Earlier this month, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) approved a $280 million loan to Equatorial Guinea. According to IMF leadership, the program “will have governance and anti-corruption reforms at its heart” with the intent of promoting “sustainable growth and development” for the Central African nation, one of the smallest on the continent.
While the country may indeed be lacking in territorial size, it punches well above its weight in other areas. For instance, the country’s authoritarian president, Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, is the longest reigning non monarch in the world. Obiang and his kleptocratic family have also earned a reputation for lavish spending habits and otherworldly levels of corruption that have debilitated the country since 1979, the year Obiang seized power in a military coup that ousted his uncle. This cavalier lifestyle has been greased by the nation’s vast natural resource wealth, namely oil, which was discovered 1991, transforming the country overnight from backwater to darling of the West – notwithstanding its tyrannical rule and routine rankings at or near the bottom of all credible human rights, human development, press freedom and anti-corruption indices. Indeed, with the country’s resource wealth acting as a shield from would-be critics, the government has had a free hand to detain the few opposition politicians brave enough to stand up and to speak out, to crack down on civil society groups, and to ruthlessly censor local journalists.
The dreadful context that prevails in Equatorial Guinea is well known to anyone paying attention. Nevertheless, according to news reports, about $40 million of the new IMF loan has already been dispersed to government coffers, prompting critics to note that this move simply amounts to yet another bailout for a chronically corrupt regime. Importantly, however, IMF leadership included a caveat this time around, announcing that as part of a deal to release the remaining funds, state authorities would be compelled to “implement an asset-declaration regime” and that this law “will apply to all senior government officials.”
These demands for transparency in Equatorial Guinea are important and represents a bold move for an institution like the IMF, better known for erring on the side of appeasement and couching their funding decisions in terms of stability and not rocking the boat, despite evidently troubled waters. This June, for example, the IMF approved a nearly half billion-dollar bailout for the kleptocratic regime in the Republic of Congo; this, despite hundreds of millions of dollars being brazenly looted by government officials over the past decade, including by the president’s son (a scam not unfamiliar to those also tracking Equatorial Guinea).
This is precisely why the IMF and its leadership must hold the line on Equatorial Guinea and not budge on its demands for transparency. To put the current situation into context: The $280 million IMF loan roughly equates to what President Obiang’s eldest son and current vice president, Teodorin, spent from 2000-2011 buying luxury properties on four different continents. Similarly, Teodorin – who has been prosecuted for money laundering by the U.S. Department of Justice – is conservatively estimated to have global assets worth $300 million. In other words: instead of benefiting the people, Equatorial Guinea’s oil revenue is subsidizing the lives of President Obiang and his extended family, which includes a mansion in a tony subdivision of Potomac, Maryland, not twenty miles from the White House. This siphoning of vast quantities of money from state coffers has also allowed the Obiang regime to invest heavily in public relations, lobbying, and “crisis communications” worldwide, including a lucrative contract with Qorvis/MSLGroup, which is based in Washington, DC. This stunning lack of priorities exhibited by the Obiang regime is occurring while two-thirds of the population ekes out a living in extreme poverty and where spending on health, education and other social sectors remains below the already woeful Central Africa regional average.
As previously highlighted, part of the IMF’s rationale for the new loan to Equatorial Guinea is premised on “re-establishing stability” in the country. In such situations, though, one must inevitably ask: stability for whom? The situation is surely not stable for human rights defenders or the pro-democracy opposition, both of which have been systematically dismantled or forced to flee into exile. The situation is not stable for civic activists, anti-corruption campaigners or dissidents who have been beaten, jailed, tortured, disappeared and killed by state authorities.
The situation is, however, stable for an aging and thoroughly corrupt dictator and his family. It is stable for his PR hacks and lobbyists who profit off of rampant repression and plunder. It’s also stable for other abusive leaders in the region, as well as would-be despots the world over, who are no doubt emboldened by a lack of consequences for morally bankrupt behavior.
The International Monetary Fund would be wise to break with past precedent and demonstrate whose side it really stands on, once and for all: the people of Equatorial Guinea and others suffering under misrule, or the retrograde powers that be who continue to rule with ruthless impunity? Truth be told, it is long past due for international institutions such as the IMF to cease subsidizing repression under the guises of “stability” and “development.”
Jeffrey Smith is the Founding Director of Vanguard Africa and the Vanguard Africa Foundation