The secretary general of CPDS, Andrés Esono./ Picture: E. González.
Eduardo González. Madrid.
The main opposition group of Equatorial Guinea, Convergence for Social Democracy (CPDS in its Spanish acronym), considers that the Spanish Government should put more pressure on President Teodoro Obiang Nguema to start a democratization process. They warn that the people from Equatorial Guinea “are accumulating too much anger and hate because of the corruption, the lack of freedom and the misery” and that if they do not start a liberalizing process, the country could fall in “a burst of violence, even blowing with machetes”.
“It surprises us that Spain has stopped putting pressure on Obiang, despite of not having as many economic interests in Guinea as other powers”, the secretary general of CPDS, Andrés Esono, declared to The Diplomat. “Spain should understand this more than anyone, since it has suffered a dictatorship and it knows the advantages of living in a democracy and of the changes derived from the end of it”, he added.
According to Esono, the Spanish Government should understand that “Obiang’s intransigence, the way he governs the country, can lead to chaos, to a social burst and to violence”. “The risk is that this may explode, even blowing with machetes. The level of corruption is shocking, the way the power treats citizens is humiliating”, the opposition leader carried on. He has come to Madrid to attend the special congress of the PSOE.
There are no schools, no hospitals”, and the two main state medical centres of the country, the hospitals of La Paz de Bata and Malabo, are unattainable for the population, he denounced. “One night in La Paz is equivalent to a teacher’s salary. In the A&E unit, doctors can only prescribe medicines and those who have no money to buy them, die”, he underlined.
“Policemen and soldiers are roaming free and armed on the streets, pushing and attacking the population”, he criticized. In these conditions, Esono thinks that “the population is accumulating anger, much hate and much resistance” and if the regime and the politicians do not start a process of dialogue, “the one talking will be the street, in a bad way”.
International pressure on Obiang “has been attenuated” because of the oil, Andrés Esono affirms
In that sense, the secretary general of CPDS considered necessary to convince Obians to “call a process of dialogue where all the political actors participate, those of the interior and those of the exile”, through the passing of a law allowing “the safe return of those exiled”.
This process should lead to the creation of “a constituent Assembly that elaborates a new Constitution and a transition government to prepare democratic elections with complete transparency”, Esono declared. Nevertheless, he regretted the fact that the international pressure Obiang had on him 15 or 20 years ago has been “attenuated” during the last years because of the oil.
“Obiang is a rich president handling a lot of money, Equatorial Guinea is a rich country exploiting oil and that only has 700,000 inhabitants”, but the president “handles the resources as he pleases to buy affection, whereas the population lives “in the most absolute poverty”, he warned. “I am not only pointing at the Spanish Government, I am pointing at all the western Governments”.
Finally, Esono regretted that the president of the Government, Mariano Rajoy, did not use the visit he made last June to Equatorial Guinea to “speak to the opposition and know what their points of view and their proposals are”.
