Omar Bongo despised democracy and trappings of good governance

By Barrack Muluka

He died last week, aged 73. For 41 years, he was the President of Gabon. That was for more than half of his life. He was the longest serving President in the whole world.

He despised democracy and all the trappings of good governance. His country was his personal property. For 26 years, he served as an unelected President. For the rest of his reign, he made a mockery of democracy, ensuring he was re-elected President every seven years. The elections themselves were always choreographed to coincide with his birthday. Such was the ego of the fallen African dinosaur from Gabon.

It is difficult to shed tears when a man like Omar Bongo dies. And he was not alone. David Lamb, in the controversial but brutally honest volume titled The Africans, said of Omar Bongo and his peers in the African dinosaur club: "Elections remain largely in the realm of fantasyland throughout Africa. In Gabon, President El Hadj Omar Bongo celebrates his birthdays by holding elections and running unopposed." In this club, he found peerage with the likes of Somalia’s Mohamed Siad Barre, Guinea’s Ahmed Sekou Toure, Zambia’s Kenneth Kaunda, Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni, Malawi’s Hastings Kamuzu Banda and Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe.

Others are Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak, Milton Obote of Uganda, Meles Zenawi of Ethiopia and Mengistu Haile Mariam before him. You could go on and on, until you had a catalogue of everyone who has ruled in Africa, with very few exceptions in South Africa and Botswana. The continent flounders in the oppressive grip of megalomaniacs who imagine they hold title deeds for the entire country and their citizens are their indentured slaves. Bongo was one such a megalomaniac. He was an African latifundium whose body only died last week while his soul actually died many decades ago. And he was not alone.

It is worse than scandalous that a man who presided over an oil rich country for 41 years should die in a foreign hospital in Spain. In point of fact, they said it was a clinic. For all the years that he was in power, he did not build a single hospital good enough to care for him in Gabon. At the apogee of its fortunes, Gabon produced 350,000 barrels of oil a day. Even at the nadir of its fortunes, production declined to between 200,000 and 250,000 barrels a day. Sadly, these fortunes were exploited by French oil companies and Gobon’s life President.

Martin Meredith has written thus of Omar Bongo in the volume The State of Africa: A History of Fifty Years of Independence, "In Gabon, Omar Bongo had presided over the country’s oil wealth for twenty-two years, making himself one the world’s richest men. A flamboyant, autocratic figure, accustomed to living in style and demanding total obedience, he explained his conversion from Christianity to Islam by pointing out that it removed intermediaries between himself and God. ‘I do not have to appear before a bishop in order to render account of what I have done,’ he said."

And Bongo was not accountable to anybody, with probable exception of a successive chain of French Presidents, from Charles De Gaulle to Nicholas Sarkozy. He willfully raided the country’s treasury for whimsical ends. The cost of his presidential palace in Libreville was $800 million (Sh60 billion). His business interests ranged from manganese and, of course, oil exports.

The French newspaper Le Monde reported in 1989 that a quarter of public revenues had been diverted to the elite. It was an amount nearly double the national debt that the country was struggling to pay. Eighty per cent of all personal income in Gabon goes to two per cent of the population. And this two per cent comprises of Bongo and close members of his family and tribe.

Bongo died many years ago. If we should cry about the death of his body, it is only to the extent that its continued pilgrimage on this side of the grave caused so much harm to so many. Again, he was not always alone, as will shortly be demonstrated when Africa’s who is who throngs the slum they call the city of Libreville to mourn him. Some will recall how in one of the most lavish jamborees on the continent, Bongo hosted the OAU heads of state and government summit meeting. David Lamb recalls: "Presidents roared through Libreville, the somnolent capital on the Atlantic coast, in Mercedes-Benzes and Cadillacs with sirens wailing, each jammed into the back his bodyguards… There was no laundry service in Libreville that week because the city’s women had been recruited to perform traditional dances in honour of the arriving presidents, nor were there any working prostitutes …"

They will be replaying this drama again, only that this time the big man will be permanently asleep. While I cannot celebrate his death, from a purely universal human principle of solidarity against death, it is equally difficult for me to waste my tears on this African dinosaur, and others like him. If we were honest people, we would say God has his own ways of getting rid of bad rubbish.

—The writer ([email protected]) is a publishing editor and media consultant with Mvule Publishers.