About 80 French companies are registered in Gabon, said Etienne Giraud, president of the French Council of Investors in Africa (CIAN), a body whose members represent four-fifths of French business activity on the continent.
He added in a report by Agence France-Presse that dozens of small companies, artisans, restaurants, lawyers, insurance companies and financial services companies could be added to this number.
In 2022, Gabon will become the most important destination for French exports among the six member states of the Central African Economic and Monetary Community (CEMAC), which also includes Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Congo and Equatorial Guinea.
French companies sold 536 million euros ($585 million) worth of goods in Gabon, according to Finance Ministry figures, mainly agricultural products, foodstuffs, machinery and equipment, electrical and electronic goods, information technology equipment, intermediate goods and pharmaceutical products.
In the aftermath of the coup, the “Eramet” mining group, one of the largest French companies in Gabon, announced that it had suspended its activities “for the safety of employees and security of operations”, but later announced that it would resume its activities “gradually”, starting from Wednesday evening.
On Wednesday evening, Iramet said it had “decided to immediately resume rail transportation and resume extraction activities tomorrow morning, Thursday, August 31.”
Staff safety
Eramet employs 8,000 people in the oil-rich central African country and its local subsidiary extracts manganese ore, a mineral used in making steel and batteries, from the Moanda mines, the world’s largest manganese mine.
Gabon is the second largest producer of manganese in the world after South Africa, and the French company Komelog extracts 90 percent of the manganese in Gabon, while the Chinese company CICMHZ extracts the rest.
Meanwhile, Eramet’s Sitrag unit operates the Trans-Gabon railway, the only train line in the country.
Energy giant Total Energies has been present in Gabon since 1928, the fourth largest oil producer in sub-Saharan Africa and a member of OPEC.
Total Energy told AFP the company had “taken action to ensure the safety of its employees and operations and this is its top priority” in the aftermath of the coup.
Total Energy operates seven oil extraction sites in Gabon as well as a network of a few dozen gas stations, and invested last year in Gabon’s forestry sector.
Morel & Brum, another hydrocarbon exploration and production company, said on Wednesday that the situation in Gabon had not affected its sites and that work was proceeding normally. Contacted by AFP, the oil company Perenco, also operating in Gabon, did not respond.
Giraud said it was too early to determine the final impact of the coup on French companies, but stressed that he did not expect companies to leave Gabon en masse or suddenly.
#Oil #manganese. #coup #threaten #Frances #interests #Gabon