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LIBREVILLE, Gabon-Behind the tall white walls of a grandiose home belonging to the world's longest-ruling president, ostriches, buffalo and camels roam neatly landscaped lawns-part of a vast private complex said to include a crocodile wetland and lake topped with lotus flowers. In the poverty-stricken shell of a city outside, where the poorest pick through garbage for scraps to eat, Omar Bongo's mustachioed face is omnipresent: gazing solemnly from glass building facades, beaming proudly from ubiquitous billboards, woven into the fabric of countless shirts worn from the coast to the farthest reaches of the forested interior.He may be short in stature, but he is larger than life in the oil-rich Central African nation he has ruled for 40 years-so long that he's the only president most of his subdued 1.5 million people (life expectancy, 53) have ever known.Bongo became the longest-ruling head of state, not counting the monarchs of Britain and Thailand, after Fidel Castro resigned last month, ending 49 years in power.While most Gabonese genuinely fear the 72-year-old autocrat and there is little opposition, many accept his rule because he has kept his country remarkably peaceful and governed without the sustained brutality characteristic of many dictators."God brought him to us and only God can call him away," said forestry worker Ignasse Minaga, who was born the same year Bongo became president, in 1967. "For us there is only Bongo. He is irreplaceable." Minaga lives in the president's native Bongoville, a tiny village rising out of jungle greenery at the end of a freshly paved road complete with high-wattage, functioning light-poles-luxuries rare in most of Gabon's undeveloped interior.Struggling to stabilize after becoming independent of colonial rule in the 1960s, Africa has suffered its share of "Big Men," many of whom use fear, patronage and rigged elections to cling to power. A few are still around, such as Libya's Moammar Gadhafi (38 years) and Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe, Equatorial Guinea's Teodoro Obiang and Angola's Jose Eduardo dos Santos (28 years).Like many of the continent's "Big Men," Bongo has displayed plenty of dictatorial tendencies. His government has jailed journalists who dared criticize him personally, and has cowed most of the rest into self-censorship. But Gabon's prisons are not filled with political prisoners and rivals don't disappear or turn up mysteriously dead in the night.Instead, he "attacks his opponents by bringing them into his fold, offering them top posts, giving them a piece of the pie,"said Moussirou Mouyama, a linguistics professor at Libreville's Omar Bongo University."He's like a boa constrictor. He suffocates his prey until it's weak, then swallows it."Bongo's principal opponent in the 2005 election was Pierre Momboundou. After losing the vote by a landslide, Momboundou asked for and got $7 million a year later for development in his constituency (he's now a member of parliament). He insists the transaction has not defanged his criticism of Bongo. But Gabonese journalists say he doesn't speak out much anymore."It's belly politics," Mouyama said. "If you don't go along, you don't eat."The most vocal critics today are from a movement called "Bongo Must Go," whose 40-year-old U.S.-based leader Daniel Mengara has called for an armed rebellion (there's no sign of one).Gabon today is "neither dictatorship nor democracy, neither paradise nor hell," said Louis-Gaston Mayila, who heads a pro-Bongo political party from an office featuring a framed photo of him whispering in the president's ear. "We are something in between."That "in-between" has put Gabon in first place among countries in mainland sub-Saharan Africa on the U.N. Human Development Index, which measures literacy, education and other markers of national well-being. It puts Gabon ahead of Africa's richest economy, South Africa, and its most respected democracy, Botswana.But Gabon's wealth depends on dwindling oil reserves, and its democracy is problematic...To read more go to:
As in the days of Noah....
