by ABENA AMPOFOA ASARE
“Equatorial Guinea President Teodoro Obiang at a meeting [in 2006] with US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice: The easiest way to earn Washington’s graces is to discover oil.” PHOTO/Reuters/Der Spiegel
This past October, the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) suspended a three million dollar research prize funded by Teodoro Obiang, one of the world’s worst dictators. Shamed by an open protest letter signed by over 60 leading global activists, UNESCO was compelled to distance itself from a man who has long ruled Equatorial Guinea with an iron fist. Precisely how a leader cut from the same cloth as Idi Amin, Omar al-Bashir, or Nicolae Ceausescu came to finance a UN prize in the first place is a truth stranger than fiction.
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This is the strangeness of Equatorial Guinea’s plight. No matter how many dubiously-funded multimillion dollar houses Obiang’s son buys in Malibu, California, how many dissidents are tortured and killed in Malabo prisons, or how many human rights exposés are published in the world’s leading publications, when Teodoro Obiang travels to the United States, France, and the UN, he receives a red carpet reception – as long as he promises to do better.
OBIANG’S ACE IN THE HOLE
Part of this maddening paradox is the result of Equatorial Guinea’s massive oil reserves, which, according to one US Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations report, have created an ‘increasing capacity to buy diplomatic influence’. The extent to which oil resources distort Equatorial Guinea’s global standing is evident in the most recent UNDP Human Development Index. More than any other country in the world, Equatorial Guinea’s abysmal figures in health, education, and other social indicators are masked by its oil-bloated national income. When national income is removed from the human development index calculations, Equatorial Guinea’s ranking plummets.
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