“The Ironies are Just too Much”

Equatorial Guinea is hosting the 17^th African Union Summit, with the theme of Youth Empowerment for Sustainable Development, starting today. In preparation for the summit, President Obiang Nguema has unveiled Sipopo, a multi-million dollar 'city' for the summit delegates. The complex includes 52 luxury presidential villas, a banquet hall, artificial beach, heliport, golf course, and the country’s first spa for delegates to enjoy during the week-long summit.

Oil rich, dirt poor

The extravagant luxury of the summit resort contrasts sharply with the living standards experienced by most of the population in Equatorial Guinea, where it is claimed that the gap between rich and poor is the largest in the world. Following the discovery of oil in 1996, today it is per-capita the richest country in Africa. However, approximately 75% of the population live on less than a dollar a day and infant and child mortality rates have risen since the oil boom.

Human Rights Watch considers the West African state to be a textbook example of the resource curse, where oil has greatly enriched a small handful of individuals – almost exclusively members of the president’s family – with the majority of citizens failing to benefit.

Ostentatious displays of wealth such as the Sipopo 'city' contrast sharply with the living standards and lack of opportunities most of the population suffers from. President Obiang’s eldest son, tipped to be his successor, spent more money on houses and cars in the US and South Africa in 2004-2006 than the entire education budget in 2005. Just 1% of GNP in 2008 was invested into education, and 2% into public health.  Hospitals lack basic sanitation systems. Clean drinking water in cities is hard to come by. It is estimated that nearly a quarter of the population is unemployed, with the youth worst hit, although this figure does seem to be slightly improving.

The Sipopo complex for the AU summit has been funded out of this vast oil wealth, but should be viewed as a "misplaced priority" – as several organisations have labelled it – given the levels of poverty and government underfunding on education and job creation. Ironically, it is such spending which could actually empower the country’s youth and improve their standard of living. Ken Hurwitz from the Open Society Justice Institute said: “They’re spending huge amounts of money on everything but education. The ironies are just too much.”

New image for “human rights bad boy”?

Since he seized power from his uncle in a 1979 coup, the reign of President Obiang Nguema has been extremely controversial. If the current campaign succeeds in removing Gaddafi from power in Libya, the Equatorial Guinea president will then have the dubious title of being the longest-serving ruler on the continent.

Obiang has been described by the New York Times as an “undisputed human rights global bad boy”, although NGO interest in the tiny nation has generally been limited. Owing to the importance of Equatorial Guinea in supplying the West with oil, human rights abuses and endemic corruption are generally overlooked and in some cases even encouraged. Wikileaks cables from the American Embassy portray the president’s reign as a “mellowing, benign leadership”; in 2004 it emerged that major US oil corporations were paying huge sums of money directly into the president’s banks accounts.

Last year, Obiang hired an American lobbyist for $1 million a year to try to improve his troubled image abroad. He has since promised to initiate reforms that will increase government spending on health, education and other social services. The attempt to reform his image was exemplified in the establishment of the Unesco-Odiang prize to honour achievements that “improve the quality of human life”, which came in for heavy criticism. The prize has now been suspended indefinitely. Equatorial Guinea’s regime has proved to be a hard sell at times. However, successful lobbying captured him the latest chairmanship of the African Union.

The Sipopo complex can be seen as part of the attempted image-revamp of the regime, to impress other African leaders and project a positive view of the country as stable and prosperous. Yet in order to protect this image at the AU summit, youths have been harassed, removed and denied education.

Disempowering the youth

The government ordered schools to close a month early this year to prepare for the summit, prioritising security preparations. The rhetoric of youth empowerment, which will surely be employed by the president and AU chair, has taken precedence over the concrete form of empowering the country’s youth through education.

Youth who should have been in the classroom have instead been transported back to their home villages in an attempt by the government to reduce the chance of protests at the summit. Opposition forces and human rights group EG Justice have reported that hundreds of youth are being detained and forcibly moved back to their home villages as part of special measures “to ensure perfect security” at the conference. Over 200 youth were detained for “unknown reasons” in the last week of May. Fearful of the youth-dominated protests that have gripped the Arab world, the government is detaining its own youth and has ordered a total media black-out of the Arab Spring.

Within the luxurious confines of Sipopo, the African Union delegates look set to discuss issues of youth empowerment untroubled by the reality of deeply disempowered youth in Equatorial Guinea. This rhetoric is unlikely to translate into meaningful action, and preparation for the conference – the creation of a luxury resort, the closing of schools, and the detention and forcible removal of youth – is having the opposite effect. While it comes as no surprise, the government of Equatorial Guinea is far more concerned with impressing other African leaders at the summit than with the summit's purported content.