“I congratulate the Gabonese voters who expressed their democratic will in a process in which management lacked transparency”, she said in a press release. “Gabon is a small country so it is possible to know all the results right now”, he said.
Advertisement
Ping fell out with “Bongo Junior”, as Gabonese call the president, leaving the ruling party in 2014 to become an outspoken critic.
President Bongo has accused the opposition of “inciting the people to disagree and indulge in violence” and has ordered the security agencies to “take all necessary measures” to make sure the vote goes smoothly.
“You have foiled the congenital fraud of this regime which we are finally going to see off”, Ping told his supporters Sunday.
“The fight is tight but we are confident our candidate will win”, Simard told Al Jazeera. “It’s all part of the game”, Djovi Gally told reporters.
Bongo’s camp has dismissed such claims as “totally insane”.
Gabon does not have a runoff system, meaning whoever gets the largest share of Saturday’s vote will be the victor.
Bongo, 57, first won election after his father Omar died in 2009 after 42 years in office.
Ping also has close family ties to the Bongo dynasty: he is the father of two children by Ali’s sister.
The OIC had dispatched a team of electoral observers to Libreville to monitor this year’s presidential election as it did seven years ago in 2009 to encourage Gabon to continue on its path in democracy.
Barely had the last ballots been cast Saturday evening before the incumbent’s spokesman declared: “Bongo will win. we are already on our way to a second mandate”.
Ping and the younger Bongo worked for years together under Bongo senior, who was responsible for getting the current opposition leader his job as chairman of the AUC.
The president’s only credible challenger, former senior African Union official Jean Ping, 73, is carrying the flag for the old guard of Bongo senior’s cronies.
Since then, he has boosted investment in palm-oil production and mining, restricted exports of raw materials to encourage local processing and overseen the creation of a special economic zone near the capital, Libreville. Fearing a repeat of the violence that followed Bongo’s contested victory in 2009, many residents, who had stocked up on food, stayed indoors. Shops and stalls usually open on Sundays were shuttered.
Since the 1970s, Gabon’s economy has depended on the oil industry, which gives the nation one of the highest per capita incomes in Africa – $18,600 in 2015, according to the CIA World Factbook.
Advertisement
But Gabon faces a financial squeeze owing to a long-term decline in oil output – which shrunk GDP per capita by almost a fifth between 1980 and 2014, according to the United Nations Development Programme – and a sharp fall in the price of crude over the past two years.
