Something is far from kosher in Equatorial Guinea, but
the ‘moralists’ are turning a blind eye to it
20 Jan 2015 | Tony Leon | Original Publication: Rand Daily Mail
There’s a question, coupled with
a riddle, designed to shake off the back-to-work blues: Which is the richest
country, per head of population, in Africa? Theoretically at least, each
citizen there should be more than three times richer than the average South
African.
Clue: If you have not paid much
attention to it before Monday this week, you should now know the country, as
its city of Mongomo, home town of its president, was the site of Bafana's
defeat by Algeria in the African Cup of Nations.
The riddle: Why does 80% of
Equatorial Guinea's population live in abject poverty? According to the UN,
fewer than half its population has access to clean drinking water. About 15% of
Equatorial Guinea's children die before reaching the age of five.
According to a recent article in
the prestigious Foreign Affairs journal, it is "one of the deadliest
places on the planet to be young".
The simple reason for the wealth
gap was explained in the same article.
"Energy revenues, derived
from pumping around 346 000 barrels per day, have flowed into the pockets of
the country's elite, but virtually none has trickled down to the poor
majority."
Of course, given the collapsing
price of crude oil, the country's ruling elite might be soon be less rich than
they are currently. But they've done pretty well since Teodoro Obiang Nguema
Mbasogo seized power in 1979 in a bloody coup against his uncle.
Today he enjoys, along with his
great riches, the awkward title of being "Africa's longest-serving
dictator”.
That award, conferred on him
last year by the left-leaning Guardian newspaper, jostles along with others
awarded to the great man and his regime.
"Worst of the worst"
was Freedom House's description of the state of the country's political and
civil rights. Reporters Without Borders, which monitors the state of media
freedom in the world, described Obiang as a "predator of press freedom'',
and Transparency International places Equatorial Guinea in the top 12 of its
list of the "most corrupt states in the world".
But if you think the father is
bad, the son is apparently even worse.
Teodoro Jr, recently installed
by his dad as the country's vice-president, is also a prodigious collector of
real estate across the world. This includes a home, recently condemned as
rat-infested, in Cape Town's Clifton Beach. But this pales in comparison to his
Paris mansion, estimated to be worth more than R1.35-billion.
The headline-catcher for
"Junior" was his pile in Malibu Beach, California. It was seized,
along with a Gulfstream jet, Michael Jackson memorabilia and eight Ferraris by
US Justice Department officials. In court papers, the prosecution averred that
his riches were a consequence of corruption and were "inconsistent with
his state salary of less than $100 000 per year". Last year, to settle the
criminal indictment, Obiang forfeited some $34-million of these assets to the
US government.
Needless to say, back here in
the more modest (even Nkandla seems a shack by comparison) South Africa, there
is no "boycott, disinvest and sanction" campaign against Equatorial
Guinea and its ruling family. Standard Bank, the sole African sponsor of the
CAF — which is highlighting this benighted country — is not having any of its
branches picketed or boycotted.
No, we reserve our ire and concern
for human rights for one country, and just one chain store that stocks its
products: Israel and Woolworths.
Strangely enough, Obiang and his
dictatorship was once described by George W Bush's Secretary of State,
Condoleezza Rice as "our good friend". Hardly surprising since,
pre-fracking at least, most of that country's oil exports went to the US. But
Bush had a more arresting phrase as the educational-reforming governor of
Texas, before he became president. He said that accepting poor results in black
and Latino schools was the consequence of "the soft bigotry of low
expectations".
With all the current swirl and
tweeting around racism, real and imagined here, one can only assume that
holding Israel, for example, to the highest standard of human rights behaviour
and expecting nothing of the sort in, say, Equatorial Guinea is the current and
local equivalent of the soft, or loud, bigotry of low expectations. The local
BDS crowd expect every human rights box to be ticked by Israel, and hold no
mirror up at all to a slew of states far closer to us.
On the Woolworths issue, matters
become even more interesting. It was with a sense of macabre fascination that
last year we watched Cosas, going one better than the usual suspects in the
anti-Israel brigades, deposit pigs' heads in the Sea Point branch of
Woolworths. The basis for this act was to discomfort local Jewish shoppers
using the kosher section of the store. The stand-out problem here was that
there is no specific kosher section in the shop.
Yet just across the road, a
gleaming new Checkers store has an aisle of kosher and Israeli products. But
Checkers has been untouched by the boycott or any pigs' heads.
That's another riddle in a maze
of inconsistencies in this selective targeting. Is Israel the only country
worthy of protest action? And is it the fact that the chairman of Woolworths is
Jewish, or is it that it is seen to be the place where the elite shop that
makes it alone the target? As they say in the classics: "I think we should
be told."
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