Dictator and Diplomat
Why is this man smiling? Here's a hint: It has something to do with oil
MALABO, EQUATORIAL GUINEA-It was what Washington insiders call a grip 'n' grin. A beaming President Teodoro Obiang Nguema of Equatorial Guinea shook hands with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who welcomed him warmly to Washington as a "good friend" of the United States. If Rice had any qualms that April day, she didn't let them show. Obiang may head a corrupt and repressive regime, according to the State Department's own human-rights reports, but Equatorial Guinea is a growing oil producer-now No. 3 in sub-Saharan Africa after Nigeria and Angola-and an oil-needy America can't afford to be too picky about choosing its petro pals.
But half a world away, in this nation's dusty, ramshackle capital, Rice's diplomatic pragmatism doesn't cut it for two political dissidents who show their torture scars from their four years confined in the notorious Black Beach prison. "We are offended," one of them says. "For a Third World country to call a dictator a good friend is one thing, but for the United States to do it is something else."
Equatorial Guinea is one of those places-and there are others, to be sure-where Washington chooses not to be preachy when the competition for oil reserves is against countries such as China, unencumbered by concerns about human rights and corruption. And even Obiang's opponents seem resigned to that reality. "There will be no democracy here because the president of Equatorial Guinea does not want to democratize the country," the dissident asserts. "Equatorial Guinea's oil resources are in the hands of Obiang and his family. The people are living in a state of misery."
Nouveau riche. A former Spanish colony in West Africa, Equatorial Guinea was a forlorn, forgotten place eking out a living on coca and tobacco exports until oil was struck in the early 1990s. Today, it is quickly becoming a petrostate, its agriculture abandoned and its economy almost entirely dependent on rising revenues from oil and natural gas. Equatorial Guinea's offshore wells pump some 350,000 barrels a day, providing the government with a $3.8 billion windfall this year alone.
The country of roughly 1 million people-nearly double the official population estimate-is finally getting some respect. It has drawn attention from energy-hungry China, which is providing military training as well as locking up oil rights. In February, China National Offshore Oil Co. signed an oil production deal with Equatorial Guinea, following a strategic partnership between the two countries announced by Obiang during his visit to Beijing last October.
The United States, which closed its embassy in 1995, reopened a diplomatic mission in 2003. The Senate is expected to soon confirm career diplomat Donald C. Johnson to serve as the first resident ambassador here in over a decade. As part of the increased contacts, the Bush administration says it is pressing Obiang and his government for progress on issues such as political reform, anticorruption measures, and human-rights protections. "Human rights are violated systematically and on a daily basis," says Jesus Ela Abeme, a leader of the Convergence Party for Social Democracy, the country's only truly independent opposition force. "Torture is practiced daily. It is the only method of investigation and punishment."
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."
The answer, in part, is due to high-level corruption-reportedly including payoffs, diverted oil revenues, and construction contracts awarded to companies owned by Obiang's family and political allies. In 2004, Senate investigators discovered that some $700 million from oil revenues had been deposited in the Riggs National Bank in Washington and were under Obiang's exclusive control. The Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations also found that the major oil companies operating in Equatorial Guinea had made millions of dollars in payments directly into more than 60 Riggs accounts held by Obiang, his family, and members of his government.
The Equatorial Guinea government denied illegal diversion of money, and some sources assert that Obiang sought to prevent corruption by exercising control over the money. Whatever the reality, Riggs was fined $25 million by the Treasury Department for "systematic violations" of money laundering laws. The accounts have been transferred to the Bank of Central Africa, a regional institution, where the money, still under Obiang's control, ostensibly is for infrastructure and other development projects.
While construction of roads, office buildings, football stadiums, and airports continues at a frenzied pace, the majority of the Equatorial Guinean people live in dire poverty. Newbuildings, a vast slum in the center of Malabo, is a case in point. Some 30,000 people are cramped into one-story wooden houses with rusted tin roofs. Most survive by selling African artifacts in front of their dwellings or used clothing and fruit and vegetables in nearby markets. Children kick around deflated soccer balls among piles of garbage and pools of fetid water. "There is no development plan; that's what's lacking in this country," says a United Nations official. "It's a slow evolution not going at the pace we would like, but they had an attempted coup in 2004 and canalized many resources into defense."
That attempted coup, in which 64 alleged South African mercenaries were arrested when their plane stopped in Zimbabwe on its way to Equatorial Guinea and 15 others were arrested in Malabo, was only the latest in a series of efforts to overthrow Obiang. The incident has led to an even more repressive atmosphere, with foreign journalists and political opponents followed by the secret police or watched by government informers in hotels, restaurants, and other public places. "The regime is phobic," says one well-connected Guinean. "Every white person is suspect."
Under intense international pressure, Obiang released 41 political prisoners on June 4, the day before his birthday, including some of the South Africans held in the failed coup. No one, however, knows exactly how many political prisoners still languish in the country's jails. "Human rights are at a standstill; there is no positive evolution as there should have been by now," says Fabian Nsue Ngume Obono, a human-rights lawyer who spent several months in Black Beach in 2002 and was recently summarily prevented from practicing law for a year because of his past defense of political opponents. "If no one is being detained right now it's because the authorities don't feel like it; they can arrest us at any moment."
Indeed, Obiang exercises firm control over the judicial and legislative branches and has reduced most of the political opposition to a supporting role in exchange for favors and patronage. The media, such as they are, are under full government control. There is not a single bookstore in the entire country.
Last month, Obiang fired the cabinet over what he said was incompetence and corruption. He then reappointed many of the same officials to top posts-including oil, finance, and defense-and for the first time named a prime minister from his own Fang ethnic group, a move seen by observers as further tightening his grip on affairs of state. "No one raises their voice here," says Felix Okende, one of the few political opponents willing to speak for attribution. "And those who do end up in Black Beach-or dead."
This story appears in the September 25, 2006 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.