"LE GABON ENERVANT" OR "ANNOYING GABON"

English version  A single power line fails, and the whole capital goes dark. The September crisis reveals a Gabonese grid built with no safety margin at all. Since 13 September, Greater Libreville has been living to the rhythm of load shedding. From Bikélé to Owendo, by way of Awendjé and IAI, no neighbourhood has been spared. Residents worry about their freezers, shopkeepers about their business, and anger is rising against SEEG. But beyond this outage, one question stands out: why is a single incident enough to paralyse an entire metropolitan area? It all started with a cable. During the night of 13 to 14 September, a conductor snapped on the Bisségué–Owendo 90 kV overhead line, one of the main routes carrying electricity to the capital. SEEG described a major failure that triggered cascading malfunctions across several parts of the grid. At the same time, Karpowership was carrying out maintenance on its floating power plant based in Owendo. The result: the Interconnected Grid lo...

 

 

English version  Three months before January 1, 2027, the government keeps repeating that the ban on broiler chicken imports still stands. The figures it puts forward, however, tell a more complicated story. In forty-eight hours, L'Union went from "A thwarted ambition?" (September 22) to "Gabon stays the course" (September 23). In between came an interview with the Minister of Agriculture, Pacôme Kossy, who sought to reassure the public after Gabon's so-called query by the United States at the WTO. The message is clear: "Our course remains unchanged: produce in Gabon the chicken we consume." The question is whether this course leads to an actual ban on January 1, or to something else. The most important sentence in the interview is the one where the minister explains that the decision to halt imports "is therefore an instrument" of poultry policy, and that "it is not the end goal." This is a notable shift in tone. In May 2025, t...