Gabonese voters voted on Saturday in a presidential election widely expected to make junta chief Brice Oligui Nguema the oil-rich central African country’s first elected leader since his 2023 coup.
Oligui led the Aug. 30, 2023, putsch that ended 55 years of dynastic rule by the Bongo family, who were accused of looting Gabon’s wealth.
“I am very confident. May the best man win,” said Oligui, who has been leading in opinion polls, as he cast his ballot alongside first lady Zita at a school in the center of the capital Libreville before a media scrum of clicking cameras.
Photo: EPA-EFE
Snaking queues were seen outside polling stations in the seaside city as voting got underway in bright sunshine after a stormy night.
After voting ended at 6:00pm, the Gabonese Ministry of the Interior said turnout had run to 87.12 percent.
The country of 2.3 million people is casting ballots at a time of high unemployment, regular power and water shortages, a lack of infrastructure and heavy government debt.
Despite successive plans, only 2,000 of the 10,000km of roads in the country are usable, official data showed. Derailments are frequent on the sole rail link and youth unemployment exceeds 60 percent in rural areas.
Oligui ditched his military uniform as he campaigned for a seven-year term against seven rival candidates, including Alain-Claude Bilie By Nze, who served as prime minister before the coup.
About 920,000 voters were eligible to cast ballots, with final results expected today.
Oligui has predicted a “historic victory.”
However, critics accuse Oligui, of failing to move on from the years of plunder of the country’s vast mineral wealth under the Bongos, whom he served for years.
Oligui’s image has been plastered all over the capital Libreville during his campaign, while those of his rivals are nowhere to be seen.
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
ECONOMIC WORRIES: The ruling PAP faces voters amid concerns that the city-state faces the possibility of a recession and job losses amid Washington’s tariffs Singapore yesterday finalized contestants for its general election on Saturday next week, with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) fielding 32 new candidates in the biggest refresh of the party that has ruled the city-state since independence in 1965. The move follows a pledge by Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財), who took office last year and assumed the PAP leadership, to “bring in new blood, new ideas and new energy” to steer the country of 6 million people. His latest shake-up beats that of predecessors Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) and Goh Chok Tong (吳作棟), who replaced 24 and 11 politicians respectively
Young women standing idly around a park in Tokyo’s west suggest that a giant statue of Godzilla is not the only attraction for a record number of foreign tourists. Their faces lit by the cold glow of their phones, the women lining Okubo Park are evidence that sex tourism has developed as a dark flipside to the bustling Kabukicho nightlife district. Increasing numbers of foreign men are flocking to the area after seeing videos on social media. One of the women said that the area near Kabukicho, where Godzilla rumbles and belches smoke atop a cinema, has become a “real
Archeologists in Peru on Thursday said they found the 5,000-year-old remains of a noblewoman at the sacred city of Caral, revealing the important role played by women in the oldest center of civilization in the Americas. “What has been discovered corresponds to a woman who apparently had elevated status, an elite woman,” archeologist David Palomino said. The mummy was found in Aspero, a sacred site within the city of Caral that was a garbage dump for more than 30 years until becoming an archeological site in the 1990s. Palomino said the carefully preserved remains, dating to 3,000BC, contained skin, part of the
RSS