The news came through on an otherwise quiet Tuesday afternoon: the government of Equatorial Guinea has collapsed. It is the kind of headline that sends a ripple through Whitehall, and today our Trade Secretary is demanding answers. But beyond the diplomatic cables and urgent questions in Parliament, there is a human story unfolding. I find myself thinking about the people whose lives are caught in the slipstream of this collapse.
Equatorial Guinea is one of those places that most Britons could not place on a map. It is a sliver of a country on the west coast of Africa, rich in oil but poor in almost everything else. Its government, under President Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, has been a byword for autocracy and graft since 1979. But a collapse, even of a regime so rotten, is not a clean break. It is a rupture. And ruptures have a habit of swallowing the innocent.
The Trade Secretary's demand for answers is framed in the language of commerce: contracts, investments, supply chains. British firms have interests there, and the government wants to protect them. But what of the people? The civil servants who suddenly have no jobs. The shopkeepers who relied on government contracts. The families who fled the city for the relative safety of the countryside, only to find roads blocked by checkpoints manned by men with no allegiance to anything but their own survival.
I spoke to a British businessman who had been working in Malabo, the capital, until last week. He described a city holding its breath. 'The markets were still open, but no one was buying. The streets were empty. Everyone was waiting for something to happen.' Now it has happened. And the waiting is over. The question is: what comes next?
There is a peculiar British tendency to view political collapse abroad through the lens of our own concerns. We worry about our investments, our embassies, our citizens. But I wonder if we might pause to consider the cultural shift that such a collapse precipitates. In Equatorial Guinea, the sudden absence of a repressive state apparatus creates a vacuum. And vacuums are filled by whoever has the guns, the money, or the audacity. For the ordinary person, this means a world where the rules vanish overnight. It is a terrifying freedom.
Class dynamics, too, are thrown into sharp relief. The elite, those who profited from the old regime, will scramble to secure their assets abroad. The middle class, such as it existed, will find their savings wiped out as the currency becomes useless. The poor, as always, will bear the brunt. They have few reserves, fewer options, and no escape routes. They will be the ones queuing for aid, if any comes.
Our Trade Secretary is demanding answers. Perhaps the question should be: what can we do for the people of Equatorial Guinea, now that their government has fallen? It is not a question of trade. It is a question of humanity. And that is a demand we should all be making.
