With next year’s presidential polls coming, debate has been brewing
over the birthplace of President Ali Bongo Ondimba of Gabon with critics
allege fabricated his birth certificate to cover the fact that he was
adopted from another country.
If the claims are proved true, it could keep him from contesting for another term and cost him his wealth.
This surprising revelation is about to be disclosed as a court in
western France on November 12, Thursday, permitted a family member of
Ali Bongo Ondimba to view the birth certificate of the leader after
claims that he lied about where he was born.
The court in Nantes allowed 25-year-old Onaida Maisha Bongo Ondimba, a
daughter of ex-president Omar Bongo, to read the documents in full.
Her legal representative Eric Moutet praised the decision as “enormous”, and “diplomatically complex”.
Ali Bongo is the only one of former president Omar Bongo’s 54
announced inheritors not to have produced the identification documents.
He became the president after the 2009 death of his father Omar
Bongo, who had ruled the West African country and its oil and mineral
wealth since 1967.
According to the Gabonese constitution one must be born Gabonese to
become the head of state, but French investigative reporter Pierre Pean
supposed in a recent book that the president was actually Nigerian and
was adopted during the Biafran war in the late 1960s.
Bongo himself says he was born in Brazzaville in 1959, the former capital of French Equatorial Africa.
The Bongo family is alleged to have skimmed off 25% of the oil-rich
nation’s gross domestic product over the years, and Omar was said to be
one of the world’s wealthiest heads of state.
The Nantes civil registration centre is answerable for all birth
certificates of people born in French Equatorial Africa up to 1960, when
the former colonial countries in the region gained independence to
become Gabon, Congo, Chad and the Central African Republic.
Ali Bongo declared in late August that he would give “all his share of the inheritance” from his father to “the Gabonese youth” in a speech marking the 55th anniversary of independence.
0 comments:
Post a Comment