Usually, before a football-ing tournament gets underway, I read up on the host country(ies)... you know? The geography, the geology & all those things. Academic commitments, real life challenges I have to obliterate & a general disinterest prompted by the frequency of the cup of nations have not allowed me do the reconnaissance study I'm wont to do. But then I caught some highlights on TV last night and I did a quick Google search of the host country of the 2015 tourney: Equatorial Guinea. Hence, this piece.
Upon independence in 1968 (from Spain), Francisco Nguema was elected as President. In '72, he created a single-party state and made himself President for Life; eliminating all opposition in a reign of terror until he was ousted in a bloody coup d'etat by his nephew Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo in '79.
After initially relaxing dictatorship strings, his rule has become increasingly worse than his Uncle's! Nepotism, malevolence, torture, oppression, ethnocentrism, blatant corruption of 'fuck-you' proportions typify a man who is, to put it mildly, a terrible human being.
1. An oil-rich country with a population of just 650,702 (2012)
2. The richest country per capita in Africa ($23,133), 69th in the world
3.One of sub-Sahara's largest oil producers
4. Due to uneven distribution of oil money, a select few benefit from proceeds
5. 50% of the population (>300,000people) do NOT have access to clean drinking water. (UN)
6. 20% of children die before age five.
7. The authoritarian government boasts one of the worst human rights records in the world
8. Women & children are subjected to forced labour & sex trafficking
9. All broadcast media are either owned by government or controlled by its allies
10. The President's son, Teodorin is Vice President and a government minister, who inflates contracts awarded to his company by daddy.
11. The man favours his son to succeed him when he passes.
12. ....on & on it goes.
My gripe? Ever since I learnt to read, I've been appalled by the lack of common human decency the world over. Power corrupts, evidently. But I often wonder, do these people not see what their people are going through? What do they know that we don't? I guess it just pains me that power rests in the hands of a minute fraction of a people. I don't even know what I'm trying to say anymore.
Its just not fair.
Cue (fuck).
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