In the shop, whenever the brass decided to padlock the breakroom or turn down the intercom, nobody bought the line that it was done for our own safety. We knew the truth in our marrow: the bosses were terrified we might compare notes, tally up the wage theft, and decide together that the line wasn’t going to start up on Monday. For eight long months, the military authorities in Libreville pulled that exact same stunt on an entire country. They yanked the master breaker on social media, claiming digital agitation was stirring up conflict, while the working class was forced to choke down rising prices and austerity in enforced silence. Now, the state has magnanimously flipped the switch back on. We are supposed to applaud this return to normalcy, but working people ought to know better than to thank the jailer for loosening the cuffs.
To understand why a regime spends nearly three-quarters of a year strangling its own telecommunications, you have to look beyond the sanitised babble of security statements and peer directly into the machinery of class domination. Antonio Gramsci wrote that the crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum, a great variety of morbid symptoms appear. When the long-ruling Bongo dynasty collapsed into a military coup last year, the Gabonese state suffered an acute crisis of authority. The hegemony that had allowed a comprador elite to run the country as a private plantation for foreign oil and mining interests suddenly fractured. Deprived of the easy consent manufactured by decades of dynastic patronage, the new masters of the state reached for the bluntest coercive tool in the shed: the total suppression of the digital avenues where the subaltern classes talk, grumble, and organise.
Let us dispose of the liberal myth that this blackout was merely a spat over free expression in the abstract. In our era, digital networks are not luxury parlor games; they are vital means of production and reproduction for the urban poor and the precarious working class. Across Libreville and Port-Gentil, informal traders rely on messaging apps to source produce, independent taxi drivers need connectivity to find fares, and families depend on the network to transfer remittances simply to survive the week. To shut down access for eight months is to impose a devastating economic siege on the very people living hand-to-mouth. Yet, while the dock worker and the market woman were left in the dark, you can bet your last dollar that the high-speed satellite feeds in the air-conditioned boardrooms of multinational oil operations never flickered once.
The ruling class understands class solidarity far better than most union bureaucrats do. Gabon is a treasure house of wealth—crude oil, raw manganese, hardwood timber—sucked dry by global capital while a staggering portion of its youth languishes without steady employment. The genuine terror haunting the junta was never that online agitators would insult political sensibilities; it was that the spontaneous rage of the streets would find coherence. They feared that a localized strike by oil workers in the coastal terminals might ignite solidarity walkouts among transport workers and teachers in the capital, coordinated in real time across the networks before the police batons could arrive to snuff it out.
The mainstream press and the bourgeois opposition will frame this restoration of service as a victory for the rule of law or a concession to civil society. That is pure managerial nonsense. The state is turning the feed back on because it believes it has consolidated its grip, pacified the streets, and steered the post-coup transition into safe, manageable channels that do not threaten foreign property or domestic privilege. The restored connection is not a gift; it is a tactical redeployment by a regime that thinks the fever of popular unrest has broken.
They are mistaken. You can kill a data signal, and you can ban an application, but you cannot decree an end to the class antagonisms that generated the crisis in the first place. The cost of living remains unpayable, the extraction of Gabon’s mineral wealth remains directed outward toward Paris and London, and the working people who dig the ore and pump the oil are still left with the scrapings from the master's table.
Working people across the continent and beyond should watch this spectacle with open eyes. The digital commons under modern capitalism are not public utilities held in trust; they are privately leased pipelines that the capitalist state will shutter the instant the status quo is threatened. Restoring social media access just gives the Gabonese proletariat back a tool that was stolen from them. The real task begins now: turning those restored lines of communication into instruments of militant labor struggle, before the masters decide to pull the plug again.