"LE GABON ENERVANT" OR "ANNOYING GABON"

English version Dear readers, you have made this blog so successful that we now have too many readers viewing or downloading files that we are exceeding the storage capacity and bandwidth quota available for non-commercial blogs (free service by Google). Google administrators have informed us that to make our blog less heavy, we must change the format of our documents from Acrobat (PDF) to Google Docs. This is going to be quite an undertaking and many of our documents may not look the same. Dear readers, we will try this remedy and see what the result will be. Rest assured that we will work all night to resolve this situation and continue to make this blog available to you. The alternate solution is for Google to start asking us to pay a fee to use the bandwidth, which we don’t want to do. We will let you know when all is clear, sometime tonight or early tomorrow morning Thank you Charlie Version française Chers lecteurs, vous avez fait de ce b...

Eric Benjaminson (photo: UO) English version UO Matters is an independent newsletter affiliated with members of the University of Oregon’s community. This newsletter in one of its recent edition, highlights the current problems of the poor state of education and the endemic corruption in Gabon. The article also mention the fact that Eric Benjaminson, the former US ambassador to Libreville and Ali Bongo’s supporter, has been completely quiet regarding these allegations of malfeasance by Ali Bongo. Commenting an article published in the New York Times about corruption in Gabon, OU Matters writes the following: “From the NYT, I didn’t see a quote from former UO Ambassador and current Director of the $20M UO-Gabon project, Eric Benjaminson. Too bad, he must have some inside knowledge on this. Many in Libreville are angry at the luxurious lifestyles of officials, including Bongo and his entourage. At an investment summit last month, traffic jams clogged city streets as preside...

Photo: Gabontribune.com English version On his website, Louis Gaston Mayila purports to have the following qualifications: Capacity in Law (first and second part); Degree in Public Law; Masters in Public Law; Masters in Political Science. He enunciates there, a string of positions he has occupied at the top of the State, the most prestigious being his appointment in January 2006 by Omar Bongo, as Deputy Prime Minister, Minister of National Solidarity, Social Affairs, Well Being and the Fight Against Poverty. Louis Gaston Mayila has been a member of the highest political levels of Gabon since 1975, when he was appointed Chief of Staff of Omar Bongo. A 40 years presence at that level. These loyal official services have also been rewarded during the celebrations of 17 August 2014, by Ali Bongo awarding him of the decoration of the Merit of the Order of the Equatorial Star (see photo above). However, the same Louis Gaston Mayila now finds himself entangled in a case of coun...

Leon Nzouba (photo: M. Libama) English version Dear readers, we do not need to remind you that Gabon has no Minister of Education. We do not need to tell you that the Gabonese university system finds itself in tatters. We do not need to remind you again of the issue of the 2014 baccalaureate which is still pending. In short we do not need to repeat to you the fact that in Gabon, the regime continues to manage education with revolting incompetence. One gets the impression that the Gabonese authorities do not know or do not want to know, that the purpose of education is to promote individual development and social well-being in the society. The purpose of education is normally therefore focused towards the preparation of the individual to access this development. But Ali Bongo and his Ministers of Education who were Seraphin Moundounga and Leon Nzouba, have only succeeded in locking the Gabonese education system in dangerous destructive impasses that leave no room f...

English version The truth will set you free, they say. Upon learning that Ali Bongo has once again taken a huge amount of debt on the back of the Gabonese people, we decided to look into how much the Gabonese taxpayers were being burdened by this regime. We decided to look at the IMF report on the external debt of developing countries (see above). At the page 142, we see a table presenting the evolution of Gabon’s external debt as follows: 1995: 4.361 billion dollars 2000: 3.902 billion dollars 2005: 3.877 billion dollars 2007: 2.845 billion dollars 2008: 2.173 billion dollars 2009: 2.130 billion dollars 2010: 2.331 billion dollars So dear readers, you can clearly see that from 1995 to 2009, Gabon was able to reduce its external debt by 50% and when Ali Bongo took power in 2009, this external debt was at its lowest level since the 1970s. However, since 2009, this is how the Gabonese debt appears in the IMF documents: 2010: 2.331 billion dollars 2011: 2.700 billion dollars 20...