Ali Bongo is standing in elections on 26 August for a third term as president of the central African country
Dynasty: Ali Bongo has been president since 2009, replacing his father, Omar, who ruled from 1967. Photo: Ludovic Marin/Getty Imagesor years, Gabon’s President Ali Bongo Ondimba struggled in the shadow of his charismatic father, Omar, who ruled the oil-rich central African country for more than four decades.
Emerging from a long convalescence after his 2018 stroke, he embarked on an image revamp, putting himself forward as a man of rigour bent on rooting out “traitors” and “profiteers” in his inner circle. He was born to a teenage girl, Josephine Kama, in the Congolese city of Brazzaville, which at the time was still part of France’s rapidly shrinking colonial empire. Because he was born abroad and out of wedlock, Bongo for years fought rumours that he was a foreigner who had been adopted.
He was also a pillar of “FrancAfrique” — a now much-contested strategy by which France bound itself to its former African colonies through cronyism, often tainted with corruption and rights abuses. In 1989, he was appointed foreign minister aged just 30 but had to step down two years later when a new Constitution stipulated that cabinet members had to be at least 35.There he remained until shortly before the start of the election campaign caused by his father’s death in 2009.
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