Polling a paltry 3.02% of the vote in Gabon;s presidential vote over the weekend, former Prime Minister Alain Claude Bilie By Nze on Monday dismissed the polls as a masquerade.
He claimed the polls were rigged in favour of junta leader Gen Brice Clotaire Oligui Nguema and warned of a resurgence of the system that the coup of August 30, 2023, had vowed to banish.
Coming in second place with 19,227 votes, Alain Claude Bilie By Nze delivered a statement to the press on Monday criticising the integrity of the elections against a vote which he called a charade.
He denounced what he called the instrumentalisation of the state in the service of Gen Oligui who polled 90.35% of the vote.
“Should we congratulate a victory achieved under such opaque and questionable conditions?” he asked.
Bilie By Nze asserted that “adding the votes attributed to each candidate gives a total of 95.18%, or 4.82% of the votes that were missing from the count,” which, according to him, “is enough to
discredit this election.”
In a serious and firm speech, he denounced “an orchestration of the false, a confiscation of the true,” speaking of “ballot box stuffing, suppression of votes, deprivation of room for maneuver for his teams,” and accused the government of having “exhausted democratic discourse.”
According to him, last Saturday’s vote “was not a free election. It was a literal replay of the referendum charade,” castigating “a government that wants to drag itself out by usurping the opinions of the rupture.”
Nze believes that the military regime born of the August 30, 2023 coup, which sparked scenes of jubilation, “has betrayed its promises,” notably by organising the election early and adopting a new
constitution that “establishes absolutism, concentrating the executive, legislative, and judicial branches in the same hands.”
While he welcomes a climate of calm during the vote, he criticies the “disproportion of resources between a candidate funded by the state and the others, forced to campaign with their own resources.”
He nevertheless thanked the voters who supported his candidacy and promised to “continue to uphold the ideal of a truly democratic, equitable, united, decentralised, and self-reconciled Gabon.”
“The choice of continuity has won out, at least temporarily. But ideas don’t die. They bide their time, and that time will come,” he declared.
Rejecting a single-track mindset and calling for “a refusal to let fear become the norm,” he urged the Gabonese people to prepare for “a return to true democracy.”
Bilie By Nze stated that he did not intend to refer the matter to the Constitutional Court. “I will not waste my time referring the matter to the Constitutional Court. I am not disputing a figure, I am
disputing a whole set of figures,” he told the press.
He also clarified that he had not congratulated the president-elect, but merely wished him “good luck for Gabon”.
Another candidate, Stéphane Germain Iloko, acknowledged General Oligui Nguema’s victory.
The former Prime Minister, the last head of government under Ali Bongo Ondimba before his fall, is calling for a mobilisation around the “breakthrough” ideas he championed during the campaign, such as a guaranteed universal income and a thorough reform of public finances.
“This fight goes beyond me. It concerns the soul of our nation. And for this soul, I will continue to fight,” he insisted.
ODL/te/Sf/fss/as/APA