Gabon's economy: oil revenue spent on the years after oil

What the oil still pays for in Gabon

The Grondin field was discovered in 1971, 40 kilometres offshore in 50 metres of water, and about 60% of its estimated reserves had been extracted by 1978. The oil business was just coming on stream when Omar Bongo took office in 1967, and it tripled in value after the global crisis of 1973, as the Guardian's obituary of him recorded in 2009. National budgets multiplied fifteen times between the late 1960s and the late 1970s, by Britannica's account, and petroleum came to make up 70% of exports.

The share has moved little since. Two Wikipedia articles, as read in October 2026, put it slightly differently: the article on the Gabonese economy gives oil 50% of GDP and 80% of exports, and the main article on Gabon gives 43% of GDP, 81% of exports and roughly 46% of the government's budget. Neither attaches a year to its figures, which is worth recording in its own right. Accounts of the coup of August 2023 put oil at 60% of national revenue.

Nearly half of production comes from offshore fields, most productive near Port-Gentil, and the main onshore sites are at Rabi-Kounga and Sette Cama. Most of the crude leaves Africa, the bulk of it for the United States and France. Very little is burned at home: consumption was estimated at 13,170 barrels a day in 2007, against production of 244,000 the same year.

Output has fallen from the 1997 peak despite newer offshore finds, and proven reserves were estimated at 2 billion barrels on 1 January 2008. Gabon left the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries in 1995 and rejoined it in 2016.

The refinery at Port-Gentil, opened in 1967, is where most of the country's manufacturing began. Light industry spread out from it, and Britannica describes the refinery with its shipyard and metalworking shops as overshadowing everything else: cement and cigarette factories, a sugar refinery, breweries, palm oil and flour mills. Several of these were state corporations, and Britannica records that most of them drained the treasury, because posts went to the relatives and supporters of politicians.

Who held the oil and who held the income

Under Bongo, president from 1967 until his death in 2009, the French state oil company Elf Aquitaine held privileged rights to Gabonese oil, and Total later took its place. French criminal inquiries into illicit payments by Elf heard one Elf representative testify that the company gave Bongo 50 million euros a year to work the fields. In 1999 a United States Senate subcommittee estimated that he held US$130 million in personal accounts at Citibank, money its report described as sourced in the public finances of Gabon.

Britannica puts the distribution in one sentence: a group comprising 2% of the population came to control some 80% of personal income in the decades of Bongo's rule, diverting funds from public works along with the income from at least a quarter of oil sales.

Why a railway was laid to Franceville

Gabon's plan for after the oil was drawn up in the 1970s, and it was laid in steel. Air transport had spread across the country after the Second World War, because all-weather roads were so hard to build and keep open, but aircraft could not move timber or ore in bulk. Petroleum revenue paid for the Transgabon railway instead, with loans and aid from France, West Germany and international organisations, and work began in 1974.

The line went in by stages. The first section, from the port of Owendo to Ndjolé, opened in 1979. Ndjolé sits 240 kilometres up the Ogooué, at the point where the river stops being navigable from the Atlantic, so the first stretch of track ended where navigation on the river ends. The second section reached Booué in 1983 and the third reached Franceville at the end of 1986. Improved ore-handling facilities at the deepwater rail terminus at Owendo were completed in 1988.

The railway was argued over from the start. The Guardian's 2009 obituary of Bongo describes him as often in deep trouble with the Washington institutions over a line linking his home region to the sea, one that mainly benefited the timber companies working the country's hardwood. Wikipedia's account of the economy names overspending on the railway as one cause of the debt problems that followed, alongside the devaluation of the CFA franc in 1994 and the years of low oil prices. On its own terms the line did what it was built for. Logging of the interior forests began in the late 1970s, once the first section had opened, and the expansion of manganese output at Moanda became possible only once the track reached nearby Franceville.

What the mines around Moanda send to the coast

Manganese ore made up 16% of Gabon's exports in 2023. It is mined at Moanda, near Franceville in the south-eastern province of Haut-Ogooué, by the French company Eramet, which had 8,000 employees in Gabon when soldiers removed the president on 30 August 2023. Eramet halted all work in the country that day for security reasons, and its shares fell 18% on the morning of the coup. Uranium came out of the same district first.

Its exploitation and processing began in 1961, 26 kilometres north of Moanda, to supply the French nuclear power industry. In the 1970s the mining uncovered the Oklo reactor zones, rock in which natural nuclear fission had run about 2 billion years ago.

Diamonds and gold are also mined. In the north-east, at Mékambo and Bélinga, there are reserves of iron ore graded at 60 to 65% iron. China's CMEC temporarily secured the rights to the Bélinga ore in 2007, and in 2012 the government announced it would reassess how much ore the site actually held before awarding a concession. Mining output fell 2.1% in 2025, according to the African Development Bank, and the World Bank attributed the weakness in manganese and timber that year to transport and demand problems.

What the raw ore ban asks of miners

The June 2025 announcement is explicit about its purpose. Gabon has no domestic capacity to process manganese, so every tonne leaves as ore, and the ban taking effect on 1 January 2029 is meant to make the mining industry build processing plants in the country before that date. The stated aims are skilled jobs, higher tax revenue and a larger share of the value of the ore staying in Gabon. A public and private partnership is being set up by the government to prepare the transition.

Wikipedia's article on the Gabonese economy describes government policy as having moved since mid-2025 toward economic nationalism, including support for nationalisation, after an earlier commitment to a free market. The African Development Bank's outlook for 2026 and 2027 expects industry, named as agrifood and manufacturing, to be among the sectors driving a projected recovery to growth of 3.0% in 2026 and 3.1% in 2027.

Any processing plant would join a modest power system. Gabon generated 1.671 terawatt-hours of electricity in 2006, and hydropower supplied 72.2% of generation in 1998, from complexes including Tchimbélé, Kinguélé and Poubara. Natural gas from the fields at Port-Gentil is burned mainly to generate electricity. Nearly two thirds of the population has access to electricity, but only 15% of rural areas were connected in 2014, and the stated target is universal access by 2035.

Read beside the railway, the ban is the same wager made by other means. In the 1970s the state spent oil revenue to move ore cheaply to the coast. From 2029 the law is to stop the ore at the mine until it has been processed there.

How the forest economy was worked before oil

Before oil, logging was the pillar of the Gabonese economy, and by the early 1970s newly worked mineral wealth had overtaken timber and other forest products in importance. Forest covers more than three quarters of the territory. The principal logging districts were around Kango, Booué, Fougamou, Ndjolé, Mitzic and Mouila, while the forests nearest the coast and along the rivers had already been largely cut. Logs were floated down the Ogooué, the Abanga and the Nyanga to the sea, which is why the riverside forests went first and why the interior waited for the railway.

The commercial wood is okoumé, a tropical hardwood that the economic statistics list alongside cocoa, coffee, palm oil and rubber among the country's agricultural products. Lumber and plywood processing appear among the country's industries, and Britannica's picture of the timber yard at Owendo shows logs stacked in the open waiting to be processed at the railhead. Timber output fell 23.7% in 2025, the African Development Bank recorded.

The forest is also being offered as a source of climate finance. Gabon accounted for just over 0.04% of global greenhouse gas emissions in 2023, about 24.7 million tonnes, and its forests absorb more carbon than the country emits. It has pledged to stay carbon neutral beyond 2050 and, with outside support, to keep net removals at 100 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent a year. The World Bank describes the country as engaged in international carbon markets with the aim of turning its forest into climate finance, and the African Development Bank lists carbon credits and green and blue bonds among the instruments for funding the National Growth and Development Plan for 2026 to 2030.

Why Gabon buys most of its food abroad

Britannica puts agriculture, mostly subsistence farming, at about a third of the workforce, while a 2000 estimate quoted on Wikipedia gives 60%, and the two describe different years. Agriculture was 5.7% of GDP in a 2008 estimate. Better schooling and jobs in the towns emptied the countryside of young people, and about 80% of the population is now urban, by the World Bank's overview as read in October 2026.

By 1980 Gabon was producing only enough food to meet 10 to 15% of its needs, despite government efforts during the 1970s to hold people on the land. The 1980s brought expensive, capital-intensive market gardens to supply Libreville and Franceville. Efforts to revive cocoa and coffee brought modest results, while sugar refining at Franceville and palm-oil processing at Lambaréné succeeded. The tsetse fly defeated every attempt at beef and dairy herds, and cattle farming began only in 1980, with tsetse-resistant animals brought from elsewhere in Africa. Commercial fishing remains little developed.

The dependence on imports is felt in prices. When the CFA franc was devalued by 50% in January 1994, protests broke out in several cities and about three dozen people were killed; after they were suppressed, the government granted modest salary increases and put controls on the soaring prices of basic goods, most of them imported. In its outlook published in June 2026, the African Development Bank expects a new central purchasing agency to help hold inflation to 3.1% in 2026 by reducing speculation on imported goods, and names palm oil and poultry farming among the sources of growth.

Britannica notes one feature that sets the Gabonese economy apart from other sub-Saharan economies: a reliance on thousands of wage earners from other African countries to supplement a sparse Gabonese workforce in retailing, crafts and domestic transport. The labour force was estimated at 592,000 in 2008.

Who the oil income has not reached

A third of the population lives in poverty, a figure the BBC's country profile attributes to the World Bank and that the African Development Bank measured at 32.8% in 2024 and 33.1% in 2025. Growth in GDP per head was 0.6% in 2025, against 1.2% in 2024. Unemployment stood at 20.2% in 2025, and at 36.3% among young people and 28.6% among women. An earlier estimate put unemployment among Gabonese aged 15 to 24 at 40% in 2020.

The record puts Gabon at 2,300,000 people in 2023, and the World Bank counts nearly 59% of them in Libreville and Port-Gentil, the capital and the oil town. The rest of the country is thinly settled forest, and for some rural households without work in the extractive industries, income comes as remittances from family in the towns or from subsistence activities. The World Bank's rural services project had connected more than 12,784 households to electricity and water by July 2023, laying 160 kilometres of high-voltage and 140 kilometres of low-voltage line in Ngounié, Estuaire, Woleu-Ntem and Haut-Ogooué.

How the debt brought Gabon back to the IMF

Gabon joined the International Monetary Fund on 10 September 1963 and had entered 14 arrangements with it by October 2026. By the late 1990s debt service took some two fifths of the national budget, according to Britannica, and the government turned repeatedly to France for money and for help cancelling and rescheduling what it owed. French aid in 1987 amounted to US$360 million and subsidised a third of the budget, The New York Times reported in 1988. Gabon rescheduled a large part of its debt in 2004, concluded a 15-month Stand-By Arrangement in 2005 and had a three-year one approved in 2007, whose goals it could not meet in 2009 after the financial crisis and Bongo's death.

After the coup, the IMF's 2024 Article IV consultation, published on 31 May 2024, described a soft patch in 2023 and potential growth of around 3%, and called the fiscal imbalances urgent. The African Development Bank's figures for 2025 show where that led: growth of 2.7%, a budget deficit of 5.3% of GDP, public debt of 78.9% of GDP, and a further downgrade of the sovereign rating in December 2025. Lending to the government by banks rose 116.9% that year, non-performing loans rose from 9.28% to 9.86%, and exports fell 20.7%, turning a current-account surplus of 3.4% of GDP into a deficit of 1.5%. The World Bank estimated 2025 growth at 3.2%.

The CFA franc, issued for six countries by the Bank of Central African States, has been pegged at 655.957 to the euro since 1 January 1999, and the bank cut its policy rate to 4.5% in June 2026, with Gabonese inflation at 1% a year in May 2026. Credit inside the country stays dear: interest rates were 16.5% in the first quarter of 2025, and long-term resources accounted for 1% of bank loans in 2025.

A public debt audit was carried out in mid-2026, and the government has requested an IMF-supported programme. An IMF staff team visited Libreville from 14 to 25 September 2026 to discuss the audit's findings and the 2027 budget, and IMF loans outstanding stood at 319.05 million special drawing rights on 30 September 2026. The World Bank noted the same year that higher oil prices would raise revenue and the cost of fuel subsidies together, and that the destruction of an oil pipeline had undercut the export gains the higher prices might have brought.