Gabon Says It Revoked 52 Mining Permits After Audit, but Tallies Differ

Gabon’s Ministry of Mines says it withdrew 52 mining titles after a nationwide audit, but a separate tally published by a Gabonese economic outlet puts the number at 71, leaving an unresolved discrepancy over which permits were affected.

The ministry announced the action on 19 October 2026, saying 41 exploration permits and 11 exploitation permits were withdrawn following an audit conducted between 29 June and 16 October. It said the affected mining areas returned to the state’s public domain because of failures to comply with legal and regulatory requirements. Its announcement refers to communiqué 000002/MMRG/CAB-M.

Those are the government’s stated figures and grounds for the administrative decision. The ministry’s web summary does not itself establish that a particular holder committed a criminal offence.

An independent Gabonese economic publication, Échos de l’Éco, reported on 20 October that its count of the communiqué’s tables produced 71 distinct titles after removing what it described as a duplicated block of three exploitation permits. Its breakdown was 48 exploration and 23 exploitation permits across 46 companies. This is a newsroom count of the purported annex, not an independently verified administrative registry extract. TFNOS has not reconciled the complete signed annex against the ministry’s online summary.

Regional economic publication EcoMatin separately reported the ministry’s 52-title total on 21 October, with the same 41/11 division. It noted that the ministry had not published the specific grounds for each company’s alleged non-compliance, the total area affected, or a timetable for redistributing the titles. The agreement between the ministry and that report does not resolve the different annex-based tally.

The distinction matters for public accountability. A licence count is not the same as the number of companies affected, and a company may hold several permits. Exploration rights and exploitation rights are different legal categories. If a permit appears more than once in a table, counting rows rather than unique permit identifiers can change the total. Conversely, if the ministry’s headline total omits listed identifiers, a public clarification would be needed.

The ministry identified Ogooué-Ivindo, Woleu-Ntem, Haut-Ogooué, Ogooué-Lolo, Ngounié, Estuaire and Nyanga among provinces with exploration titles affected. The geographical distribution does not establish the number of unique titles or the final status of any appeal.

The October decision follows the government’s 22 June suspension of small-scale gold-mining activity. The ministry linked the audit to stronger enforcement of the mining framework, including law 037/2018, cited as dated 11 June 2019. The government said operators could seek clarification from mining-administration offices and warned that continued unlawful activity could lead to proceedings.

None of these records establishes that all affected companies were convicted of wrongdoing, that a particular sum of public money was lost, or that every revocation is beyond administrative or judicial challenge. The existence and outcomes of any individual appeal remain to be checked.

The next verifiable steps are to obtain the signed communiqué and all annex pages, count unique permit identifiers in each legal category, compare them with the live mining-title register, and seek a ministry explanation for the different published totals. A further report would be warranted if a corrected list, court ruling, appeal decision or reallocation of the titles materially changes the documented position.