My Beauty Best Teacher

In the Economist:

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President Obiang Nguema

Whichever bright public-relations firm advised the unappealing president of Equatorial Guinea that he could spruce up his international image by throwing $3m the way of a UN agency must now be licking his wounds. Obiang Nguema, the despotic president of the tiny (but oil rich) African nation since 1979, is best known for the nastiness of his rule (especially in his prisons), the clumsy way he rigs election results (typically claiming the support of nearly 99% of voters) and the breathtaking corruption which sees the ruling family syphoning off a large share of government cash for its own ends. After achieving some notoriety in 2004, when posh British mercenaries bungled a coup attempt against him (the Wonga coup), Mr Obiang set about trying to improve his image. The latest wheeze was to offer cash to UNESCO...[continue reading]

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Imagine a tiny country flush with oil money, where the wealth per person is on par with that of Spain or Italy. Now picture a place quite the opposite, where nearly two-thirds of the population lives in extreme poverty and infant and child mortality rates are on par with those of the war-ravaged Democratic Republic of the Congo...impossible as it sounds, these two sentences describe the same place: Equatorial Guinea, a West African country home to roughly a half-million people. Earlier this month, the country's president, Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, marked the 30th anniversary of the coup that brought him to power.

Michael Radu writes "...It does not seem that [Africa's] leaders even accept the notion of responsibility, let alone the idea of using what resources it has to address its own problems...For more than four decades, African elites and their intellectual mentors in the West have comfortably lived with a fiction: that whatever is wrong in the continent—tribalism, corruption, genocide, failing states, poverty, and HIV/AIDS—is somebody else's fault, i.e., the rich West's. Genocide in Rwanda? Blame the Belgians. Rampant anti-Asian racism in East Africa? Blame the British. Even more blatant anti-White racism in Zimbabwe? The British again. A string of spectacularly bloody tyrants, including Idi Amin in Uganda, Bokassa in Central Africa, Macias Nguema in Equatorial Guinea? The really guilty ones are in London, Paris, and Madrid; "Africa" is innocent..."