Dark green uniform, green beret on his head, General Brice Oligui Nguema was carried in triumph, Wednesday August 30, by hundreds of soldiers a few hours after a coup d’etat. In images broadcast by state television, hundreds of people shout “Oligui president”, just after the reading of a press release announcing the placement “under house arrest” of the ousted president, Ali Bongo Ondimba. The latter had been at the head of the country for 14 years.
General Brice Oligui Nguema, head of the Republican Guard (GR), praetorian guard of ousted President Ali Bongo Ondimba, would he have become Gabon’s new man? “I am not yet declaring myself, I am not considering anything for the moment. It is a debate that we are going to have with all the generals. We are going to meet at 2 p.m. (3 p.m., Paris time). It will be a question of reaching a consensus”, he said exclusively in the columns of our colleagues from the Worldthis Wednesday.
The son of a Gabonese general officer, he chose the military path very early on. Trained at the Royal Military Academy of Meknes in Morocco, he then followed a commando course at the Commando Training Center in the equatorial forest of Gabon. Brice Oligui Nguema rose through the ranks and became one of Omar Bongo’s aides-de-camp. Originally like him from Haut-Ogooué, the cradle of the Bongos, he remained faithful to him until his death in June 2009. But under his son, Ali Bongo, Brice Oligui Nguema remained confined to diplomatic tasks. “Thus, he is a military attaché at the Gabonese embassy in Morocco and then in Senegal and according to certain sources, he experiences it as an exile”, interprets the specialized media. Mondafrique.
“He had no right to serve a third term”
Weakened by a stroke, Ali Bongo then called him back to Gabon. In 2019, he replaced another colonel – Frédéric Bongo – at the head of the intelligence service of the Republican Guard: the General Directorate of Special Services (DGSS). Things follow one another: six months later, Brice Oligui Nguema finds himself at the head of the Republican Guard where he replaces General Grégoire Kouna. Since April 2020, he had been trying to push for changes to make this institution more effective in keeping the regime in place. Among his most notable reforms was the creation of the Section des Interventions Spéciales (SIS), a special unit headed directly by Ali Bongo. Under his control, the unit is considerably reinforced.
With the presidential election in sight, Brice Oligui Nguema had the mission of consolidating the power of Ali Bongo to prepare for the advent of his son, Noureddin Bongo Valentin. The senior officer will have finally decided otherwise. His goal now: to ensure the transition of Ali Bongo. “He did not have the right to serve a third term, the Constitution was flouted, the method of election itself was not good. So the army decided to turn the page, to take its responsibilities” , he told the World. A Coup d’Etat which earned him the creation of his page Wikipedia in stride.
At the microphone of France 24, Francis Kpatindé, lecturer at Science Po Paris, described him as “someone intelligent, easy to talk to and who was not afraid of journalists”. With his former mentor, he also shares a taste for beautiful things to the point of raising suspicions of personal enrichment. According to one Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project investigation (OCCRP) of 2020, he bought several properties in the United States with a value of more than one million dollars in cash. The Beninese newspaper, New Grandstandsays he bought a property in Silver Spring, Maryland, for $447,000 in cash in 2018.