Slate has a good article up all about one of Africa’s other ugly and unpleasant dicators.
Teodoro Obiang is the dictator of Equatorial Guinea. Don’t feel bad if you haven’t heard of him or his country. Heck, even I had to go look at a map.
Most of what I’ve heard about the guy comes from the Slate article, and boy does he sound like a winner! He’s also propped up by the US government, and there’s no excuse for that. Next time we sit around wondering why the rest of the world hates us, let’s keep this in mind.
Sadly, since EG has oil, and we want oil, we ignore the evil the government there does. As Slate points out, this is somewhat confusing, since we occasionally make noises about Saudia Arabia and they have hundreds of times the amount of oil that EG does. So not only are we selling out our morals, we’re selling them out for very little benefit.
Africa in general is something of a cesspool, and it’s really too bad, cause the countries there have everything they need to be doing well. Unfortunately they also have some very, very evil rulers who are determined to hold onto power no matter the cost.
I know we’re not going to go do anything to Obiang, or Mugabe for that matter. But if we’re not going to do anything to stop them, we do need to at least stop propping them up. There’s no excuse for it, and it makes us look very low in the eyes of the world.
