An evening with Teodoro Obiang Nguema, longest-serving president 

BY CHRIS ANYOKWU

Chris Anyokwu, PhD, a dramatist, poet, fiction writer, speaker, rights activist and public intellectual, is a Professor of English at the University of Lagos, Nigeria and has joined Business a.m.’s growing list of informed editorial commentators to write on Politics & Society. He can be reached via comment@businessamlive.com

We begin by expressing our heart-felt and sincere congratulations to the President of Equatorial Guinea, Teodoro Obiang Nguema on the unprecedented and auspicious occasion of his sixth term in office.  Ambition is made of such sterner stuff, and, in fact we can put that Shakespeare dictum to rest by proposing a reformulation, thus: Ambition, thy name is Teodoro Obiang Nguema.  To be sure, Lady Macbeth should be shaking in her grave, green with evident envy.  For, Nguema’s example is tribute and testament to political skulduggery, to the sheer strategic savvy of the prisoner of power.  After all, George Orwell in Nineteen-Eighty-Four tells us that the ultimate end of power is power, QED!  Nguema, for short, has put all the Strong Men of Power in Africa, and, indeed, the entirety of the world to shame, having outrun them all.  Our mind, this beautiful and temperate evening of reflection on our collective odyssey as Black people so far, goes to a gallery of erstwhile dinosaurs who once held their people by the jugular.  First is the Dinosaur of Yamoussoukro, Félix Houphouët-Boigny, affectionately called Papa Houphouët or Le Vieux.  He was the first president of Ivory Coast, aka, Côte d’Voire who was quoted to have counselled a Nigerian leader during an OAU summit in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia that in African custom you do not concede power or abdicate it.  You die clinging on to power, period!  We shall come back to this much later in our reflection.  Next, our mind drifts to Mathieu Kerekou, the Beninese politician.  He served from 1972 to 1991 in his first incarnation and later took up the reins in 1996 to 2006 on the platform of his People’s Revolutionary Party of Benin.  A former dictator, being a Lieutenant Colonel in the army, Mathieu Kerekou, the Marxian pretender, is credited with ushering democracy to his tiny French-speaking country on the West African coast.  Yet, it’s a democracy that has blood-stains all over it, having himself ridden to power via a coup d’etat in 1972.

Up next is Gnassingbe Eyadema, former president of Togo.  Characteristically, Eyadema was in the saddle from 1967 until his death in 2005 after which he was immediately succeeded by his son, Faure Gnassingbe.  This politics of personality cult is writ large all across the Black continent as we shall see presently.  Enter Robert Gabriel Mugabe, the long-serving president of Zimbabwe.  In fact, Mugabe’s story is unique in highlighting what Chinua Achebe in A Man of the People refers to as the corrosive effect of power.  Mugabe had set forth at dawn as a fire-eating revolutionary, impatient with unconscionable and repressive power in every material particular.  First, he had ruled his country, Zimbabwe, (formerly South Rhodesia) as Prime Minister from 1980 to 1987.  He had later metamorphosed into an executive president from 1987 to 2017 when he was disgraced out of office.  How are the mighty fallen!  In spite of Mugabe’s Land Redistribution policy and all his Afrocentrism (or anti-racist racism) he left a lasting legacy of a deeply-polarised, impoverished nation, always looking North for aid.

We come to Uganda, not very far removed from Mugabe’s basket-case.  Reigning supreme in Uganda is a certain living, if, fast-expiring raptor, called Yoweri Kaguta Museveni.  Born on 15th September, 1944, Museveni, the moustachioed Iron Man, is the second longest serving president of Uganda, ahead of Idi Amin Dada.  Museveni has maintained a vice-like grip on power since 29th January, 1986 and continues to enjoy a no-term limits clause in their constitution.  Bobi Wine, the upstart, was merely a bump on the road to political sit-tightism for the Uganda Grand Old Man of power.  We move upwards to the heart of Africa, the Central African region, Cameroon, to be precise.  Wow!  What can we say about the living Ancestor, Paul Biya?  If you are familiar with social media, you would agree that this colourful scion of Africa is making Africa proud, first with the successful hosting of the Africa Cup of Nations at which the Indomitable Lions, the Cameroon men’s soccer team, did so well. Always colourfully garlanded and caparisoned, sash and all, the nonagenarian Strong Man for many years now has always relied on a retinue of handlers and aides to stand on his own feet.  Always at risk of toppling over (no pun intended), Biya makes the heart palpitate as you watch him slouch gingerly from place to place doing his level best to retain the false impression of animation.  He has been at it since 6th November, 1982 and is the second longest-ruling president in Africa and the oldest head of state in the world.  Not too far-flung from this roiling maelstrom of senescent misrule is another seething cauldron of dynastic one-upmanship.  Remember Joseph Kabila? Yeah, Joseph Kabila Kabango is a Congolese politician who was president from January 2001 to January 2019.  Following the assassination of his beloved father, President Laurent-Desire Kabila, the son, Joseph, had taken over power in the mineral-rich country. Although Kabila, the son, has magnanimously relinquished power in marked contradistinction to the Houphouët-Boigny Law of Power in Africa, Joseph still dreams; he is still there or thereabouts as King or King-maker. Northeastern flank of Nigeria is a parched satellite of terror called Chad whose rulership has gone from father to son.  Born on 18th June 1952, Idriss Deby Itno ruled Chad from 1990 to 2021. Following his assassination on 20th April, 2021, his quixotic and enterprising son, clearly a chip off the old block, took over power.  According to the african report of June 30, 2021, President Mahamat Deby, the successor, was quoted as boasting: “My father would be proud of me”.

For her part, Nigeria can be imagined as an Icarus country winging her way, sometimes, very dangerously towards the Eye of the Sun.  For, truth be told, some of her rulers have at one point in time or another, flirted with disaster.  Who can forget the OBJ Third Term pipe dream which almost soured into a long Harmattan Nightmare until the then Senate President, Ken Nnamani’s gavel silenced it for all eternity?  Then came the goggled maximum ruler and military dictator, General Sani Abacha.  Lord have mercy!  Abacha was such a mean-hearted, blood-thirsty Dracula who brooked no form of opposition.  At the time, he had worn all at once both a civilian abeti-aja (cap) and a military cap thus imbricating and totalizing for himself all temporal power.  Like Emperor Napoleon 1 of France, he was the State and the State was him. Goodness knows how Abacha would have performed as President-for-Life but for the Deu ex machina of exotic apples and Indian houris.

Even General Ibrahim Badamosi Babangida (IBB for short) could not resist the sweet songs of the Sirens.  Many times, he had enacted and re-enacted his infamous Transition Programme to civilian rule.  He had always contrived booby-traps for his own pet projects.  Such was his habit of dissimulation and double-speak that he earned the sobriquet “the Maradona”. Charles Oputa, a.k.a. Charly Boy, produced a hit-song on this never-ending political rigmarole of IBB’s; a song that goes like, “Waiting for 1990”, typically rendered in the people’s patois, the pidgin English. Thoroughly enmeshed and entangled in the labyrinthine maze of his self-reversals, IBB was unceremoniously shown the door.  He had “stepped aside”, suggesting a lingering desire to return.

For Africa, north of the Sahara, the story is the same, sadly. For all his single-minded Arabism and Islamism, Colonel Mouaman Ghaddafi of Libya was hounded down by America and the Allied forces, killed like a chicken and buried in an unmarked grave in the Sahara Desert.  Even after his death, one of his sons, el Islam Ghaddafi, still dreams of becoming the president of Libya.  Mubarak of Egypt and Ahmad el Bashir of Sudan do not evoke happy memories either as their stewardships were marked by blood and gore.  We may include Abdulaziz Bouteflika, the Algerian dictator in this inglorious coterie.

The epidemic of leadership deficit in Africa is a recurring theme in modern African literature. Wole Soyinka, for instance, in A Play of Giants dramatises this enduring scourge. Described as a “Fantasia on Aminian theme”, Soyinka’s play presents a savage portrait of a group of dictatorial African leaders at bay in an embassy in New York (A Play of Giants, Preface). The so-called Giants are: President-for-Life.  Macias Nguema (late) of Equatorial Guinea, Emperor-for-Life (ex) Jean-Baptiste Bokassa of the Central African Republic, Life-President Mobutu Sese Koko, etc., of Congo Kinshasa and – the HERO OF HEROES in the person of Life-President (ex) the Field-Marshal El-Haji Dr Idi Amin of Uganda, DSc, DSO, VC etc. (A Play of Giants, Preface).  The depressing picture of Africa’s leadership today derives in significant part from gerontocracy, autocratic authoritarianism (sounds familiar?) and the burgeoning political cults of personality. For decades, Africa has patented the building of Big Men rather than of institutions as obtains in the politically-advanced climes such as the USA, the UK and Western Europe. All across the African continent, all you see is a trans-generational transfer of power, from father to son to grand-son, ad nauseam! This rather patriarchal and/or phallocratic model of governance is evident in countries such as the Congo, Sierra Leone, Kenya, Chad, Libya, and Equatorial Guinea. Nigeria is gearing up to join them as in some states, sons and daughters of former and current governors have been positioned to take over from where their fathers left off. The immediate implication of this political anomaly is the normative bastardization of democratic ethos. It looks like democracy but not quite. Under the circumstances, electoralism, the holding of elections periodically, becomes a kind of hollow and meaningless ritual performed to confer legitimacy upon gargantuan political fraud. Thus, the electorate, stupefied, zombied, is bludgeoned into a herd mentality with a deep-seated sense of resignation and fatalism. They cease being victims and become accomplices in their own life-long enslavement. Disorientated with the weaponization of poverty, the glamorization of ignorance, the mass mobilisation of illiteracy and the rigorous promotion of the opiates of ethnicism and religion, what ensues logically and inevitably is political catheterization and sit-tightism. For Nigeria, the unholy wedlock between the military top brass (retired and serving) and the ruling elite has created an unsustainable situation in which power has been corralled, cornered and colonised by a shadowy Mafiosi known as “The Cabal”. This Deep-State Mafiosi oversees the sharing of the National Cake.  Speaking of which, the belief is that Africa and its rulers have been assigned the historical task of simply producing primary produce and raw materials.  Thus, Africa’s rulers only dutifully carry out the exploration and exploitation of natural resources and the exportation of the same overseas for processing.  They (i.e. Africa’s rulers) collect their “cut”, their percentage and live in clover while the masses grovel in the dust, living below the poverty-line. In this regard, Nigeria is a signal trope as the poverty capital of the world! That is what you get when you invest in and build Big Brother rather than nurse and nurture social and political institutions in a postcolonial menagerie.

Let us now return to our host, the 80-year-old Teodoro Obiang Nguema of Equatorial Guinea.  Born on 5th June, 1942, Teodoro Nguema ousted his uncle Macias Nguema from power in a military coup in 1979. He then took control of the country and became Chairman of the Supreme Council junta. After the country’s return to nominal civilian rule in 1982, Nguema founded the Democratic Party of Equatorial Guinea (PDGE)in 1987, the country’s sole legal party until 1992. He oversaw Equatorial Guinea’s emergence as an important oil producer, beginning in the 1990s. An authoritarian leader notorious for gross human rights abuses, Teodoro Nguema has made the Constitution to give him sweeping powers, including the right to rule by decree, thereby making the nation a legal dictatorship. On 26th November, 2022, Reuters reported that Nguema won re-election with 95 percent of the November 20 vote and his party took ALL the senate and parliament seats, with his son Teodoro Nguema Obiang Mangue as Vice President.  This “win” for the 80 year-old politician will be his 6th term in office, extending his 43-year rule and cementing his place as the second president of his nation and the longest-serving president of any country ever and the first or second longest consecutively-serving current non-royal national leader in the world. Having gained independence in 1968 as Spanish Guinea, the tiny mineral-rich country became the Republic of Equatorial Guinea.  The Spanish, French and Portuguese-speaking country discovered vast oil reserves in 1996, but much of the 1.4 million population has not benefitted from this natural boon, which, for all intents and purposes, has become a resource curse. Like Equatorial Guinea, like Nigeria: in spite of the tropical paradise of Malabo, the country’s capital, poverty remains rampant in the entire country. And yet there is silence around the world and African rulers have fallen over themselves to congratulate Teodoro Nguema on his sit-tightism. Like most of his fellow rulers in Africa, Nguema is hobbled by poor health, declining mental capacity, among other pathologies. This anomalous situation calls for a serious interrogation of what truly constitutes governance in Africa. There is an urgent need for a paradigm shift in governance models in Africa. Away with gerontocracy and in with youthful vigour and vision. Away with the rule of Big Brother, and in with constitutionalism and the Rule of Law. Political rulers must be held to account according to the letter and the spirit of the law. It’s time power was truly democratised and really returned to the people!

• business a.m. commits to publishing a diversity of views, opinions and comments. It, therefore, welcomes your reaction to this and any of our articles via email: comment@businessamlive.com