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Soldiers in Gabon appointed the head of the republican guard as the OPEC member state’s new leader, hours after placing President Ali Bongo under house arrest and annulling elections in which he secured a third term.
General Brice Oligui Nguema will serve as Gabon’s transitional president, according to a statement read out on state television in the capital, Libreville, on Wednesday evening.
The junta said it will maintain a dusk-to-dawn curfew in the nation of 2.3 million people, and urged residents to return to work on Thursday.
Nguema’s appointment came after army officers appeared on Gabonese state television in the early hours of Wednesday to announce they’d canceled an Aug. 26 vote and dissolved the country’s institutions.
President Bongo is under house arrest with his family and medical doctor, while one of his sons has been detained, the officers said in a separate broadcast.
The military takeover drew condemnation from the US, Nigeria, France and the African Union.
The putsch in the former French colony is the ninth in sub-Saharan Africa in the past three years, and follows a coup in Niger last month.
The country is one of OPEC’s smaller members, pumping about 200,000 barrels a day, and has abundant manganese deposits
Since 2020, there have been two coups each in Burkina Faso and Mali, as well as military takeovers in Chad, Guinea, Niger and Sudan.
The African Union which suspended Niger from all its activities following the coup in the West African nation, said it “strongly condemns” the army’s actions in Gabon, according to a post on X, the social-media platform formerly known as Twitter.
Nigerian President Bola Tinubu, whose nation is Africa’s largest democracy, echoed the criticism.
“The president is working very closely and continuing to communicate with other heads of state in the African Union toward a comprehensive consensus on the next steps forward with respect to how the crisis in Gabon will play out into how the continent will respond to the contagion of autocracy we are seeing spread across our continent,” Tinubu’s office said in a statement.