LIBREVILLE: Junta chief Brice Oligui Nguema celebrated a huge victory in Gabon’s presidential election Sunday after provisional results gave him 90.35 percent of the vote.
Oligui, who ended more than five decades of corruption-plagued rule by the Bongo family in August 2023, assuming the role of transitional president, had promised to return the country to democratic rule.
“God does not abandon his people,” Oligui told hundreds of delighted supporters at his campaign headquarters, paying tribute to what he called “the maturity of the Gabonese people.”
Interior Minister Hermann Immongault said earlier that Oligui had won a seven-year mandate with more than 575,200 votes, or 90.3 percent, of the votes counted so far.
His main rival, Alain-Claude Bilie By Nze, took three percent of the vote and six other candidates failed to win more than 1 percent in Saturday’s election.
Even before the count was completed, the official Gabonese media had that announced Mr. Oligui was “far ahead.”
Voters in the nation of 2.3 million people flocked to the ballot boxes on Saturday to take part in an election officially marking the end of military rule. The interior ministry put the participation rate at 70.4 percent.
French President Emmanuel Macron congratulated Oligui on his win and the conduct of the election in a telephone call, his office said.
The day after voting, the streets of the capital Libreville were calm — in contrast with elections in 2016 and 2023 marked by tensions and unrest.
“I hadn’t voted in a long time, but this time, I saw a ray or something that made me go out and vote,” 58-year-old Olivina Migombe told AFP while en route to church on Sunday.
“I believe in change this time,” the professed Oligui voter added.
The new president faces a litany of problems in the oil-rich country, from crumbling infrastructure to widespread poverty, all while laboring under a crushing mountain of debt.
Oligui had sought to shed his military strongman image and even ditched his general’s uniform to run for a seven-year term.
The junta leader dominated the campaign, with his seven challengers, led by ousted leader Ali Bongo’s last prime minister, Alain-Claude Bilie By Nze, largely invisible by comparison.
Critics accuse Oligui of having failed to move on from the years of plunder of the country’s vast mineral wealth under the Bongos, whom he served for years.
For the first time, foreign and independent media were allowed to film the ballot count.
International observers at polling stations across the country did not see major incidents, according to first reports.
In total, some 920,000 voters were eligible to cast ballots at 3,037 polling stations, of which 96 were abroad.
Already, in the first results released by state media on Sunday morning, Oligui was the overwhelming favorite to win in around 30 polling stations, some of them returning results of 100 percent of the vote in his favor.
