Voters in Gabon have cast their ballots in the presidential election, as military leader Brice Oligui Nguema looks to cement his grip on power in the first election since he led the 2023 coup.
Polls closed at 6pm (17:00 GMT) on Saturday and counting was under way, with interim results expected overnight or on Sunday.
Nearly one million people, including some 28,000 overseas, are registered to vote in this oil-rich but poor African nation of 2.3 million people.
Al Jazeera’s Ali Hashem, reporting from Libreville, said that many voters were “stuck between hope and fear”.
Nguema, who had been instrumental in ending 55 years of iron-fisted dynastic rule of the Bongo family led by former leader Ali Bongo, has been leading in opinion polls. Bongo family members were accused of looting Gabon’s wealth.
Aurele Ossantanga Mouila, 30, voted for the first time ever after finishing his shift as a croupier in a casino.
“I did not have confidence in the earlier regime,” he said.
Nguema took the role of transitional president while overseeing the formation of a government that includes civilians, tasked with drawing up a new constitution after the 2023 coup.
The election comes at a time of high unemployment, regular power and water shortages, a lack of infrastructure and heavy government debt.
Nguema ditched his military uniform as he campaigned for a seven-year term against seven rivals, including Alain-Claude Bilie By Nze, who served as prime minister under Ali Bongo before the coup.
He has predicted an “historic victory” in the election.
“The builder is here, the special candidate, the one you called,” Nguema said on Thursday, amid the music and dancing at his closing rally in the capital, Libreville.
But critics accuse Nguema, who had promised to hand power back to civilians, of failing to move on from the years of plunder of the country’s vast mineral wealth under the Bongos, under whom he served for years.
Bilie By Nze, Nguema’s main opponent, has cast himself as the candidate for a “complete rupture”.
“In reality, it’s an election of total change. It’s a challenge and we are at a crossroads,” he told Al Jazeera.
He has accused Nguema, who led the Republican Guard in the Bongo years, of representing a continuity of the old system.
Nguema formerly served as an aide-de-camp to Omar Bongo before becoming chief of the presidential guard under his son Ali Bongo.
Whoever wins will have to meet the high hopes of a country where one in three people lives below the poverty line despite its vast resource wealth, according to the World Bank.
Gabon’s debt rose to 73.3 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) last year and is projected to reach 80 percent this year.
