The current president of Gabon is rumoured to be a Nigerian of Igbo origin who was accepted by a former leader of the country during the Biafran war.

With next year’s presidential polls coming, debate has been brewing over the birthplace of President Ali Bongo Ondimba of Gabon with
critics allege fabricated his birth certificate to cover the fact that he was adopted from another country.
If the claims are proved true, it could keep him from contesting for another term and cost him his wealth.

This surprising revelation is about to be disclosed as a court in western France on November 12, Thursday, permitted a family member of Ali Bongo Ondimba to view the birth certificate of the leader after claims that he lied about where he was born.
The court in Nantes allowed 25-year-old Onaida Maisha Bongo Ondimba, a daughter of ex-president Omar Bongo, to read the documents in full.
Her legal representative Eric Moutet praised the decision as “enormous”, and “diplomatically complex”.

Ali Bongo is the only one of former president Omar Bongo’s 54 announced inheritors not to have produced the identification documents.
He became the president after the 2009 death of his father Omar Bongo, who had ruled the West African country and its oil and mineral wealth since 1967.
According to the Gabonese constitution one must be born Gabonese to become the head of state, but French investigative reporter Pierre Pean supposed in a recent book that the president was actually Nigerian and was adopted during the Biafran war in the late 1960s.

Bongo himself says he was born in Brazzaville in 1959, the former capital of French Equatorial Africa. The Bongo family is alleged to have skimmed off 25% of the oil-rich nation’s gross domestic product over the years, and Omar was said to be one of the world’s wealthiest heads of state.

The Nantes civil registration centre is answerable for all birth certificates of people born in French Equatorial Africa up to 1960, when the former colonial countries in the region gained independence to become Gabon, Congo, Chad and the Central African Republic.

Ali Bongo declared in late August that he would give “all his share of the inheritance” from his father to “the Gabonese youth” in a speech marking the 55th anniversary of independence.