some bottles of Château Pétrus (among the world's most expensive wines), and a 3.7 million dollars clock.
Not one to be outdone by the French, the Americans attempted to put a bigger dent in Obiang Jr.'s fortune. The public got blitzed with the news that the United States Justice Department filed a 70 million dollars forfeiture action against Obiang Jr. And voilà , another list that included a Gulfstream jet, Michael Jackson's infamous gloves, and a villa in Malibu, California. Wait a minute! The kid was still allowed to parade around vast amounts of money in the United States after the scandal that forced the Riggs Bank to shut down? Somehow, the United States Justice Department never troubled the bank's largest single depositor at the time, with over 700 million dollars. What is there to make of all of this juicy story? By no stretch of the imagination, the very young Teodoro Nguema Obiang has presumably amassed all of that uncovered fortune while earning a salary of less than 100,000 dollars per year as Equatorial Guinea's minister of Agriculture and Forestry.
What can be said about Equatorial Guinea to put everything in perspective? The country is among the most repressed countries in West Africa, and if we take the proportion of its people living on less than a dollar a day. This nation of just 700,000 people is at the same time poverty-stricken and oil-rich, a contrast of epic proportions. There are pictures on social media sites of glassy high rises and presidential mansions next to rusted shacks. As one visits the country's capital Malabo, there are sightings of people riding in flashy Mercedes Benzes through the slums and trying to miss the city's zillions of potholes and of the country's Chief of Police, who is related to the president, bragging that his uniforms are tailored by none other than the French celebrated designer - Yves Saint Laurent. From the fancy room's window of the brand-new hotel he stayed in, he could see families crammed in small and tin-roofed shacks.
And while I was digging out more facts, like one out five children dies before reaching the age of five years old and less than fifty percent of them have access to clean drinkable water, I was stunned to learn that the Commissioner of Police of a tiny country located right in the center of Mandela's Rainbow nation, was presenting, on behalf of his greedy and perverted absolute monarch, a sincere apology for two million Euros stolen, strangely in a briefcase, during a party in Obiang Jr.'s villa in Swaziland. If anyone is wondering, what about Teodoro Nguema Obiang's punishment for exhibiting such extravagance and tarnishing Equatorial Guinea's image? Well, let's just say that it fits with a son of one of Africa's longest-ruling dictators, a shrinking elite group. His father has since made him Second Vice President of Equatorial Guinea. The highly regarded and guarded position, shielding him from any eventual international prosecution.
"I am for doing good to the poor, but I differ in opinion about the means. I think the best way of doing good to the poor is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it."â Benjamin Franklin
Noah was a good man, but he is to blame for spoiling my childhood's unique way of escaping abuses at home. After a neighboring kid's dramatic incident in our home's backyard, I got terrified to play Rambo camping out by myself. I have long suspected that Noah had something to do with my tactic fiasco; the detail of his exploit brought up irrefutable evidence of his guilt. I have read different versions of Noah's Ark story, and it all boiled down to the same specifics: Noah saved himself, his family, and a remnant of all the world's animals when God decided to flood the world and destroy it, because of humanity's evil deeds. As a child, I found this so reprehensible that the unsupervised Noah chose among other animals, to also allow on board vultures, rats, crocodiles, and particularly the biblical source of Adam and Eve's demise and my childhood summer's long caging - I am talking about snakes.
Parallel to Noah's Ark story, Mandela was a good man. He ruined something so dear to me. I have dreamed of spending my golden age in the wealthiest and most inspiring African country, South Africa or "SA," a plausible way of enjoying my retirement amongst prosperous black Africans. In the past couple of years, I could not quite figure out Mandela's responsibility in my fading dream. Ultimately when I set aside the fact that he spent 27 years in a labor camp for his part in the struggle against Apartheid and then critically assessed his one term as President of South Africa, it got crystal clear.
I consider myself a member of the tiny bold group navigating through uncharted territories, and whose voices should have preferably been louder before "Madiba's" death. Do we dare denounce that the "compromised negotiations perpetuated South Africa's social, commerce and trade, and political woes?" There is no doubt in my mind that Mandela got a great deal for himself, ANC & Co., and the small affluent white society when F.W. de Klerk who, in my view, bears some resemblance to God, and is a white old man and an undertone racist, was pressed to bring an end to Apartheid by white South African middle class and big businesses burgeoning dissatisfactions in the 1990s.
I have succumbed to my grandparents' mantra that people should be judged solely by their actions; two real facts put into question Mandela's strength of character. The unchecked "Madiba" went too far to accommodate the Apartheid establishment by striking a deal with racist judges, some of the worst human rights violators, the Afrikaner squads of kidnappers and murderers and exclusively the ones who sponsored the entire cruel Apartheid system and who have become the new safeguard of the rainbow elite. I am pointing at the mining and financial corporations. And what's to say about a man who in an interview with the Australian reporter, John Pilger, expressed a total disregard toward Indonesia's three decades of brutal dictatorship and other people struggling alike, who went on to justify the rewarding in 1997 of the Butcher of Jakarta, General Suharto, with the Order of Good Hope, which is South Africa's highest honor that could be bestowed on a foreigner?
I cannot reconcile the fact that The African National Congress (ANC), South Africa's national liberation movement and their allies have won all of the South African presidential elections since the end of the Apartheid. The de facto economic Apartheid remains intact. South African blacks remain horrifically poor in absolute and relative terms. To my eyes, the ANC has abused the trust of black people who are still cramped in slums like Dimbaza and Alexandria, and these violent townships are beginning to bear the brunt of widespread frustration. In contrast, there is plenty of evidence that the ANC has been good for the whites. In exchange for including a few ANC black operatives in their glamorous closed circle (a scheme used to funnel money back into affluent party members' pockets), whites in SA have been allowed to enjoy discreetly behind massive barricades the wealth extracted and amassed from the inhumane exploitation of blacks in SA during the Apartheid. Another way to say it is when the South African Apartheid was choked, their leaders realized that all they had to do was to bring black leaders to the business of distributing wealth and welfare, and the explosive greed disintegrated the ability of Negros and Indians to collaborate across neighborhoods and ghettos.
I once asked myself how Mandela & Co. planned to lead or drive black South Africans out of poverty? One would find that the ANC set an excellent map plan to that end, stating unmistakably in a segment of the Party's Freedom Charter:
"The national wealth of our country, the heritage of South Africans, shall be restored to the people; the mineral wealth beneath the soil, the banks and monopoly industry shall be transferred to the ownership of the people as a whole; all other industry and trade shall be controlled to assist the wellbeing of the people..."
This section of the ANC Freedom Charter is inconsistent with concessions that they made such as the late 1992 "sunset clauses." It paved the way for a Government of National Unity (dictators' favorite method to blend wolves and lambs and to diffuse popular demand for a change) and for the absurd job guarantees that protect all Apartheid-era civil servants.
If one wonders in the post-Apartheid era what happens when poor blacks take it upon themselves and demand an adequate share of the nation's wealth? The awful truth is that the response has been the same as it was under Apartheid: they get gunned down like rabid dogs. The footage that circulated of the Marikana Massacre of miners in 2013 was no different from the Sharpeville Massacre in 1960. Only this time, the images were in color and colored police officers did the
