IT was January 1998 and Robert Bourgi was waiting to see the Gabonese president Omar Bongo, in an antechamber at his seaside palace in Libreville.
He was there to collect funds for the approaching French presidential election on behalf of the centre-right Gaullist candidate Jacques Chirac, who was mayor of Paris at the time.
Who should then be ushered into the same antechamber but Roland Dumas, former French foreign minister and right-hand man of ruling Socialist President François Mitterrand, Chirac’s arch-rival.
“Good day, Bourgi,” said Dumas. “I believe we are here for the same purpose.”
Claiming seniority, Dumas went into Bongo’s office first. Emerging a short time later, he said to Bourgi: “Don’t worry, there’s still a bit left!”
Recounted in Bourgi’s newly-published memoirs They know that I know it all – My life in Françafrique, the anecdote says everything about the money-grabbing and mutual dependence that for so long linked French and African politics.
For four decades Robert Bourgi was at the centre of it all.
Born in Senegal in 1945 to Lebanese Shiite parents, he rose to become a confidant of a generation of African leaders – from Omar Bongo in Gabon to Denis Sassou Nguesso of Congo-Brazzaville and Blaise Compaoré of Burkina Faso.
And in Paris, he inherited the mantle of the legendary Jacques Foccart – the Gaullist who oversaw the post-colonial Françafrique system, with its arrangements of influence and protection, markets, materials, muscle… and money.
From the early years after World War Two – during which it had been a centre of activism in favour of France’s post-war leader Charles de Gaulle – Africa and its former French colonies had been a source of financing for all French political parties. By the 1980s, when Bourgi came onto the scene, it was routine.
Bourgi says that he himself never imported the bags of cash.
“The procedure was simple. When there was an election approaching, Chirac made it clear that I should deliver a message in various African capitals,” he said in an interview in Le Figaro newspaper this week.
“The [African] heads of state then sent an emissary to my office in Paris with a large sum. Several million in francs or dollars.”
In each of the 1995 and 2002 presidential elections – both won by Chirac – he says around $10m (£7.5m) was given by African leaders.
The 2002 race provided Bourgi with another colourful story, when a representative of Burkinabè leader Blaise Compaoré arrived in Paris with a large sum of money concealed in djembe drums.
According to Bourgi, he accompanied the envoy to the Elysée Palace, where they were greeted by Chirac. They opened the sealed drums using a pair of scissors, upon which a rain of banknotes fell out.