Word: oiling
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...President Omar Bongo, the world's longest serving President, who died on Monday at 73 in his 42nd year in power, it's worth remembering that Bongo was precisely the kind of leader Gabon, and Africa, could have done without. Gabon has a tiny population (1.4 million) and vast oil reserves, and after four decades of exporting hundreds of billions of dollars of crude, the biggest testament to the corruption and ineptitude of Bongo's rule is that he somehow contrived not to turn his country into an African Kuwait...
...third of all Gabonese still live on less than $2 a day, and as the oil fields begin to dry up, Bongo's subjects are facing up to the reality that he sacrificed the country's future to fund his own fantastically opulent lifestyle. The government has made no effort to build alternative industries that might replace oil when it runs out. Yet at the time of his death from cancer, in a clinic in Barcelona, Bongo was facing French allegations of embezzling hundreds of millions of dollars in public funds. (See pictures of Africa...
...been exposed. In 1999, an investigation by the U.S. Senate into Citibank estimated that the Gabonese President held $130 million in the bank's personal accounts, money the Senate report said was "sourced in the public finances of Gabon." Earlier last decade, a French inquiry into the state-owned oil firm Elf-Aquitaine named Bongo as the beneficiary of millions of dollars in slush funds. (See pictures of the global financial crisis...
...Bongo set the paradigm for Africa in other ways too. What money he did spend on Gabon went on white-elephant prestige construction projects - a raft of new government buildings and a $2 billion transnational railway - which, when oil prices dipped, were funded by debt that spiraled out of control and threatened to bankrupt the country. And in politics, Bongo fixed elections for himself and bought off political opposition with money or power - despite its small size, Gabon has more than 40 Cabinet Ministers - or worse. Several opposition members were killed in the 1970s. In 1990, the mysterious death...
...Read "Africa's Oil Dreams...