Mali, Guinea, Burkina Faso, Niger – and now Gabon: the military is once again taking power in an African country. But there are big differences.
In Gabon’s capital, Libreville, the sun hadn’t even risen on Wednesday when events were already escalating. At two-thirty in the morning, the head of the election commission presented the results of the presidential election on state television, according to which incumbent Ali Bongo had won the election with almost two-thirds of the votes. The timing does not suggest that the government wanted to draw too much attention to this news. But it didn’t help. Only 45 minutes later, a group of soldiers stood in front of the camera on another channel and declared the election result to be falsified and the government to have been ousted.