Sahel crisis: UN refugee agency wants ‘immediate international action’

LIBREVILLE: Junta chief Brice Oligui Nguema celebrated a huge victory in Gabon’s presidential election Sunday after provisional results gave him 90.35 percent of the vote.
Oligui, who ended more than five decades of corruption-plagued rule by the Bongo family in August 2023, assuming the role of transitional president, had promised to return the country to democratic rule.
“God does not abandon his people,” Oligui told hundreds of delighted supporters at his campaign headquarters, paying tribute to what he called “the maturity of the Gabonese people.”
Interior Minister Hermann Immongault said earlier that Oligui had won a seven-year mandate with more than 575,200 votes, or 90.3 percent, of the votes counted so far.
His main rival, Alain-Claude Bilie By Nze, took three percent of the vote and six other candidates failed to win more than 1 percent in Saturday’s election.
Even before the count was completed, the official Gabonese media had that announced Mr. Oligui was “far ahead.”
Voters in the nation of 2.3 million people flocked to the ballot boxes on Saturday to take part in an election officially marking the end of military rule. The interior ministry put the participation rate at 70.4 percent.
French President Emmanuel Macron congratulated Oligui on his win and the conduct of the election in a telephone call, his office said.

The day after voting, the streets of the capital Libreville were calm — in contrast with elections in 2016 and 2023 marked by tensions and unrest.
“I hadn’t voted in a long time, but this time, I saw a ray or something that made me go out and vote,” 58-year-old Olivina Migombe told AFP while en route to church on Sunday.
“I believe in change this time,” the professed Oligui voter added.
The new president faces a litany of problems in the oil-rich country, from crumbling infrastructure to widespread poverty, all while laboring under a crushing mountain of debt.
Oligui had sought to shed his military strongman image and even ditched his general’s uniform to run for a seven-year term.
The junta leader dominated the campaign, with his seven challengers, led by ousted leader Ali Bongo’s last prime minister, Alain-Claude Bilie By Nze, largely invisible by comparison.
Critics accuse Oligui of having failed to move on from the years of plunder of the country’s vast mineral wealth under the Bongos, whom he served for years.
For the first time, foreign and independent media were allowed to film the ballot count.
International observers at polling stations across the country did not see major incidents, according to first reports.
In total, some 920,000 voters were eligible to cast ballots at 3,037 polling stations, of which 96 were abroad.
Already, in the first results released by state media on Sunday morning, Oligui was the overwhelming favorite to win in around 30 polling stations, some of them returning results of 100 percent of the vote in his favor.
 

WASHINGTON/WEST PALM BEACH, Florida: US President Donald Trump on Sunday bore down on his administration’s latest message that the exclusion of smartphones and computers from his reciprocal tariffs on China will be short-lived, pledging a national security trade investigation into the semiconductor sector.
Those electronics “are just moving to a different Tariff ‘bucket,’” Trump said in a social media post. “We are taking a look at Semiconductors and the WHOLE ELECTRONICS SUPPLY CHAIN in the upcoming National Security Tariff Investigations.”
The White House had announced the exclusions from steep reciprocal tariffs on Friday.
Trump’s commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, earlier on Sunday said that critical technology products from China would face separate new duties along with semiconductors within the next two months.
The exclusions announced on Friday were seen as a big break for technology firms such as Apple and Dell Technologies that rely on imports from China.
Trump’s back-and-forth on tariffs last week triggered the wildest swings on Wall Street since the COVID pandemic of 2020. The benchmark Standard & Poor’s 500 index is down more than 10 percent since Trump took office on January 20.
Lutnick said Trump would enact “a special focus-type of tariff” on smartphones, computers and other electronics products in a month or two, alongside sectoral tariffs targeting semiconductors and pharmaceuticals. The new duties would fall outside Trump’s so-called reciprocal tariffs, under which levies on Chinese imports climbed to 125 percent last week, he said.
“He’s saying they’re exempt from the reciprocal tariffs, but they’re included in the semiconductor tariffs, which are coming in probably a month or two,” Lutnick said in an interview on ABC’s “This Week,” predicting that the levies would bring production of those products to the United States. “These are things that are national security, that we need to be made in America.”
Beijing increased its own tariffs on US imports to 125 percent on Friday in response. On Sunday, before Lutnick’s comments, China said it was evaluating the impact of the exclusions for the technology products implemented late on Friday.
“The bell on a tiger’s neck can only be untied by the person who tied it,” China’s Ministry of Commerce said.
Billionaire investor Bill Ackman, who endorsed Trump’s run for president but who has criticized the tariffs, on Sunday called on him to pause the broad and steep reciprocal tariffs on China for three months, as Trump did for most countries last week.
If Trump paused Chinese tariffs for 90 days and cut them to 10 percent temporarily, “he would achieve the same objective in causing US businesses to relocate their supply chains from China without the disruption and risk,” Ackman wrote on X.

’CHANGES EVERY DAY’
Sven Henrich, founder and lead market strategist for NorthmanTrader, was harshly critical of how the tariff issue was being handled on Sunday. “Sentiment check: The biggest rally of the year would come on the day Lutnick gets fired,” Henrich wrote on X. “I suggest the administration figures out who controls the message, whatever it is, as it changes every day. US business can’t plan or invest with the constant back and forth.”
US Senator Elizabeth Warren, a Democrat, criticized the latest revision to Trump’s tariff plan, which economists have warned could dent economic growth and fuel inflation.
“There is no tariff policy — only chaos and corruption,” Warren said on ABC’s “This Week,” speaking before Trump’s latest post on social media.
In a notice to shippers late on Friday, the US Customs and Border Protection agency published a list of tariff codes excluded from the import taxes. It featured 20 product categories, including computers, laptops, disc drives, semiconductor devices, memory chips and flat panel displays.
In an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” White House trade adviser Peter Navarro said the US has opened an invitation to China to negotiate, but he criticized China’s connection to the lethal fentanyl supply chain and did not include it on a list of seven entities — the United Kingdom, the European Union, India, Japan, South Korea, Indonesia and Israel — with which he said the administration was in talks.
Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said on CBS’s “Face the Nation” that there were no plans yet for Trump to speak to Chinese President Xi Jinping on tariffs, accusing China of creating trade friction by responding with levies of its own. But he expressed hopes for some non-Chinese deals.
“My goal is to get meaningful deals before 90 days, and I think we’re going to be there with several countries in the next few weeks,” Greer said.
Ray Dalio, the billionaire founder of the world’s biggest hedge fund, told NBC’s “Meet the Press” that he was worried about the United States sliding into recession, or worse, as a result of the tariffs.
“Right now we are at a decision-making point and very close to a recession,” Dalio said on Sunday. “And I’m worried about something worse than a recession if this isn’t handled well.”