Dictator and Diplomat
Why is this man smiling? Here's a hint: It has something to do with oil
With more than $10 billion in U.S. direct foreign investment and major American companies such as Exxon Mobil, Marathon Oil, Amerada Hess, and Chevron winning the lion's share of exploration and extraction rights, maintaining political stability in Equatorial Guinea is a key priority for the Bush administration. Its location in the Bay of Guinea, where African oil giants including Angola, Nigeria, and Gabon are expected to provide 25 percent of all U.S. imports in just a few years, gives the Massachusetts-size country added geopolitical value.
Gentle push. The Bush administration has kept its human-rights efforts low key, and has somewhat successfully exercised its influence on Obiang to release political prisoners and improve jail conditions. "There is a disconnect between what he would like to see happen and what his people actually do," says a foreigner in defense of the president. "He'd love to find a way to have a better place in history than the one he knows he has right now."
That seems unlikely, however, given his long record of political repression. Obiang, an admirer of the late Spanish dictator Francisco Franco, served as director of Black Beach prison and in other top posts under his uncle, Francisco Macias Nguema, whose 11-year rule of terror resulted in the killing or forced exile of one third of the country's population. Macias was executed after a summary trial shortly after the 1979 coup led by Obiang, and since then not a single local, legislative, or presidential election has been fair and transparent, according to international organizations, as well as the U.S. State Department. "Democracy is not an import item," Obiang said in a speech this summer to the convention of his Democratic Party of Equatorial Guinea, which predictably nominated him yet again as its candidate for the 2009 presidential election. "People continue to say that Equatorial Guinea must be democratized. But what kind of democracy? The democracy that is in their interests, not in the interest of Equatorial Guinea."
Meanwhile, the effects of the oil boom can be seen in places such as the commercial port city of Bata, where Obiang spoke to the party congress in July. Major construction projects include an expanded airport, numerous hotel, office, and apartment buildings, repaved streets and rebuilt plazas, and a lovely seafront promenade complete with a marble balustrade. "There was no electricity and now there is electricity. There were no traffic lights and now there are traffic lights. There were almost no houses and hotels and now there are houses and hotels," says Crispin Mbomio, a 22-year-old Bata taxi driver.
Infrastructure development has not been matched, however, by spending on badly needed social projects. Even though Equatorial Guinea's economy is now 20 times larger than it was in the mid-1990s thanks to growing oil revenues, school enrollment and literacy rates have not improved significantly, access to clean water remains among the most limited in the world, and life expectancy actually decreased from 2000 to 2004, according to the World Bank. "Of particular concern," the International Monetary Fund said in a June report, "is why recent rapid growth and high oil revenues have not translated into a perceptible rise in living standards and a decline in poverty."
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