Oil and politics in Equatorial Guinea

At a time when the economic trajectory of Guyana may appear to be heading in a potentially positive direction – a circumstance that is dictated, chiefly, by evidence that the country’s oil wealth is beginning to bring about some measure of socio-economic transformation, we are witnessing – or at least so it seems – the emergence of trends that are known to attend such changes in countries blessed with relatively sudden shifts in economic fortunes. Truth be told, there is no shortage of new oil and mineral-rich countries that were once desperately poor and where sudden infusions of considerable wealth have been attended by exalted expectations of across-the-board ‘betterment.’

The proclivity of the ruling political elite in hitherto poor (poverty stricken?) countries has been for that ‘elite’ to be among the first to seek access to the feeding trough. Here it is purely a matter of them, their families and their cronies benefitting from the ‘first crack’ at whatever material gains the country might have to offer. If it is by no means the only example of the practice, the instance of the 40-odd year regime of the Equatorial Guinean President, Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, is among those most frequently alluded to when stories of state capture and stealing from the state arise.

Oil in Equatorial Guinea’s instance – as in the more recent instance of Guyana - had been, overwhelmingly responsible for the country assuming the level of international attention that it had secured. What Equatorial Guinea instructs, of course, is that the stability of a country in which poverty at the level of the wider populace persists cheek by jowl with corrupt elites, whose wealth, not infrequently, render them altogether indifferent to the plight of the poor, represents a condition of worrisome instability that can, in itself, metamorphose into serious governance challenges.

This condition arises when those with unhindered access to the wealth of the state become sufficiently ‘intoxicated’ by their own circumstances as to assume an unbridled preoccupation with their own aggrandizement. It comes, all too frequently, with a complete indifference to the plight of the poor, whose condition is occasionally (‘mitigated’?) by life-preserving handouts which, in themselves, give cause to animated responses.

Unsurprisingly, Equatorial Guinea has had to pay its own high price for the road that its leadership had chosen in a society roughly divided between Obiang’s benefactors (supporters) and those who reportedly fear and despise him and have, over time, fashioned their own grotesque image of his disposition.

Obiang’s political trademark, reportedly,

had been his proclivity for corralling those institutions that are responsible for critical portfolios, particularly those that have to do with - law and order, national security and control of the public treasury – into his corner. He is not alone in this regard. One can name a number of other countries where the political choices that one makes quickly metamorphoses into rags to riches stories that are attended by sharp changes in socio-political behaviour. Students of international relations can, with the greatest of ease, identify resource-rich countries in which political leaders fashioned their leadership recipes in the cauldrons of state capture.

State capture, it has to be said, is a particularly ‘twisted’ governance mechanism. It has to do with the manner in which strategically positioned state institutions and functionaries are systematically peeled away from the mainstream public service structure to become lackeys of those who rule. These join cliques that include favoured individual government officials, hand-picked private sector functionaries, individuals, and state-backed and privately-owned companies, together re-writing the governance rule book to meet the focus of a regime that is bent on state capture, no less.

State capture goes further, the disciples constantly seeking to remove critical laws from their wellanchored moorings. This ruse is designed specifically to provide protection for the interests of those who rule and their cronies. Ingeniously, they might even find gain in selective enforcement of pre-existing laws that might still protect and/or promote their particular interests.

Perhaps oddly enough, state capture is not necessarily illegal. It may come into being through a seemingly legitimate political process that may, afterwards, be deemed to have been fraudulent and quickly gotten rid of. Published articles on state capture have even laid the blame for such eventualities at the feet of a range of state institutions, including the legislature, the executive, ministries, and the judiciary, or through a corrupt electoral process.

Here the point should be made that the eventuality of ‘state capture’ can only be held together insofar as the captive institutions agree to ‘go along’ with the charade, a circumstance that often poses challenges for those who seek to hold the ‘alliance’ together. If, for example, it may have seemed to be a proverbial walk in the park for the Obiang regime in Equatorial Guinea, over more than four decades, the blunt facts that stand as the pillars of the experience are that it has been underpinned by fear, ruthlessness and socio-political instability that has realized an overbearing international opprobrium that comes with the turf.