person who has gained Gabonese nationality cannot present themselves as a candidate for the republic’s presidency”. If it were proven that Ali Bongo was originally from Biafra, and therefore of Nigerian nationality, and not the biological son of Omar Bongo, then the 2009 election result should be invalidated and he would naturally be barred from standing again.
Despite increasing doubts about the authenticity of Ali Bongo’s birth certificate, the subject of a judicial investigation in France, the French presidency has come out clearly on the Gabonese president’s side. Months after Péan detailed his findings in a book, Nouvelles Affaires Africaines, published at the end of 2014, French President François Hollande’s African affairs advisor, Hélène Le Gal, wrote a letter to members of the Gabonese opposition in July 2015 in which she stated “no doubt can be had about the authenticity” of Bongo’s birth certificate. “In the view of the French authorities, nothing can support the accusation of an administrative and legal imbroglio,” wrote Le Gal in the July 15th correspondence to which Mediapart has gained access (see below)
Since the subject first emerged, evidence has continued to gather suggesting that the certificate was a forgery. Perhaps the most spectacular was the admission by Ali Bongo himself, in an interview with Radio France Internationale (RFI) on January 11th 2015, that he had provided “false documents” to his country’s electoral commission in order to stand in the 2009 elections.
Ali Bongo was officially born during the rule of the AEF, the French colonial governorate of French Equatorial Africa (Afrique équatoriale française). The archives of documents relating to the AEF are in Nantes, in western France. The archives contain a birth certificate for Ali Bongo, whose original first names were Alain-Bernard Bongo but which were changed after Omar Bongo, who was born Albert-Bernard Bongo, converted to Islam in the early 1970s. However, the certificate in the Nantes archives (see below), which was revealed in November 2015, is notably different to that which the Gabonese presidency supplied a copy of to French daily Le Monde. Furthermore, contrary to other birth certificates of the same period, it has no official stamp mark.
Enlargement : Illustration 2
But another document, obtained by Mediapart, casts significant further doubt over the claims by the French and Gabonese authorities that Ali Bongo is the biological son of Omar Bongo. It is the birth certificate (see below) of Ali’s sister, Annick Bongo, which records that she was born on July 19th 1959 and is the daughter of Omar Bongo (then called Albert-Bernard Bongo) and Josephine Kama - who is also recorded as the mother of Ali Bongo on his birth certificate in the archives in Nantes. That would mean that Annick Bongo was conceived and born less than six months after Ali Bongo’s birth in February.
Ali Bongo is the only one of Omar Bongo’s 53 heirs (most of them Omar’s children) not to have provided a birth certificate in due form to the notaries managing the huge and controversial inheritance.
The political opposition in Gabon is trying its best to block Ali Bongo’s reelection bid. At the beginning of July, a wide range of candidates joined together to publish a statement denouncing the “manoeuvres” of the Gabonese electoral commission which they said had discreetly modified in favour of Ali Bongo the rules regarding candidatures. “We restate our determination to see the constitution and the whole of the legal corpus be applied to everyone, without exception or hesitation,” they wrote. They have lodged a complaint with the Gabonese constitutional court, although the opposition has regularly complained of how the country’s judicial institutions are entirely submissive to the ruling regime.
Tensions are running high in Libreville, less than one month before the country goes to the urns. On July 8th, the authorities deployed a large surveillance operation which the Gabonese armed forces’ high command described in a document as targeting “terrorist groups” and “all suspect movements across the whole of the national territory”. Opposition members have expressed their fears that this is in fact nothing other than an attempt to prevent demonstrations and publicly-voiced criticism against Ali Bongo;
On July 24th, French news agency Agence France-Presse (AFP) reported that the police in Libreville had violently dispersed a peaceful opposition party demonstration which questioned the legality of Ali Bongo’s presidency because of his allegedly false birth certificate. An AFP cameraman was attacked by the police who charged the demonstrators, gathered on a city traffic roundabout called the ‘rond-point de la Démocratie, as they began singing the Gabonese national anthem.
While Paris has remained silent over the politically volatile situation in Gabon, it is causing growing concern internationally, as expressed by United Nations Under-Secretary-General for Political Affairs, Jeffrey Feltman, after a two-day visit to Gabon in July, who cited the risk of violence in the run-up to the August 27th elections. Also in July, the US House of representatives put forward a resolution urging the government of Gabon “to respect democratic principles during the August 2016 presidential elections”, citing heightening tensions “from grievances about the legal framework of elections, including respect of the constitution and current laws”.
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The French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Graham Tearse