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.

In a demonstration of its openhanded cooperative relationship with the Cangele administration, UpLink International has offered to defray a large portion of the highway’s construction cost with corporate funding. While no specific financial amount has been disclosed, its promised subsidy is rumored to be in excess of $10 million U.S., ensuring that no unfair tax burden will be imposed on residents of Port-Gentil and its surrounding districts.

Shortly before this story went to press, President Cangele was asked about media stories of political opposition to his aggressive backing of the UpLink licenses. “The stories were classic sensationalistic exaggerations,” he told our reporter, adding, “It is praiseworthy that none such accounts appeared in L’Union, our national beacon of journalistic integrity and accuracy.”

The president went on to explain that there has been no significant governmental dispute over the idea that UpLink International represents the nation’s telecommunications future.

“Any divisions that may have emerged concerned minor timing and procedural issues and were settled by brotherly, well-ordered debate,” he said. “My appearance with the foremost members of all our coalition parties will show that, regardless of political or tribal affiliations, the Gabonese people are joined by common principle, and a wish to champion West Africa’s shift from continuous cycles of violence and revolution to progressive, harmonious evolution at the dawn of the twenty-first century.”