Gabonese organizations such as Libreville-based Brainforest have expressed concern that the project would fall victim to government corruption, as has been the case for the country’s oil industry. Corruption has left Gabon mostly impoverished, despite its vast natural resources and the high price of commodities. For example, the Ministry of Mining has apparently authorized CMEC to begin building the road to Kongou Falls without approval from the Environment Ministry, raising concerns that proper legal and oversight processes are not being followed. 

CMEC has garnered priveleges from the government of Gabon that many natural resource monitoring groups in Gabon worry will be highly detrimental to the country's sustainable economic and environmental development. For example, CMEC negotiated a 25-year tax holiday for the company even though the mine is projected to be profitable within 8-10 years.

Groups are demanding that the contract between CMEC and the Gabon government be made public and subject to stakeholder input. They have also demanded to see the government’s feasibility studies for the project, which claimed 30,000 jobs would be created, in order to clarify if those jobs would go to Gabonese or Chinese workers.

Environment Gabon, a coalition of local NGOs, has expressed concerns about the proposed site of one of the dams, Kongou Falls in Ivindo National Park. They are concerned that building the dam there would require declassifying the Park, opening it and other protected areas up to further development. There are also concerns about the biodiversity impacts of the project area in general, as the Belinga region area is ecologically sensitive, and home to threatened wild chimpanzees.

According to Environment Gabon, construction on a 42km road and worker camps have already begun, despite the fact that impact assessments have not been completed, as required by Gabonese law.

As the government of Gabon comes under pressure from CMEC to push the project forward, it is coming down increasingly hard on grassroots groups that critique the mine's potential impacts and lack of transparency. This has included suspending the legal operations of civil society groups, imposing travel bans of key activists and detaining individuals who raise concerns about government corruption in the project. The latest detentions came in December 2008, when national police arrested and detained 5 activists without warrant for almost two weeks before releasing the individuals with charges pending. One of those held was Marc Ona, a member of the multi-stakeholder committee implementing Gabon's Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI), an international initiative promoting increased transparency of revenues from oil, gas and mining.