00:00 We're going to get a bit more analysis now from France 24's Douglas Herbert.
00:03 Doug, this coup in Gabon is now the eighth one in that region in three years.
00:09 It might even be the ninth.
00:11 It's easy to lose count, Jeannie.
00:12 But for someone tuning in, if they haven't gone to sleep with their map of Africa in
00:18 front of them, they're like, what is going on here?
00:20 Is this endemic?
00:21 Is this some sort of coup contagion?
00:23 A scourge of coups across Africa?
00:25 I think it's important to sort of pick them apart because otherwise it becomes this tired
00:29 old cliche, another African nation with beleaguered bad governance having a coup.
00:35 We have seen several very recently, right?
00:38 Burkina Faso, Mali, which were clearly military juntas taking over why it had to do with the
00:44 fight against insurgencies and mainly sort of this grievance against what they saw as
00:49 incompetent leadership not effectively battling the jihadist insurgents.
00:53 They're saying we can do a better job, we're stepping in.
00:56 Sudan was also a slightly separate case, right?
00:59 There's a raging ongoing civil war, if you will, between two vying leaders there.
01:04 And that's more of an intra-military conflict, not so much about a jihadist insurgency, but
01:09 about vying clans and factions within the military.
01:13 So and Niger, we know once again, sort of cues to that jihadist insurgency, military
01:20 junta saying we can do this fight better.
01:22 We have the people's interests at heart.
01:24 Gabon is a separate case in the sense that we've had, yes, a string of coups.
01:28 In Gabon, it literally is squarely aimed at what the coup leaders see as the absolute
01:35 incompetence, the massive fraud, the allegations of corruption against what has become essentially
01:41 a ruling dynasty, a clan in this country.
01:43 The country has been independent from France since 1960, right?
01:47 But it has essentially been led for all but seven of those years by one family, the Bango
01:51 dynasty, first by the father and since 2009 by the son, who had been just until yesterday
01:58 elected to a third term.
02:00 And it's against him.
02:01 It's really against him in his perception that he has made, you know, basically wasted
02:06 the country's natural resources.
02:08 The population has not seen any of the benefits of what should be a wealthy and prosperous
02:12 nation.
02:13 You could say again, well, that's another cliche, right?
02:15 The African nation, the resource, the resource rich, the oil rich African nation, where the
02:20 leaders are all powerful and wealthy and the population sees none of the money.
02:24 It is a cliche, but it's a cliche made much worse in Gabon's case by the fact there genuinely
02:29 was an extremely corrupt and according to most people, you'll ask who know Africa far
02:35 better than I do, a very fraudulent regime that had been sort of failing the people,
02:40 failing them signally in trying to make the most of what should be a much more prosperous
02:45 nation, a nation with a lot of things going for it.
02:49 We're going to talk a bit more about Gabon's economy in just a minute.
02:52 But first, Doug, I just want to keep you, France obviously has a very long and complicated
02:56 relationship with many countries in Africa, the so-called France Afrique, which dates
03:00 back almost to the colonial times.
03:01 But things are particularly complicated in that relationship with Gabon.
03:05 It really is.
03:06 You know, it's easy to say, I guess, look, you can boil this down to the bare essence
03:09 that technically Gabon remains, quote, a close ally of France.
03:13 But that comes with so many sort of caveats there, because it's true that for decades
03:18 and decades, Gabon was for part of that mold, that sort of, you know, that pattern of that
03:23 France Afrique mold.
03:24 What was it?
03:25 It was trading political economic support for business favors, essentially.
03:30 And yes, and as Charles will tell us, you know, he'll tell us more about the French
03:33 business presence in the country.
03:36 But at the same time, since 2009, since the son, Ali Bongo, had acceded to power, had
03:42 taken over from his father, who ruled for 41 years, it had not been as chummy a relationship.
03:48 Even if Emmanuel Macron was recently seen here in Paris, smiling broadly with a visiting
03:53 Gabonese president, you know, still maintaining the pretense of a close and chummy relationship.
03:58 The reality is that the relationship had cooled in recent years and cooled notably because
04:03 the French had been starting to go after, investigate the allegations of fraud, of massive
04:09 corruption within the Gabonese leadership.
04:12 And that obviously made Gabon a little less keen to cultivate a close relationship with
04:18 France.
04:19 It did remain close.
04:21 France does remain a big and influential presence in Gabon, but it hadn't been as chummy and
04:25 smiley a relationship, perhaps, as it had been for many, many decades before Ali Bongo
04:31 had come to power.
04:32 So when you say it's complicated, it is complicated.
04:35 But unfortunately, perhaps from the French president's perspective, no matter how much
04:39 the French presidents, one after another, they come to power vowing to undo, to unravel
04:44 that that false afflique, cliché, that that decades long mold, it's still it's stubborn.
04:51 It persists.
04:52 It remains more entrenched than many politicians want to admit.
04:56 And Gabon is a case in point.
