00:00 Given his state of health, the former President of the Republic, Ali Bongo
00:10 Ondimba has freedom of movement. He can travel abroad if he wishes to carry out
00:19 his medical checks.
00:21 For some details on this story you can cross live to Gabon to the
00:27 capital, Liberia. Military leaders say Ali Bongo has freedom of movement.
00:38 What does that mean? He can leave the country? Is he free to go out and
00:41 about in Liberia?
00:46 We have to look at the detail. This announcement coming from the new
00:53 leaders of the transition, members of the military who seized power from
00:57 Ali Bongo, saying that the ousted leader had freedom of movement and
01:02 that he was free to leave the country if he wanted, given his state of
01:06 health. Ali Bongo suffered from a stroke back in 2018 and has in the
01:11 past sought medical treatment in Morocco. They are saying by no means
01:15 that they are preventing him from leaving the country. That could
01:19 constitute the freedom of movement they were referring to in that
01:23 announcement. We have just been to the residence where he has been since
01:30 the coup d'etat, since his toppling, in a very chic neighbourhood to the
01:34 north of Libreville. There are still soldiers stationed outside, there are
01:40 military checkpoints, there were two armoured vehicles and we were not
01:44 allowed to pass. It doesn't seem like he is totally free to move around.
01:50 Of course, the transition authorities are saying that some of this is for
01:54 Ali Bongo's own personal protection as well. When we spoke to one of their
01:59 spokesmen last night, he said that as far as he was aware, Ali Bongo had
02:03 no plans to leave the country and that he had been under "residence
02:07 surveillée", which we would translate in English as house arrest. So
02:11 freedom of movement to leave the country, yes, freedom to say that he
02:16 is freed full stop, I think would be overstating it. In the meantime,
02:22 people are trying to get back to some kind of normality. This, of course,
02:28 after 55 years of the Bongo family rule. The question of poverty is
02:34 coming up quite frequently. What can you tell us? Absolutely. Life
02:41 for a lot of Gabonese people has been very hard. There is a very wealthy
02:46 elite, including the Bongo family and inner circle, who have been
02:51 basically stealing from state coffers over the past decades. They
02:55 ruled Gabon for 55 years, first Omar Bongo the father and then Ali
02:59 Bongo the son. That has left Gabonese ordinary people in a very
03:04 precarious situation, a lot of them suffering. Among them, one of the
03:08 sectors that has been the hardest hit are retirees, pensioners, some of
03:12 whom say they have been unable to access their pensions for years. We
03:18 met some of them in Libreville with Maisa Awad.
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