20100914
africanews

DAKAR (Reuters) - Gabon managed to execute less than a third of its 2010 investment plans by mid-year, an International Monetary Fund official said in an interview, raising questions over its drive to revamp its economy.

President Ali Bongo Ondimba succeeded his late father last year and vowed to use the Central African country's dwindling oil wealth to fund $11 billion of spending over his seven-year mandate to transform it into a regional economic powerhouse.

But administrative inefficiencies and resistance to reforms from within the ruling elite are slowing plans for some 897.5 billion CFA francs of investment in Bongo's 2010 budget, IMF Resident Representative Samba Thiam told Reuters.

"We said before you accelerate investment you want to implement the reforms first, especially if you want good governance and accountability," Thiam said in the interview, conducted by telephone and email.

"The execution rate at the end of June is only 27.2 percent," he added, forecasting a "very low" proportion of the budget will have been implemented by the end of the year.

Oil currently accounts for around half of Gabon's $14.5 billion-a-year economy, one of the largest in the region and one of the few in sub-Saharan Africa to have issued a Eurobond, due in 2017 with an 8.2 percent coupon.

There was no immediate comment from the Gabonese government on its budget despite telephone calls made to officials in the economic ministry and the presidency on Monday and Tuesday.

Bongo, whose election in a disputed poll in August 2009 triggered several days of riots, has undertaken a number of high-profile steps to break with the era of his father, under whose rule most Gabonese failed to reap any benefit from oil.