A few minutes later, the military overturned the result, arrested him and said they were done with more than half a century of family rule by the Bongos. And just like that, West and Central Africa had its eighth coup since 2020.
On Wednesday the electoral commission in Gabon announced that President Ali Bongo had been re-elected with 64 percent of the vote.
Gabon is slightly different from Niger, Burkina Faso, Mali and the Central African Republic which are all now under military rule.
Its GDP per capita is higher than that of Botswana, another resource-rich, low-population country. But unlike the southern African state which is largely democratic, peaceful, and invests in social services for its people, the economic surplus in Gabon is covered in the Bongo flava of patrimonial state capture.
People on the street do not eat GDP figures or chew on mid-term growth projections. This probably explains why Bongo’s alleged 64 percent instantly evaporated back into the ether of electoral alchemy and morphed into happy humans celebrating in the streets and hugging the soldiers.
In trying to understand the driving forces of the new wave of coups in Western and Central Africa, we should be careful and wild not to expect an inevitable domino effect as many erroneously predicted after the Arab Spring broke out a decade ago.
Local histories, regional and international reactions, as well as the efficacy of counter-revolutionary measures, will determine how and where these uprisings evolve. But it is worth looking at the underlying dynamics.
Every day young men and women across West Africa wake up with one goal in mind:
Of the 10 poorest countries in Africa, about half lie in the wretched expanse of the Sahel, caught between the Sahara Desert and greener, slightly more fertile, neighbours to the south.
Visitors to some parts of Niger, Chad, the Central African Republic, Liberia, and elsewhere, look at the desolation and destitution around them and wonder why anyone bothers to stay.
Much is made of the migration across the Mediterranean into Europe. Indeed, Africans today risk life and limb, sweltering heat and scorching desert sands, rickety fishing boats in stormy seas, and malevolent people smugglers – all so that they can offer themselves up into modern-day slavery.
Most of the migration, however, is intra-continental. About 7.5 million people in West Africa, or about 90 percent of the total migrant population, have left their birth countries and crossed flimsy colonial borders in search of employment and better economic conditions.
They gravitate mostly towards Nigeria and the Ivory Coast; despite the noise coming from Europe, only one in 10 heads farther out or goes overseas.
West and Central Africa might have some extreme examples, but this portrait of poverty casts a large shadow across most of the continent, stretching as far as South Sudan, Somalia, Burundi, Malawi and elsewhere.
There is a long- and a near-term aspect to the poverty trend. The long-term shows that much of Africa has missed out on the anti-poverty success that the world has seen over the past four decades.
In 1981, the percentage of Africans living in extreme poverty was 43.1 percent, close to the world average of 42.8 percent.
By 2015 that number had dropped to 35.5 percent, but that was almost seven times the world average. The pacesetter was China, which lifted 800 million people out of extreme poverty during that period – but the world, generally, had moved on without Africa.
Africa’s high population growth rate also meant that while the percentage fell, in some countries the real number of people in extreme poverty increased.
The coronavirus pandemic, and its shock to macro and micro/individual economic conditions, appear to have triggered a do-something among Africa’s young and restless.
Before the pandemic, about 445 million people in Africa lived below the poverty line. Covid pushed another 30 million down through the cracks.
This pain is real and personal. It is felt in depleted household savings and jobs that went away, never to return.
Citizens in countries whose governments enjoy legitimacy and credibility might whine and hope that austerity measures eventually rebalance the books.
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A few minutes later, the military overturned the result, arrested him and said they were done with more than half a century of family rule by the Bongos. And just like that, West and Central Africa had its eighth coup since 2020.
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