Janet Smith

As a foreigner, it’s easy to land in trouble in Equatorial Guinea. A careless snap of a photo or a minor misstep in the maze of officialdom, with all its arbitrary permits and paperwork, quickly invites suspicion.

I found this out the hard way one morning during a week-long reporting trip a few months ago. My driver and I were exploring Ciudad de la Paz — the country’s planned new capital that was never completed and is now a ghost town.

As we were riding along wide, empty boulevards and clambering over abandoned construction sites looking for worthy photo opportunities, I was — unbeknownst to my driver — looking for signs of a Portuguese construction company I was writing about. It was a still, muggy day, and a haunting silence filled every gap in our conversation.

We encountered only the occasional herder from a nearby village or worker at one of the few institutions running in and around Ciudad de la Paz. At some point we walked into a cluster of buildings overgrown with weeds next to a disused stadium. That would make for good pictures — the contrast of opulence and neglect was a neat metaphor for the story I was working on.

There were no signs warning us away from the area, but a security guard had spotted us. He was immediately hostile, speaking only with my driver and accusing us of attempted theft. Just what he thought we had wanted to steal from an abandoned building was unclear.

As my driver tried to reason with him, I was on my phone quickly sending a message to the South African Embassy and my employer before the quite likely scenario that I was arrested and had my phone confiscated.

A short while later, when it was clear that the security guard wasn’t letting go of the idea that we were thieves, four Kalashnikov-wielding police officers led by an aggressive young captain sped up to us in an old red unmarked sedan.

After a brief discussion with the security guard, they put me in the back of the car, sandwiching me between two of them. I wasn’t handcuffed, nor were my possessions confiscated, but I was hauled off to a village police station a short drive away. The spartan blue wooden building was little more than a glorified shed with an old desk, a few benches and a couple of dingy holding cells.

None of the officers would say much about why we had been arrested, but from what I could make out from their conversations and the vague bits of information they offered me, we were being accused, variously, of attempting to steal something — I never understood what — of trespassing, and of being in a restricted area without a permit.

But my bigger concern was that some officious policeman, steeped in the state’s paranoia and keen to ingratiate himself with his superiors, would try to concoct a story that I was a spy.

For now, I was told to sit on a bench and wait for the district police commissioner. Every time a car pulled up, I would anxiously peer through the window to see whether it was the commissioner — the man who would determine what happened next.

I was in the country to report a story based on leaked documents connecting the son of Equatorial Guinea’s longtime dictator with the Portuguese construction firm Zagope, a subsidiary of Brazilian giant Andrade Gutierrez.

From 2009 until at least 2012, Zagope bagged state infrastructure contracts worth over $1-billion. In turn, leaked documents show, between 2014 and 2018 the firm channelled over $86-million to Somagui, a supposed forestry company belonging to the dictator’s son, Teodoro Nguema Obiang Mangue, known as Teodorin.

Cases in France and the United States laid bare Teodorin’s notoriety for corruption. The main character in our investigation — and deputy to his father, the president — Teodorin is widely thought to be the real power behind the dictatorship.

Almost no one in Equatorial Guinea, on the west coast of central Africa, knew the real reason I was there, not even my driver — in whom the police had little interest but who had accompanied me to the station and probably thought I was a tourist with a bizarre penchant for construction sites.

Reporting in Equatorial Guinea carries serious risks. There is no free media in the country, and criticising the ruling regime or documenting the country’s persistent poverty from within is a sure path to problems

Activists, journalists and political dissidents face intense state repression and the threat of abductions, torture, disappearance and death. Even abroad they are not safe, with well-documented cases of regime critics being abducted in foreign countries.

And here I was, a foreign journalist working for a Western media outfit. That afforded me added layers of protection, but I also knew how quickly things could turn.

Before I began working on the story, I didn’t know much about Equatorial Guinea, other than that it was a tiny, oil-rich former Spanish colony. I did know, though, that the Obiang regime was legendary for its excess and violence. So as far as safety was concerned, I was well prepared.

The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) head of tech had prepped me on digital security and made sure there was nothing compromising on my phone or computer.

I had spoken at length with colleagues at ICIJ and our media partners about how best to manage the risks: which contacts to have on hand and what communication protocols to follow.

I’d given plenty of thought to reporting an investigative story in a country that does not tolerate independent journalists

I would enter the country on a tourist visa, ostensibly as one of those rare intrepid travellers who venture to Equatorial Guinea. (Thankfully, the numerous stamps in my passport, including from many African countries, lent credibility to that cover story.)

One dilemma was about which passport to use for my visa application. I’m a dual national and could apply using either my South African or British passport. South Africa has an embassy in the country. That would surely help. On the other hand, the Obiang regime has made a habit of arbitrarily arresting South African citizens.

In fact, while I was in Equatorial Guinea, two South Africans were languishing in the country’s notorious prisons on trumped-up drug charges. They were being used as diplomatic bargaining chips after South African authorities seized some of Teodorin’s assets.

The asset seizures were in connection with a damages claim brought by another South African citizen whom Teodorin had arrested over a business deal that went awry. In the end, we decided it would be more prudent to use my UK passport.

Hazards aside, on-the-ground reporting adds meaning and helps bring life to otherwise dry forensic investigations. And to truly comprehend the scale of the looting by the Equatorial Guinean elite, the lost opportunities, and the repercussions for ordinary people in this tiny, little-known and very closed-off country, we at ICIJ felt that I had to come here and witness it up close.

On top of that, we wanted further proof of what we had seen in the leaked documents.

Our story, in collaboration with media partners in Portugal, France and Brazil, as well as Equatorial Guinean reporters in exile, exposed the connection between Teodorin and Zagope while highlighting a larger issue: how Equatorial Guinea, an impoverished country with a horrendous human rights record, became one of the fastest-growing economies in the world after the discovery of oil in the 1990s.

The government then squandered its resources, building absurdly ostentatious projects while ignoring the needs of its citizens and trampling over their rights.

Case in point: my hotel on the outskirts of the envisioned new capital, the Grand Hotel Djibloho. ‘Grand’ is an understatement. The hotel boasts over 400 plush rooms, a small suburb of VIP villas and a private wing for the exclusive use of the first family — along with a perfectly manicured 18-hole golf course, indoor and outdoor pools, gyms, spas, bars, an enormous marble-clad lobby and ornate dining areas.

An enthusiastic hotel staffer showed me around a state-of-the-art conference area that looked like it could have been built for the United Nations General Assembly.

While the Grand Hotel Djibloho’s small army of local and international staff were impeccable and attentive, there were hardly any guests, save for the occasional traveller, UN or government official, or day visitors from a nearby university. With next to no clientele, rooms go for a fraction of the listed price.

The hotel was planned during the development of the future capital, which was carved out of the dense rainforest in the country’s interior, closer to the political stronghold of the ruling family. The government’s outsize ambitions remain a pipe dream.

Today, Ciudad de la Paz is largely an empty shell of half-built structures, deserted construction sites and wide boulevards that are slowly being reclaimed by nature.

The country is packed with monuments to the regime’s delusions of grandeur: empty airports, grandiose but senseless engineering works and barely used highways that criss-cross the country. The extent of the waste has to be seen to be believed

One highway, six lanes wide, runs from the coastal town of Bata to Ciudad de la Paz. It’s a roughly 2½-hour drive; there’s almost nothing in between but a dark green wall of virgin forest on either side of the road.

Other vehicles are a rarity. So much so that when we stopped to help some people who had broken down, my driver explained to me the code of the highway: you always assist, because you never know when another vehicle might come past.

The boom years may be over, but the state is determined to continue projecting an image of prosperity. It is an investor’s Potemkin paradise. And in the shadows of this extravagance, more than two-thirds of the population live in poverty.

Power is exercised arbitrarily in Equatorial Guinea. The country can be as unpredictable as its mercurial deputy president, Teodorin, who has used the state machinery to protect his own assets and interests, as he did in the case of the imprisoned South Africans.

That unpredictability was in the back of my mind when I was apprehended. As I was being driven to the police station I received a call from an embassy official asking what had happened. It was a relief to hear a familiar accent and to know that the message had gotten out before I ended up in whichever remote little spot on the map I was being dragged off to — and where, it turned out, there was no cellphone reception.

I gave the official as much detail as I thought she needed, and she assured me that the embassy would assist in any way possible. She ended the conversation sounding a little troubled, though, and said, basically, that when a South African is arrested in Equatorial Guinea it’s always very bad news.

I spent the entire day sitting in the heat of the rudimentary station waiting for the local police commissioner. I flipped through a frayed old travel guide I’d brought along to keep up the appearance of a tourist, and I watched people trickle in and out, making enquiries, getting documents stamped or asking after the elusive commissioner.

A young tattooed woman, clearly a local from the village, stopped by. She seemed to be there just to break the boredom of her day by chatting with the equally bored officers who would come and go but who made little attempt to look busy.

After a brief tropical downpour that eased the heat, the commissioner’s deputy arrived late that afternoon. Most of the officers had been nice enough to me — offering food and water, occasionally attempting small talk. But it was immediately apparent that the deputy would be difficult

He demanded to see my papers — then more papers and more papers. I frantically rummaged through my bag and pockets, flinging over every scrap I could find in a vain effort to satisfy his bureaucratic appetite.

At some point that evening, the deputy commissioner demanded a physical copy of my e-visa. He couldn’t understand the concept of an e-visa and wouldn’t accept that the document I showed him on my phone was just that. I told him that I had a physical copy at the hotel (I didn’t but knew I could print one there). He then told me to go retrieve it and come straight back to the station.

Back at the hotel, I alerted management about what was going on. They were alarmed that one of their rare guests was being held by police and sent a three-person delegation to the station that arrived shortly after I returned there. We again spoke to the deputy commissioner, who was as stubborn as before, but our discussion was interrupted by the arrival of the commissioner.

To my relief, the man I had been waiting all day to see seemed a lot more reasonable than his subordinate. He interrogated me, asking what I was doing in the country and where I was from, but not in an overly hostile way. He flipped through the photos on my phone, but thankfully I had managed to delete anything vaguely sensitive.

I explained that I was a reporter but was on holiday, and that I liked to explore Africa. To reinforce that, I showed pictures on my social media of all the African countries I’d visited. One of the hotel managers, who knew the commissioner, helped convince him that I was just a tourist. Eventually I was allowed to leave that night.

The commissioner apologised for the inconvenience. He said that I and any other tourists were welcome in the country, and he told me of a similarly unpleasant experience he had had during a visit to Europe when he was taken for questioning by immigration officials.

When I got back to the hotel, my phone, with the cell signal returned, lit up with messages. The news of my arrest had gotten out and set in motion frantic attempts to reach me — from worried family members, diplomatic officials and my colleagues at ICIJ, who had started arranging legal support.

Later that night, feeling both relieved and fortunate that things hadn’t taken a more difficult twist, I was invited to dinner with one of the hotel managers. The whole episode was a reminder of the support and protection that foreign journalists operating in countries like Equatorial Guinea enjoy — something their local counterparts often do not.

And that, in turn, was a reminder of the value of journalistic collaborations like the one I was part of. I was there in the first place because our local journalist partners couldn’t be, even in their own country

For my remaining few days in Equatorial Guinea, as I thought about the story I would write, I wrestled with how to avoid falling into a caricatured depiction of a tropical African dictatorship: the brutal colonial past (uniquely for sub-Saharan Africa, the country’s overlords were Spanish); the bloody post-colonial power struggles, coups and attempted coups; the corrupt rule of a strongman (Teodorin’s father, Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, is the longest ruling head of state in the world); all the squandered mineral wealth; a population trapped in poverty and deprived of a political voice and the complicity of extractive international corporations working hand-in-glove with local compradors.

If this sounds like a list of cliches, it is because local and international elites have made it so.

Foreign businesses — including U.S. oil companies and banks — have knowingly helped prop up the Obiangs. By funnelling or helping to funnel millions into the accounts of the ruling family and their close associates, these foreigners have helped make the country’s modern history the archetypal tale of post-colonial disappointment and failure in Africa.

Still, the government has not succeeded in stamping out every glint of hope, when hope itself becomes an act of resistance.

Dissidents in Equatorial Guinea continue to defy the regime, fight for change and endure immense suffering in doing so. Despite the serious risks to regime critics within the country, some actually spoke with me for our investigation

I met one source who was well acquainted with the inside of Obiang’s prisons at a discreet location and was eager to talk openly and critically about the regime.

Obiang senior has been in power since 1979 — long before I, or most Equatorial Guineans, for that matter, was born. He took control of the country in a coup, but his regime was itself the target of a botched coup in 2004, famously involving the son of former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher.

He has outlived numerous other vicious and venal regimes in the region.

As I was walking along the Grand Hotel Djibloho’s deserted golf course, picking up my pace as dark storm clouds closed in, I wondered: How is it that a regime so egregiously corrupt and contemptuous of its people has lasted so long when so many others on the continent had fallen?

Brute force and the regime’s insular nature are partial explanations. Another part of that is what one analyst described to me as Equatorial Guinea’s cloak of ‘international invisibility’. It is, in short, a tiny country that few people know or care about. On the domestic front, the Obiang regime can get away with a lot simply because nobody on the outside is watching.

That idea was again brought home to me when, at some point during my trip, I went past the site of the 2021 Bata explosions — a series of accidental blasts at an armory and military barracks in the port city of Bata that killed over 100 and left hundreds more wounded. The disaster seems to have largely passed international media by — I didn’t know about it — and the neighborhood still looks like a war zone.

The only foreign travellers I met during the trip were an older couple from the US who were attempting to visit every country in the world. Equatorial Guinea was one of the last places to tick off their list because of how hard it is to get to.

Still, though what happens in Equatorial Guinea tends to escape much media coverage and public attention, the Obiang regime faces diplomatic pressure from some Western countries — where the family has stashed its illicit assets.

But the regime has also exploited geopolitical shifts and courted a range of backers: among others, China, Israel – which has long supplied the Obiang regime with weapons, surveillance systems and training – and Kremlin ally, Belarus, whose strongman president Alexander Lukashenko once sat in the same dining hall of the Grand Hotel Djibloho where I had dinner.

Russia has also been a key backer and has deployed troops to the country to protect the presidency, likely including members of Africa Corps (formerly Wagner, the notorious mercenary outfit that has been incorporated into the Russian military). While waiting at the police station, I witnessed Russian military personnel picking up supplies from a shop next door.

With the help of these and other governments, and together with its corporate enablers, Equatorial Guinea’s ruling elite has kept finding ways to prosper at the expense of its people.

A few days after my run-in with the police, I was back in Malabo, the island capital that Ciudad de la Paz was intended to replace. I stayed near the airport — a part of the city designed to maintain the investor paradise facade — but it, too, was showing signs of decay. In the overgrown patches of empty land in between the boulevards and high-rise buildings, desperate people were collecting putrid river water.

My flight out was the next day. At the airport I sat with fellow passengers in the otherwise empty terminal. Our plane taxied past a couple of decrepit passenger jets belonging to a local airline, and a hangar housing the presidential jet, a Boeing 777-200 painted deep blue and ornate gold.

A new Boeing like that starts at over $300m or more. There it sat, one of the Obiangs’ crown jewels — and a colossal insult to the 1.6-million people who live here.

MICAH REDDY

INTERNATIONAL CONSORTIUM OF INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALISTS

This article was first published here