In a symbolic display of commitment for the fast-track prioritization of their plans, Sedco Chairman of the Board Hugh Bennett, and UpLink Founder and CEO Roger Gordian—the latter almost absent from the public eye since his near-fatal illness several years ago—have informed the Wall Street Journal that they will attend a formal contract-signing ceremony sometime next month aboard one of Sedco’s state-of-the-art drill platforms off Gabon, not coincidentally the hub of UpLink International’s African fiber network. Only the size of Colorado, with a population of under two million, the country nonetheless can boast of a relatively stable civil infrastructure and accelerated democratic reforms under President Adrian Cangele, offering foreign companies a lower-risk host environment than its notoriously chaotic regional neighbors—among them Cameroon, Congo, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (formerly Zaire), and Angola.

This is not to suggest that Gabon is anything close to a Western investor’s paradise. UpLink’s large and formidable private security force has acquired a worldwide reputation. But despite Cangele’s reform measures, a complex political landscape and employee safeguard issues have led many other corporations to remain wary of their practical ability to conduct business in the tiny nation. . . .

From L’Union Online
(limited content English version):

PRESIDENT CANGELE AND PARLIAMENT
SHARE IN JOYOUS RECEPTION FOR UPLINK
INTERNATIONAL

LIBREVILLE—In a gathering scheduled for later today, His Excellency El Hadj President Adrian Cangele and senior Parliamentary lawmakers will stand together beneath the graceful marble portico of the Presidential Palace to ratify a fifteen-year grant of the UpLink telecommunications licenses that had been early approved by the National Assembly. This frees the way for UpLink’s installation of a state-of-the-art fiberoptic network throughout the continent, and reaffirms the Republic of Gabon’s position as undisputed leader in Africa’s technological and economic rise to maturity on the global stage.

By confirming Uplink’s long-term franchise, President Cangele has given the company renewed confidence to proceed with its establishment of a headquarters complex in the Sette Cama region without concern that current network building operations could be interrupted by political sea changes. A further provision of the charter enables the Ministry of Transportation to deepen funding for construction of a modern paved highway from Port-Gentil to the Sette Cama, a difficult linkage that currently requires passage by air, river boat, or truck over dirt roads that are prone to flooding in the rainy season and plagued by scattered outbreaks of banditry, acts primarily committed by cross-border infiltrators (see feature article Cameroonian and Congolese Lawlessness). While UpLink will be a major beneficiary of upgraded travel to the region, it will also prove a splendid boon to agriculturists and lumbermen in far outlying areas, allowing easier distribution of their products to domestic and international markets. Increased tourism to the Sette Cama’s Iguéla and Loango National Wilderness Reserves, long attractive to photographic safari planners and sport fishermen, is viewed as an additional economic dividend for Gabon.