EQUATORIAL GUINEA’A PRESIDENT HAS RULED FOR 47 YEARS. HIS SON IS NOW VICE PRESIDENT

EQUATORIAL GUINEA’A PRESIDENT HAS RULED FOR 47 YEARS. HIS SON IS NOW VICE PRESIDENT

Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo took power in August 1979 the way he has kept it ever since. He overthrew his own uncle, Francisco Macias Nguema, in a military coup, then had him executed by firing squad. Forty seven years later, Obiang is still president. He is the longest serving head of state anywhere in the world today, monarchs excepted.

In 2016 he appointed his son, Teodorin Nguema Obiang Mangue, as Vice President. Teodorin had already spent years cycling through government posts, from Minister of Agriculture to Major General of the armed forces, each promotion tightening the family’s grip a little further. Today he is widely understood to be the heir. Not through an election. Through appointment, by his father, into the second highest office in the country.

While the Obiang family consolidated power at home, Teodorin built a reputation abroad as one of Africa’s most conspicuous spenders. A thirty five million dollar Malibu mansion. A fleet of supercars. Michael Jackson memorabilia, including a crystal covered glove, seized by American authorities after a corruption investigation into how a government minister’s son could afford any of it. He agreed to give it all up as part of a settlement. He kept the title of Vice President.

Equatorial Guinea is one of Africa’s largest oil exporters. It has been pumping crude since the 1990s. And yet most of its roughly 740,000 people live in poverty, in a country where the wealth was never meant to reach them, only to circle back to Mongomo and the family that has run the state since before most of its citizens were born.

This is not a story about scarcity. Equatorial Guinea has oil money most nations would envy. It is a story about where that money goes, and who gets to decide, generation after generation, without ever asking the people who live there.

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