Omar Bongo Ondimba (Le Grand Camarade)

After three decades at the head of one of Africa's worst managed and most corrupt oil economies President Omar Bongo might well expect some political trouble...

His schedule has combined urgent personal intervention - in Madagascar for example - and the cementing of long-standing friendships with the likes of Gabon's President Omar Bongo...

Sassou Chad's President Idriss Déby and Gabon's President Omar Bongo have dropped legal action against François-Xavier Verschaeve whose book Noir Silence called Sassou a dictator and human rights abuser...

In 2001 at the African Union summit in Zambia Gabonese President Omar Bongo (Sassou's son-in-law and a Bateke like Lopes) had got French-speaking African leaders including Diouf's successor Abdoulaye Wade to sign up for Lopes...

Gabon's President Omar Bongo and Morocco's King Mohammed VI tried to organise a regional summit in Marrakesh for 26 September but with little hope that Gbagbo would risk leaving the country again this was replaced by plans for a summit of the Economic Community of West African States...

French radicals still regard Paris and La Francophonie as a force for ill: they claim that hardline dinosaurs such as Gabon's Omar Bongo and Cameroon's Biya have received coaching via French embassies in rigging techniques and how to terrorise opponents into quiescence...

He is helped by wife Antoinette a Vili from the Atlantic coast and daughter Edith-Lucie married to Gabon's President Omar Bongo...

So there will be a welcome if few favours for the African leaders who claim to be Chirac's friends notably Presidents Omar Bongo (Gabon) Gnassingbé Eyadéma (Togo) Lansana Conté (Guinea) Paul Biya (Cameroon) and Denis Sassou-Nguesso once lauded by Chirac as the man to hold Congo-Brazzaville together (AC Vol 42 No 25)...

A Kenyan academic Michael Chege linked poverty to authoritarianism theft of state resources and commissions on contracts under regimes such as those of Cameroon's Paul Biya Gabon's Omar Bongo Kenya's Daniel arap Moi Togo's Gnassingbé Eyadéma and Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe...

Dinosaurs such as El Hadji Omar Bongo of Gabon and Daniel Arap Moi of Kenya offered insights into the links between investment and good governance...