BY Michael Logan
Nairobi/Malabo - Oil-rich Equatorial Guinea goes to the polls on Sunday in what observers say is a sham election designed to rubber stamp the rule of long-term president Teodoro Obiang Nguema.
Obiang, who seized power from his uncle in a 1979 coup, has told supporters in the tiny nation of just under 700,000 people he intends to win with 97 per cent of the vote. Looking at past election results, this is no idle boast.
Obiang, 67, scooped 97,1 per cent of the vote in the last presidential poll in 2002 - he ran unopposed - while his Democratic Party of Equatorial Guinea (PDGE) has strolled to overwhelming victories in all elections since multiparty politics was introduced in 1991.
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Obiang has quietly gone about stripping his country of its wealth This time around, opposition parties say they have not being given enough time to campaign to allow for a free and fair election.
New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) says the opposition has been harassed and denied equal access to the media, while the 43 international observers being sent by the African Union and Economic Community of Central African States are subject to rules that compromise their efforts to monitor the election.
While the world's attention has focused on more colourful African dictators, such as Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe, observers say Obiang has quietly gone about stripping his country of its wealth and squashing its opposition, unconcerned by the squalor its citizens live in.
"President Obiang claims that he's committed to the rule of law," said Arvind Ganesan, director of the Business and Human Rights Program at HRW. "But his actions time and again are those of a dictator determined to hang onto power and control of the country's oil money."
Equatorial Guinea became Africa's third-largest oil producer behind Nigeria and Angola after the discovery of oil and gas deposits in the mid-1990s sparked huge growth.
The only true opposition to Obiang is a government-in-exile
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