Employees at billionaire Mahamadou Bonkoungou's EBOMAF in Gabon say they have gone a year without pay slips, health insurance

Workers employed on the Gabonese construction sites of Mahamadou Bonkoungou's Ebomaf Group staged a peaceful protest on Monday May 4, accusing the Burkinabe construction giant of serious and sustained labour violations that they described as a "professional trauma" inflicted on them since the company arrived in the country, Direct Infos Gabon reported on May 5.

The employees, speaking publicly for the first time about conditions they had endured in silence, presented a list of grievances that covered unpaid annual leave, missing pay slips, absent workplace accident insurance and what they called "salary blackmail" -- the practice of conditioning wage payments on the immediate signing of new employment contracts. The protest remained strictly peaceful, with workers explicitly refusing to damage any property.

What the workers are alleging

The first and most fundamental grievance is the non-payment of annual leave benefits. Under Gabonese labour law, workers become entitled to paid leave after 12 months of continuous service. Several Ebomaf workers said they have gone well beyond that threshold without receiving any leave compensation.

More broadly, many employees said they had not received pay slips for several months or, in some cases, for an entire year. The absence of pay slips is not merely an administrative inconvenience. In Gabon, as in most jurisdictions, a pay slip is a legal document that proves what an employee was paid, their social security deductions and their employment status. Without it, a worker cannot demonstrate their financial history for a bank loan, cannot verify that their declared deductions match what was actually withheld from their wages and cannot protect themselves in any future labour dispute.

On workplace safety, workers said the company provides no accident insurance. When a construction worker is injured on site, which in the heavy civil engineering sector is a persistent occupational reality, Ebomaf is alleged to assume no responsibility for medical costs. Workers have to absorb those costs individually.

The social security dimension is arguably more troubling. Workers said that deductions are being made from their salaries in the name of the CNSS, Gabon's national social security fund, but that they have no visibility into whether those deductions are actually being remitted to the fund or whether their social coverage is real and active. If deductions are withheld from wages but not transferred to the CNSS, the employer would be collecting money from workers while those workers accumulate no actual social security credits or coverage.

The "salary blackmail" allegation adds a coercive element to the picture. Workers said management has been conditioning the payment of wages already earned on the signing of new employment contracts, presenting workers with a binary choice: sign immediately or wait for money they are already legally owed. This practice is said to affect both Gabonese nationals and expatriate workers from West Africa, primarily from Burkina Faso and other Francophone countries.

Who Bonkoungou is

Mahamadou Bonkoungou is Burkina Faso's richest man and the founder of Ebomaf, which stands for Entreprise Bonkoungou Mahamadou et Fils. He started the company in 1988 as a family enterprise, having previously traded goods and dealt in gold. Over the next 3 decades he built it into one of the largest privately held construction companies in West Africa, accumulating more than $3 billion in road, bridge, airport and public works contracts across Burkina Faso, Côte d'Ivoire, Mali, Togo, Niger, Guinea, Benin, Liberia and Gabon.

His Gabon presence is particularly significant. Ebomaf is currently building a 244-kilometre road in the Yombi-Mandji-Omboué corridor in Gabon's southern coastal region, as well as working on an international airport project. In February 2025, the company also signed a deal to manage the National Inland and International Navigation Company (CNNII), Gabon's struggling state shipping operator. That contract was terminated in August 2025 after Gabonese officials said Ebomaf had failed to put up the required capital and meet operational targets.

Beyond construction, Bonkoungou has diversified into aviation through Liza Transport International, his private jet charter service that recently opened a Dubai office, and Liz Aviation, a commercial airline launched in April 2023 with routes including Ouagadougou-Bobo-Dioulasso and Lomé-Ouagadougou. He also controls IB Bank through his holding company IB Holding after acquiring what was formerly the Togolese Bank for Commerce and Industry. Bonkoungou Distribution supplies construction and mining machinery across Burkina Faso and the region.

He is known as a philanthropist in Burkina Faso. In July 2025, he donated relief materials worth 1.722 billion CFA francs ($2.8 million) to internally displaced persons in Dédougou, his hometown, amid Burkina Faso's ongoing security crisis driven by jihadist insurgency.

What comes next

The workers have called on Gabon's labour authorities to intervene and enforce the country's labour code. They framed their appeal in the language of a state governed by law, positioning Ebomaf's alleged conduct as a direct challenge to legal norms that Gabonese authorities are obliged to uphold.

The junta that has governed Gabon since the August 2023 coup under General Brice Clotaire Oligui Nguema has signalled at various points that it intends to review the terms on which foreign companies operate in the country, particularly in the infrastructure sector. Whether that stance extends to labour enforcement on active construction sites will determine how seriously the government treats the workers' complaint.

Ebomaf has not publicly responded to the allegations. The resolution of the standoff, as Direct Infos Gabon noted, will depend on whether the company moves to regularise its administrative and social obligations before the workers or the authorities force the issue.