Military officers in oil-producing Gabon have seized power and placed President Ali Bongo under house arrest. If successful, the coup would mark the ninth in sub-Saharan Africa and the sixth to take place in a former French colony since 2020.
”Wild celebrations have broken out on the streets of Gabon’s cities on Wednesday after a military junta announced on television that it had put President Ali Bongo Ondimba under house arrest and had seized power.
The Bongo family had ruled the former French colony since 1967. Ali Bongo was the wealthiest man in Gabon with an estimated $1 billion in assets. The coup took place just after the country’s electoral commission declared that he won a third term.
It is the fifth coup in a West African country once ruled directly by France since August 2020, when Mali fell to military leaders. This was followed by military coups in Burkina Faso in September 2022, in Guinea in September 2021, in Niger last month and in Gabon on Wednesday.
The pressure is growing on Paris as the coups are directed against France’s continuing neocolonial rule in West Africa. The push to get France out is being buoyed by a growing confidence of developing countries in the emergence of a multilateral world amid the accelerating death of U.S. unilateralism and the remnants of colonialism.
The African Union and France, which has 350 troops in the country, have condemned the coup. It isn’t clear yet whether these troops will be asked to leave by the new rulers.
The coup government in Mali ordered French troops out of its country by March 18th, 2022. France completed its withdrawal on August 15th, 2022. On January 26th this year, France agreed to withdraw its forces from Burkina Faso after a request from the government that had seized power there.
In Niger, a similar demand has been made by the junta that took power last month, but French President Emmanuel Macron is so far playing hardball, refusing to move out his forces and supporting a potential military intervention by ECOWAS to restore Niger’s restored leader”. -Joe Lauria, Consortium News
The inability on behalf of the West to pressure coup plotters to put a stop to African presidents from being deposed by military juntas is demonstrative of a broader changing of the guard in Africa, where the emerging economies of BRICS can now exert more influence than their Western counterparts.
And because Gabon hasn’t been wracked with jihadi violence and had been seen as a relatively stable country, unlike Niger and some of the other former French-African colonies, it seems that the coup attempt is part of a wider campaign of dissatisfaction with a unitary neoliberal world order.