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 \u200cto sideline him, his lawyers said in a statement.<\/p>\n
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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.<\/p>\n
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Nze’s party, “Together for Gabon”, reported on Nze’s imprisonment on its \u2060Facebook page.<\/p>\n
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Nze’s lawyers said in a statement that he has spent 100 days in “political and arbitrary” solitary confinement after being arrested on April 15. The basis for his arrest was a private dispute over about 7 600 Euros ($8 650) dating to 2008, they said. His party said he was accused of fraud and breach of trust in that dispute.<\/p>\n
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Nze has been confined to a five-square-metre cell without light at a prison in the capital, Libreville, his \u200clawyers \u2060said.<\/p>\n
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His lawyers 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 June 2.<\/p>\n
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Gabon’s Justice Ministry did \u2060not respond to a request for comment.<\/p>\n
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“A man is being held on the basis of a case file his defence has never been permitted to see,” Nze\u2019s Counsel, \u2060Arthur Vercken, said in the statement.<\/p>\n
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The August 2023 coup in Gabon ended the more than five-decade rule of Ali Bongo and his family. Nguema \u2060was elected president in a vote intended to return the oil-producing Central African country to civilian rule.<\/p>\n
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–Reuters–<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":40572,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false},"news-type":[78,26],"class_list":["post-40571","news","type-news","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","news-type-featured","news-type-general_news","entry"],"acf":{"short_description":"Gabon's main opposition leader, Alain Claude Bilie By Nze, has been in jail for more than three months","published_date":"2026-07-25 08:10:42","news_description":"Gabon's main opposition leader, Alain Claude Bilie By Nze, has been in jail for more than three months","form_embed":"","author":"","image_caption":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news\/40571","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/news"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news\/40571\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":40573,"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news\/40571\/revisions\/40573"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/40572"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40571"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"news-type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news-type?post=40571"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}