Lawyers lament opposition leader’s ‘political’ jailing

Gabon’s main opposition leader, Alain Claude Bilie By Nze, has been in jail for more than three months after the government resurrected an 18-year-old private financial dispute as a pretext ‌to sideline him, his lawyers said, according to Channel Africa. Nze was serving as Prime Minister when Brice Oligui Nguema, Gabon’s current President, took power in a coup in 2023, and he unsuccessfully challenged Nguema in an election last year. Nze’s lawyers said he has spent 100 days in ‘political and arbitrary’ solitary confinement after being arrested on  15 April. They claim the  basis for his arrest was a private dispute over alelged fraud and breach of trust dating to 2008. Nze has been confined to a five square metre cell without light at a prison in the capital, Libreville, his ‌lawyers ⁠said. They said that they have not been allowed to inspect case files and that the investigating judge has said he no longer has those documents. A Libreville appeals court rejected a defence request to annul proceedings on 2 June. Gabon’s Justice Ministry did ⁠not respond to a request for comment. ‘A man is being held on the basis of a case file his defence has never been permitted to see,’ Nze’s counsel, ⁠Arthur Vercken, said. The August 2023 coup in Gabon ended the more than five-decade rule of Ali Bongo and his family. Nguema ⁠was elected President in a vote intended to return the oil-producing Central African country to civilian rule.