African special - Observations on Omar Bongo of Gabon

Whoever eventually wins Togo's fractious presidential contest next month already knows that there is one dubious honour he will not be inheriting from the late president Gnassingbe Eyadema. It is the right to call himself "le doyen du continent", or "the Dean of Africa". The unofficial title refers to Africa's longest-serving head of state, and with Eyadema's death last month, it passed quietly to Gabon's president, El-Hadj Omar Bongo Ondimba, who celebrates his 38th year in office in November.

The new grand old man shows few signs of making way for a new generation. Almost certain to be re-elected to yet another seven-year term this December, 69-year-old Bongo has said nothing about an eventual successor. Instead, he appears prepared to remain president until he meets his maker, thanks to both the absence of a credible opposition movement and the enduring presence of French military and commercial muscle.

Born Albert-Bernard Bongo in 1935, the young president changed his name to Omar and converted to Islam in the 1970s, when he needed money to realise his ambition of building the Trans-Gabon railway into the country's jungle interior. On his way back from pilgrimage to Mecca, he visited the sheikh of Abu Dhabi. Next morning, the presidential jet left heaving with French francs.

Since then, petroleum exploration and production have brought heady days for a country of barely a million people. With the high oil prices of the 1970s came an orgy of Ozymandian building and conspicuous consumption. By 1982, Gabon had become the world's largest per capita consumer of champagne. Even today, despite declining oil production, supermarkets in the capital, Libreville, are full of Brie and foie gras flown in for the city's 8,000 French expats and the Gabonese elite. Few of the petrodollars have ever made their way to the residents of the city's sweltering, stinking slums.

Today, as Gabon stares into the abyss of life apres-petrole, many quietly blame Bongo for the mess, but the real vitriol is reserved for the exploitative practices of the Franco-Belgian oil company Total and the successive French leaders who have supported Bongo over the years.

In Libreville, dissent comes only in whispers, and the presence of Bongo is felt everywhere. On a typical weekday morning, I sat in a shared taxi as rush-hour traffic came to a standstill for 20 minutes so that the president's helicopter could make its landing. One evening, after I had dined at my hotel (owned by one of the president's sons) under a beaming portrait of the great man, I met the head of a pro-minent NGO. Nicaise Moloumbi told me how Bongo had embodied the "opportunity of a lifetime" for Gabon.

A bit of rare dissent can be found on the dusty hillside campus of Omar Bongo University, a short taxi ride down Omar Bongo Triumphal Boulevard. There, Pierre-Fidele Nze Nguema, a respected sociologist and author of a history of Gabon, asks: "How can you be in power nearly 40 years and have done nothing for this country?" So why doesn't anybody put together a credible opposition? (Though Bongo banned opposition parties until 1991, the country is now, on paper, a multi-party democracy.) Nguema laughs scornfully. "Opposition? Every time someone tries that in Gabon, they get handed a fat envelope. They shut up and you never hear from them again."

I also asked Jean Silvio Koumba, one of the president's top advisers, about democracy, as we sipped cold grapefruit drinks on the veranda of his home in the suburbs. Koumba stared at me icily and tapped his pen. "Democracy?" he said finally. "Surely, you know by now that democracy doesn't exist in Africa. If I tell my son to go away and stop bothering us while we're talking, he does exactly that. He doesn't see it as an opportunity for a debate. If you read the Bible, you see that leaders are anointed by God himself."

The conversation ended soon after that, and he led me out of his house, past a large faded wedding photo of Omar Bongo that hung over the dining-room table.

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