Foreign News
Why massive sex tape leak could be a ploy for power in Equatorial Guinea
What the rest of the world sees as a sex tape scandal could in fact be the latest episode in the real-life drama over who will become Equatorial Guinea’s next president.
Over the past fortnight, dozens of videos – estimates range from 150 to more than 400 – have been leaked of a senior civil servant having sex in his office and elsewhere with different women. They have flooded social media, shocking and titillating people in the small central African country and beyond.
Many of the women filmed were wives and relatives of people close to the centre of power. It appears some were aware they were being filmed having sex with Baltasar Ebang Engonga, who is also known as “Bello” because of his good looks.
All this is hard to verify as Equatorial Guinea is a highly restricted society where a free press does not exist. But one theory is that the leaks were a way to discredit the man at the centre of the storm.
Mr Engonga is a nephew of President Teodoro Obiang Nguema and one of those thought to be hoping to replace him.
Obiang is the world’s longest-serving president having been in power since 1979. The 82-year-old has overseen an economic boom that has turned to bust as a result of the now-dwindling oil reserves.
There is a small, extremely wealthy elite, but many of the 1.7 million people in the country live in poverty.
Obiang’s administration is heavily criticised for its human rights record, including arbitrary killings and torture, according to a US government report.
It has also had its fair share of scandals – including the revelations about the lavish lifestyle of one of the president’s sons, now vice-president, who once owned a $275,000 (£210,000) crystal-encrusted glove worn by Michael Jackson.
Despite regular elections, there is no real opposition in Equatorial Guinea as activists have been jailed and exiled and those with designs on office are closely monitored.
Politics in the country is really about palace intrigue and this is where the scandal involving Mr Engonga fits in.
He was the head of the National Financial Investigation Agency, and worked on tackling crimes such as money laundering. But it turned out he himself was under investigation. He was arrested on 25 October accused of embezzling a huge sum of money from state coffers and depositing it in secret accounts in the Cayman Islands. He has not commented on the accusation.
Mr Engonga was then taken to the infamous Black Beach prison in the capital, Malabo, where it is alleged that opponents of the government are subjected to brutal treatment. His phones and computers were seized and a few days later the intimate videos started appearing online.
The first reference the BBC has found to them on Facebook is from 28 October on the page of Diario Rombe, a news site run by a journalist in exile in Spain, which said that “social networks exploded with the leaking of explicit images and videos”.
A post on X the following day referred to a “monumental scandal shaking the regime” as “pornographic videos flood social media”.
But they are believed to have originally appeared one-by-one a few days earlier on Telegram, on one of the platform’s channels known for publishing pornographic images.
They were then downloaded on to people’s phones and shared among WhatsApp groups in Equatorial Guinea, where they caused a storm.
Mr Engonga was quickly identified along with some of the women in the videos, including relatives of the president and wives to ministers and senior military officials.
The government was unable to ignore what was going on and on 30 October Vice-President Teodoro Obiang Mangue (once owner of the Michael Jackson glove) gave telecoms companies 24 hours to come up with ways to stop the spread of the clips.
“We cannot continue to watch families fall apart without taking any action, he wrote on X.
“In the meantime, the origin of these publications is being investigated to find the author or authors and make them answer for their actions.”
As the computer equipment was in the hands of the security forces, suspicion has fallen on someone there, who, perhaps, sought to trash Mr Engonga’s reputation ahead of a trial.
The police have called on women to come forward to open a case against Mr Engonga for the non-consensual sharing of intimate images. One has already announced that she is suing him.
What is not clear is why Mr Engonga made the recordings. But activists have put forward what could be other motives behind the explosive leak.
As well as being related to the president, Mr Engonga is the son of Baltasar Engonga Edjo’o, the head of the regional economic and monetary union, Cemac, and very influential in the country.
“What we are seeing is the end of an era, the end of the current president, and there is a succession [question] and this is the internal fighting we are seeing,” said Equatoguinean activist Nsang Christia Esimi Cruz, now living in London.
Speaking to the BBC Focus on Africa podcast, he alleged that Vice-President Obiang was trying to politically eliminate “anyone who could challenge his succession”.
The vice-president, along with his mother, are suspected to be pushing aside anyone who threatens his path to the presidency, including Gabriel Obiang Lima (another son of President Obiang from a different wife), who was oil minister for 10 years and then moved to a secondary government role.
Those in the elite are thought to know things about each other that they would rather was not made public, and videos have been used in the past to humiliate and discredit a political opponent.
There are also frequent accusations of coup plotting, which further fuels paranoia.
But Mr Cruz also alleges that the authorities want to use the scandal as an excuse to crack down on social media, which is how a lot of information about what is really going on in the country gets out.
In July, the authorities temporarily suspended the internet after protests broke out on the island of Annobón.
For him, the fact that a high-ranking official was having sex outside of marriage was not surprising as it was part of the decadent lifestyle of the country’s elite.
The vice-president, who himself has been convicted of corruption in France and has had lavish assets seized in various countries, wants to be seen as the man cracking down on graft and wrong-doing at home.
Last year, for example, he ordered the arrest of his half brother over allegations he sold a plane owned by the state airline.
But in this case, despite the vice-president’s efforts to stop the spread of the clips, they continue to be viewed.
This week, he tried to appear more resolute calling for the installation of CCTV cameras in government offices “to combat indecent and illicit acts”, the official news agency reported.
Saying that the scandal had “denigrated the image of the country” he ordered that any officials found engaging in sex acts at work would be suspended as this was a “flagrant violation of the code of conduct”.
He was not wrong that the story has attracted a lot of outside interest.
Judging by Google’s data, search enquiries that include the country’s name have shot up since the beginning of this week.
On Monday, on X, “Equatorial Guinea” was one of the top trending terms in Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa – surpassing at times interest in the US election.
This has left some activists who have been trying to tell the world about what is really going on in the country frustrated.
“Equatorial Guinea has much bigger problems than this sex scandal,” said Mr Cruz, who works for a rights organisation called GE Nuestra.
“This sex scandal for us is just a symptom of the illness, it’s not the illness itself. It just shows how corrupt the system is.”
[BBC]
At least 23 people have been killed in Nairobi after heavy rain overnight caused severe flooding in Kenya’s capital city.
Police said about 30 people had been rescued but many others drowned after being swept into rivers – some have been electrocuted.
Kenya’s military has been deployed to help people trapped inside their cars as police described widespread damage to properties as well as road closures.
Several flights bound for Nairobi Airport had to be cancelled or diverted to the coastal city of Mombasa.
“The torrential rains have led to significant flooding, unfortunately resulting in 23 fatalities so far, the destruction of property, road closures, and the displacement of residents,” police said in a statement on Saturday afternoon.
[BBC]
Qatar has partially reopened its airspace days after Iranian missile and drone strikes forced the country to ground all flights as a United States-Israeli military campaign against Iran continues into its seventh day.
The Qatar Civil Aviation Authority announced the limited opening on Friday evening, saying flights would operate through “designated navigational contingency routes with limited operational capacity” in coordination with the Qatari armed forces.
The move marks a cautious first step towards restoring air links to one of the Gulf’s most important aviation hubs but falls well short of a return to normality, with scheduled commercial flights to and from Doha remaining suspended until a further official announcement is made.
The Qatar Civil Aviation Authority said the partial reopening covers only a narrow category of flights “designated for passenger evacuation” and air cargo services.
Passengers with confirmed bookings were urged to follow updates from their airlines directly before travelling to the airport.
Early on Saturday, Qatar Airways said it “intends to operate repatriation flights on 07 March, departing Hamad International Airport to the following airports: London (LHR), Paris (CDG), Madrid (MAD), Rome (FCO), Frankfurt (FRA)”.
It added that priority would be given to “stranded passengers with families, elderly passengers, and those with urgent medical and compassionate travel needs”.
The Gulf country has been repeatedly struck by Iranian missiles and drones throughout the now seven-day conflict, forcing the country to activate its air force and use interceptors to defend its territory. Qatar’s Ministry of Defence confirmed the country had been struck by 14 ballistic missiles and four drones fired from Iran on Thursday.
More than 2,000 flights have been cancelled at Doha’s Hamad international airport since the conflict began.
Aviation across the Gulf
Across the Gulf, airports and airlines have been scrambling to manage the fallout from nearly a week of Iranian missile and drone barrages, launched in retaliation for the ongoing US-Israeli military campaign – codenamed Operation Epic Fury – which has killed at least 1,332 people in Iran since strikes began last Saturday, according to Iranian officials.
Emirates airline announced it is operating a reduced schedule while working to restore full network operations, carrying approximately 30,000 passengers out of Dubai on Friday alone.
By Saturday, the airline said it would have 106 daily return flights operating to 83 destinations, close to 60 percent of its full network, with a return to 100 percent expected “within the coming days, subject to airspace availability”.
Dubai international airport, the world’s busiest airport for international passengers, was evacuated on Sunday following Iranian strikes and has recorded close to 4,000 flight cancellations since Monday.
Abu Dhabi’s Zayed international airport has seen more than 1,000 cancellations and continues to operate at limited capacity.
Kuwait, also impacted by Iranian strikes, saw its airport undergo sustained physical damage in drone strikes, leaving some workers with minor injuries, and its airspace remains fully closed to commercial traffic.
Kuwait Airways has begun rerouting citizens with prior bookings through Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.
An estimated 23,000 flights have been cancelled since late February, according to analytics firm Cirium.
[Aljazeera]
The Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACHR) has ordered Peru to pay reparations to the family of Celia Ramos, a mother of three whose death resulted from a campaign of forced sterilizations during the 1990s.
Thursday’s landmark ruling stated that the 34-year-old Ramos was coerced into sterilization against her will, causing an allergic reaction that led to her death.
The court ordered Peru to pay her family $340,000 as part of the ruling.
It noted that the Peruvian government had “failed to fulfill its obligation to initiate and conduct a thorough investigation” into Ramos’s case, heightening the strain on her family.
“Ms Ramos Durand’s family members — especially her three daughters, who were children at the time of the events — suffered profound harm as a consequence of the sterilization and death of Celia Edith Ramos Durand and the impunity surrounding the case,” the IACHR wrote in its decision.
Peru’s campaign of forced sterilization took place under the late President Alberto Fujimori, whose tenure included widespread human rights abuses that continue to cast a shadow over the country.
The scheme largely targeted poor and Indigenous women who were often tricked or coerced into sterilisation procedures.
This week’s ruling is the first time the human rights court has weighed in on the issue, which has been the subject of years of legal contestation in Peru.
“After almost 30 years of searching for justice, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights recognised the responsibility of the Peruvian state in the forced sterilization and death of Celia Ramos,” the Peruvian feminist organisation DEMUS said in a social media post, celebrating the ruling.
“This ruling marks a fundamental step in reparations for Celia, her family and the thousands of victims of forced sterilizations in Peru.”
As many as 314,000 women and 24,000 men were sterilized against their will in Peru under Fujimori’s government, which sought to forcibly lower the birth rate as a means of addressing poverty.
The procedures were particularly invasive for the women involved, and some suffered long-term complications, including death.
Family members often received little information about the circumstances that led to loved ones dying after the unnecessary operations. Some survivors did not realise what had happened to them until years later, when they discovered they were unable to have children.
In Ramos’s case, the 34-year-old mother had gone to a state health clinic for medical assistance on July 3, 1997, but was instead forced to undergo tubal ligation.
Ramos, however, suffered a severe allergic reaction during the procedure. She was placed in a recovery room, but the clinic was not able to treat her adequately.
In its decision, the IACHR explained that the clinic “lacked the necessary equipment and medications for adequate risk assessment or to handle emergencies”.
Ramos was ultimately transferred to an intensive care unit in the city of Piura, where she died 19 days later, on July 22, 1997.
The state did not carry out an autopsy and declined to share details with her family.
The compensation outlined in this week’s ruling includes reimbursement for the costs of medical procedures conducted to save Ramos’s life and the estimated loss of income from her death.
In October 2024, the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women at the United Nations ruled that Peru’s sterilization programme amounted to sex-based violence and discrimination against poor, rural and Indigenous women.
The committee’s statement cited a lack of adequate medical facilities and a lack of informed consent, just as the IACHR did in its decision this week.
“The victims described a consistent pattern of being coerced, pressured, or deceived into undergoing sterilizations at clinics lacking proper infrastructure or trained personnel,” committee member Leticia Bonifaz said.
“The procedures were carried out without informed consent from these victims, with some of them, especially those from remote areas, unable to read and speak Spanish, or fully understand the nature of the procedure.”
Scholars have concluded that Fujimori’s sterilization campaign was driven, in part, by racist views among government officials who saw rural, Indigenous communities as an obstacle to economic modernisation.
[Aljazeera]
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