adminwages of about 900 euros (US$1 165), Minkoh typifies the emerging middle class in this oil-producing nation that is often associated with massive income inequality.
Even though Gabon is sub-Saharan Africa’s fourth-largest oil producer, 33 percent of the country’s 1,4 million people live below the poverty level, according to the United Nations Development Programme, based on the latest available figures from 2005.
Minkoh’s Libreville home is a far cry from the cliches of grinding African poverty, boasting a satellite dish, a flat-screen TV and a laptop. On the outskirts of town, dirt roads are being paved and new houses are under construction.
“We’ve especially felt it over the last two years,” says general contractor Eric Ngabouna (40), who is currently busy at about 15 construction sites.
Like Minkoh, Ngabouna also considers himself middle class and he too owns his home. His salary fluctuates but he has earned as much as 1 500 euros a month.
A recent report by the African Development Bank defines the middle class as anyone living on two to 20 dollars a day, which is not a huge amount in Libreville, considering that it is the world’s seventh
most expensive city.
Even on his relatively good salary, Minkoh says it can be hard to make ends meet. To boost his income, he has gone into business with a friend and sells bracelets decorated with Gabon’s national colours:
green, yellow and blue. He became a homeowner thanks to Gabon’s former long-serving president Omar Bongo Ondimba – one of only two presidents since the country gained independence from France in 1960 – who gifted the house to him during his 2005 presidential campaign. Bongo, who died in 2009, was well known for such “gifts” to citizens as a way of countering criticism that he was
mismanaging the nation’s oil wealth. – AFP.
Online Reporter