Unesco life sciences prize just there to gild dictator Teodoro Obiang Nguema, writes Peter Fabricius.
Pretoria - Hurry, hurry, hurry, life scientists of the world! Today is the deadline for applying for the $300 000 (R3.2 million), 2014 Unesco-Equatorial Guinea International Prize for Research in the Life Sciences.
Unesco, the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation, awards it to scientists for “research in the life sciences leading to improving the quality of human life”.
The great opportunity in applying for this prize is that the competition is so small. Most international life scientists will, on principle, have nothing to do with it.
They, and others, find it unbearably ironic that a prize for “improving the quality of human life” is endowed with a $3m grant from Teodoro Obiang Nguema, the president of Equatorial Guinea.
This west African state is Africa’s richest in per capita terms, yet Obiang uses most of the state’s huge oil revenue to enrich himself, his relatives and clansmen, while leaving about 75 percent of his people deeply impoverished, living on less than $2 a day, according to researcher Tutu Alicante, of the human rights group, EG Justice, speaking at an Institute for Security Studies seminar in Pretoria last week.
Obiang and his family live like royalty. His son and likely successor, Teodorin, is a playboy under investigation in France and the US for stealing state money to buy, inter alia, private jets, Ferraris and the world’s largest collection of Michael Jackson memorabilia.
Obiang has been in power since August 1979 – when he toppled and killed his uncle in a coup – longer than any other non-monarchical leader in Africa and perhaps, the world.
He has clung to power with an iron fist, though recently concealing it with sham elections. Alicante believes because internal opposition is so suppressed, it is vital that the international community intervene. Yet he notes that, instead, Obiang “is succeeding in positioning himself as a benevolent philanthropist and a wise man”.
The Unesco prize is just part of his African and international charm offensive, in which he is diverting large amounts of money from uplifting his own people, to uplift others.
He dishes out oil to countries like Ghana and Swaziland, donates and raises money for Somali famine victims, has given Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf about $160m for building social housing and renovating that country’s airport and donated an undisclosed amount to the International University of Benin, receiving in exchange an honorary doctorate and the renaming of the institution after him.
He seems to have inherited the role of the late Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, as the AU’s greatest benefactor, paying for leaders to attend summits he has hosted, including the 2011 and 2014 iterations of the AU’s own.
Alicante described how Obiang built an $830m luxury conference and golf resort, complete with 54 luxurious presidential villas in Sipopo to accommodate these summits.
In exchange, the AU gave him its chair in 2011.
President Jacob Zuma has, regrettably, played his part in helping to burnish Obiang’s image.
During the latter’s state visit to this country in 2011 – to cement general relations and possibly to discuss buying South African arms in exchange for oil – Zuma agreed with him that the critics of the Unesco prize were just neo-colonists and racists.
Zuma also commended him, with a straight face, for his “dynamism and determination in implementing his government’s developmental programmes, which are aimed at uplifting the lives of the ordinary people of Equatorial Guinea”.
A South African scientist from Tshwane University of Technology in Pretoria also helped Obiang’s charm offensive by accepting the first prize awarded in 2012, along with an Egyptian and a Mexican, Dr Felix Dapare Dakora.
And in another sign of success for Obiang, in September – to Alicante’s great dismay – Unesco director-general Irina Bokova, who initially opposed taking Obiang’s money, will apparently travel to Equatorial Guinea to present the 2013 prize.
South Africa, Africa and the UN are betraying victims of oppression.
* Peter Fabricius is Independent Newspapers’ foreign editor.
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