But it held a slight lead Saturday in the country’s biggest city, Johannesburg, with 99 percent of votes counted.
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“Even if no figure can or should be given at this stage, we are, in light of information we are receiving, able to say that our candidate… will claim victory”, he said. “Ali Bongo has chose to ignore the election and to stay in power”, said Mr Ayi.
Ping’s campaign coordinator, Jean Gaspard Ntoutoume Ayi, claimed that Bongo would attempt to retain power by force.
The rival sides also traded accusations of fraud allegedly committed during Saturday’s vote, raising the prospect of increased tension in the wake of an uncharacteristically bitter campaign.
“This is the situation which we are entering: the election is over, the coup d’etat has started”.
Opposition candidate Jean Ping, who has claimed victory in the vote which pitted him against the incumbent Ali Bongo, on Monday accused the Cenap national election commission of “manipulation” and tampering with the outcome of the poll. Bongo is reported to have taken a swipe at opponents for claims over his parentage. Ping, a former chairman of the African Union Commission, in 2014 broke with the ruling Gabonese Democratic Party that’s been in power since Gabon gained independence from France in 1960. It was impossible to immediately verify the claim.
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.
But earlier this month, the main challengers pulled out and said they would all back Ping.
Both sides have accused each other of electoral fraud and European Union observers said Saturday’s vote in the oil-rich Central African country was “managed in a way that lacked transparency”.
Gabon is a major oil producer, but still has high levels of poverty.
The collapse in the price of oil has hit the Gabonese economy hard, and Ping described Bongo’s attempts to diversify away from petroleum as window dressing.
Gabon faces an economic squeeze because of a lengthy-term loss of oil output – which reduced GDP per person by almost a fifth between 1980 and 2014, based on the UN Development Programme – along with a sharp fall within the cost of crude in the last 2 years.
The Constitutional Court disagreed with the opposition and subsequently ruled that Bongo could stand for the polls.
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“As (Omar Bongo’s) boy, it is not easy to provide yourself as new things and technocratic once the whiff of corruption dangles over in the last administration”, stated Anthony Goldman, a Libreville-based political analyst.
