Science & Tech Quote by Omar Bongo

There is a canny double move in Omar Bongo's demand that online information be "as free as in the newspapers": it sounds like a liberal principle, but it rests on an older, more controllable model of freedom. Newspapers are "free" in the sense that readers can access them and ideas can circulate, but they are also gatekept by editors, owners, licensing regimes, printing costs, and the quiet leverage of advertising and state patronage. By holding the Internet to the newspaper standard, Bongo invokes openness while implicitly normalizing the very constraints that made mass media governable for decades.

The intent reads as political positioning in the early-to-mid Internet era, when African governments were navigating globalization, democratization pressures, and the destabilizing potential of networked communication. To endorse "free information" is to align with modernity and development discourse - a signal to international partners, investors, and institutions that the state is not afraid of scrutiny. The subtext is that the Internet should be domesticated into familiar channels: public, yes, but legible; plural, but bounded.

It also reveals an anxiety about asymmetry. Newspapers historically operated within national borders; the Internet leaks across them, rerouting authority away from capitals and toward diasporas, whistleblowers, and foreign platforms. Bongo's phrasing tries to pull that unruly medium back into a framework where the state can negotiate, pressure, or co-opt intermediaries. "As free as" is the tell: not maximal freedom, but calibrated freedom - the kind a government already knows how to manage.