Pascaline Bongo was appointed as Personal Adviser to the President of the Republic in 1987 and entered the government as Minister of Foreign Affairs in June 1991. President Bongo had entrusted the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to close relatives since 1981. Pascaline's immediate predecessor in that post was her half-brother Ali Bongo, who was several years younger than Pascaline and had been rendered ineligible for a ministerial post by a constitutional age requirement. In her first address to the United Nations later in 1991, she praised the expulsion of Iraqi forces from Kuwait and expressed concern over violence in South Africa. She welcomed reforms in South Africa, but also stressed that further steps were needed to fully eliminate the apartheid system. Noting the collapse of socialism in the Warsaw Pact countries, she said that the world was witnessing rapid change, but she emphasized Gabon's view that the economic gulf between developed and developing countries—the global "north" and "south"—was "the real problem".