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Obscure Country Profile #7:
Gambling and Glitz in Africa? Welcome to Gabon
By Lionel Beehner
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Dinner for two at the Le Pili Pili: $200; an after-hour tipple at the Fizz & Jazz: $150, topped off by a night at the Hotel Atlantique: $400. Prices resemble those out of a Paris tourist brochure, right?
Try Libreville, the capital of Gabon.
The African capital was recently ranked among the world’s most expensive cities, according to a survey by the Economist Intelligence Unit (the biannual survey compares prices and products of 123 nations from around the world). So what is Libreville, whose name sounds like a tacky Buick station wagon, doing near the top of this list?
The short answer is oil. Just over a year after being colonized by the French in 1848, black gold was found gurgling beneath the waters off of Gabon’s shore, ushering in what’s been called the “Gabonese Miracle.” Libreville’s population soon doubled, its skyline underwent a facelift, and oil tycoons came looking to fatten their wallets.
The capital’s boulevards, tree-lined and wide, soon became studded with upscale casinos, high-rise hotels, and boutiques teeming with overpriced imported goods from Europe, mostly France. “The Gabonese have developed expensive tastes,” says Andrew Douglas Yates, author of The Rentier State in Africa. He adds that the Gabonese were once one of the largest per capita consumers of champagne. “They don't eat mashed manioc in Libreville very much, unless they have to. They prefer good French cuisine; they read French newspapers, books, and magazines. They buy French clothes and furniture. They drive French cars, and take French buses, and ride French trains. They live like ‘yuppies’ in the 1980s who only drank Perrier.”
image
courtesy graphicmaps.com
Not everyone in Gabon is living the high-life and sipping spritzers, of course. Little of the oil money trickles down to the country’s 1.2 million denizens. The majority of Libreville’s residents work as farmers or mill workers. A tableau of lush forests dotted with sawmills and plywood factories make up the city’s suburbia. Thousands of trees line the city’s beachfront awaiting export, a stark reminder of Libreville’s lumber workforce, much of which barely ekes out a subsistence living. Ebola has become a threat in rural parts, a result of villagers eating raw monkey.
Indeed, Gabon’s oil is making more Westerners rich than natives. Gabon is what is often referred to as a “rent-based economy,” says Raymond Toye, the World Bank’s spokesperson on Africa. “It’s basically any sector where raw materials [in this case, oil] are exploited, produced and sold by foreign companies and what they bring the country is a rent payment or the right to exploit it.”
Making Gabon’s economy all the more opaque is the fact that “none of the oil companies are required to publicize what they pay the state,” says Gavin Hayman of Global Witness, a London-based watchdog group that examines the effects of oil in the developing world. “And we’re talking vast amounts of money,” adds Hayman.
Currently oil makes up around half of Gabon’s GDP, and over 80 percent of its export revenue. The country churns over 243,000 barrels of the black stuff daily, making it second only to Angola and Nigeria in Africa.
Oil has also enriched Gabon’s small and grubby political elite, nicknamed “Bongo barons” after Gabon’s autocratic president, Omar Bongo. Originally Albert-Bernard, Bongo converted to Islam in 1973 and switched his name to the tougher-sounding Omar, seized power in 1967 and has ruled Gabon tightly since. He is seen as a source of stability among Western eyes, so much so that France twice intervened militarily to preserve his regime. To this day, 600 French marines remain on Gabon’s soil. Small wonder President Bongo remains one of the world’s richest men; or that Libreville’s main college is called Omar Bongo University.
In the late 1970s, President Bongo “squandered 2 billion dollars on the most expensive bash in the history of African summitry,” writes Young Crawford, an African historian. His assets include a multi-million dollar mansion in Hollywood, a “seaside marble fortress” in Gabon and a fleet of armor-plated Cadillac’s.
“Bongo gets his oil rent in dollars, which then have to be translated through the Banque de France into crummy CFAs [Gabon’s currency],” says Yates. “Obviously he would prefer that his dollars buy a lot of CFAs, which means that people—[those] who do not receive the oil rent in Paris and elsewhere "offshore", but have to make their livings in CFAs in Gabon—find things more expensive. It also encourages imported goods. Everything is imported to Libreville, as if it were a desert oasis. This makes it more expensive.”
Another import is tourists, mostly European ones with euros to burn who come to gamble, relax or brave the local cuisine (porcupine and monkey meat are on some menus). They also come for the scenery. Situated on a protected estuary that empties into the Gulf of Guinea, Libreville has been called a “miniature Nice” (so has just about every city in the world with more than one river snaking through its center). The city boasts 12 miles of beaches as well as 2,700 hotel rooms (looking more Marriott than Motel 6). Plans are underfoot to build a $140-200 million tourism complex (Front de mer de Libreville), replete with commercial center, golf course and marina.
All this thanks to oil, beaches and of course, Bongo, who’s provided at least a modicum of stability over his long tenure. What’s more, Gabon has a per capita income that’s four times that of its Sub-Saharan African neighbors. But if oil production and profits drop dangerously low, so may Libreville’s price tags and Gabon’s GDP. For the time being, Gabon looks safe and tourist-friendly - so long as you’re not a discount shopper.
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Lionel Beehner is a Research Editor at New York Press and a Contributing Writer at SEED Magazine. He can be contacted at [email protected].
©
2003 Me Three