Agapito Mba
Mokuy, Minister of Foreign Affairs and Cooperation participated on an open
forum to demystify Equatorial Guinea at the Leon H. Sullivan Foundation Summit, held on August 20-23 in the capital
city of Malabo.
Minister of
Foreign Affairs said that it's easy to judge a country but to judge a country,
to judge a man; people have to look at its historical context. “Equatorial
Guinea comes from 200 years of colonial slavery. In 1968, when Equatorial
Guinea gained its independence, the country only had three professionals with
graduate level. I say it again, three professionals, it was a historical
scandal. This is how Equatorial Guinea was left in 1968.”
“We had no
universities, no schools, we had no professionals. Equatorial Guinea gained its
independence and went through 11 years of the strongest dictatorship history
has ever known. Personally, I say it was predictable. A country that was left
with only three professionals, with no college, what did people expect,”
continued to say Minister Mokuy.
In 1979,
President Obiang Nguema Mbasogo inherited this country from the ruin, from
utter ruin and he began to do everything possible to restore the dignity of the
Equatoguineans. There were no schools, no universities, no intellectuals. Everything
they had was destroyed, they had no religious freedoms. Churches were closed.
Nor had they means, they had no oil.
The Guinean
economy depended mainly on cocoa and coffee, which was not much. Production in
those years was 36,000 to 40,000 metric tons. This production was described as
intellectual work. Settlers, Nigerians who lived in Equatorial Guinea, produced
the cocoa in those days. Minister Mokuy said, “But who took over the production
after they left? The colonists didn’t prepare the Guineans professionally, nor
did we have the manpower. Guinea did not have much. What happens? Cocoa
production declines, those are the things the President had to go through, all
these difficulties, this everyday thinking of ‘What can I do to lift the
economy?’ It is this persistence that leads us to discover oil at the end.”
