Equatorial Guinea sex tape scandal: The story behind the Baltasar Ebang Engonga leak

What the remainder of the world sees as a intercourse tape scandal might in actual fact be the most recent episode within the real-life drama over who will turn into Equatorial Guinea’s subsequent president.

Over the previous fortnight, dozens of movies – estimates vary from 150 to greater than 400 – have been leaked of a senior civil servant having intercourse in his workplace and elsewhere with completely different ladies.

They have flooded social media, surprising and titillating folks within the small central African nation and past.

Many of the ladies filmed have been wives and family of individuals near the centre of energy.

It seems some have been conscious they have been being filmed having intercourse with Baltasar Ebang Engonga, who’s also called “Bello” due to his attractiveness.

All that is exhausting to confirm as Equatorial Guinea is a extremely restricted society the place a free press doesn’t exist.

But one concept is that the leaks have been a strategy to discredit the person on the centre of the storm.

Mr Engonga is a nephew of President Teodoro Obiang Nguema and a type of regarded as hoping to switch him.

Obiang is the world’s longest-serving president having been in energy since 1979.

The 82-year-old has overseen an financial increase that has turned to bust on account of the now-dwindling oil reserves.

There is a small, extraordinarily rich elite, however most of the 1.7 million folks within the nation dwell in poverty.

Obiang’s administration is closely criticised for its human rights file, together with arbitrary killings and torture, according to a US government report.

It has additionally had its fair proportion of scandals – together with the revelations in regards to the lavish way of life of one of many president’s sons, now vice-president, who as soon as owned a $275,000 (£210,000) crystal-encrusted glove worn by Michael Jackson.

Despite common elections, there isn’t any actual opposition in Equatorial Guinea as activists have been jailed and exiled and people with designs on workplace are intently monitored.

Politics within the nation is basically about palace intrigue and that is the place the scandal involving Mr Engonga suits in.

He was the pinnacle of the National Financial Investigation Agency, and labored on tackling crimes reminiscent of cash laundering.

But it turned out he himself was beneath investigation.

He was arrested on 25 October accused of embezzling an enormous sum of cash from state coffers and depositing it in secret accounts within the Cayman Islands. He has not commented on the accusation.

Mr Engonga was then taken to the notorious Black Beach jail within the capital, Malabo, the place it’s alleged that opponents of the federal government are subjected to brutal remedy.

His telephones and computer systems have been seized and some days later the intimate movies began showing on-line.

The first reference the BBC has discovered to them on Facebook is from 28 October on the page of Diario Rombe, a information website run by a journalist in exile in Spain, which stated that “social networks exploded with the leaking of explicit images and videos”.

A post on X the following day referred to a “monumental scandal shaking the regime” as “pornographic videos flood social media”.

But they’re believed to have initially appeared one-by-one a number of days earlier on Telegram, on one of many platform’s channels recognized for publishing pornographic photos.

They have been then downloaded on to folks’s telephones and shared amongst WhatsApp teams in Equatorial Guinea, the place they triggered a storm.

Mr Engonga was rapidly recognized together with a number of the ladies within the movies, together with family of the president and wives to ministers and senior navy officers.

The authorities was unable to disregard what was happening and on 30 October Vice-President Teodoro Obiang Mangue (as soon as proprietor of the Michael Jackson glove) gave telecoms corporations 24 hours to give you methods to cease the unfold of the clips.

“We cannot continue to watch families fall apart without taking any action,” he wrote on X.

“In the meantime, the origin of these publications is being investigated to find the author or authors and make them answer for their actions.”

As the pc tools was within the fingers of the safety forces, suspicion has fallen on somebody there, who, maybe, sought to trash Mr Engonga’s fame forward of a trial.

The police have known as on ladies to come back ahead to open a case in opposition to Mr Engonga for the non-consensual sharing of intimate photos. One has already introduced that she is suing him.

What isn’t clear is why Mr Engonga made the recordings.

But activists have put ahead what might be different motives behind the explosive leak.

As nicely as being associated to the president, Mr Engonga is the son of Baltasar Engonga Edjo’o, the pinnacle of the regional financial and financial union, Cemac, and really influential within the nation.

“What we are seeing is the end of an era, the end of the current president, and there is a succession [question] and this is the internal fighting we are seeing,” stated Equatoguinean activist Nsang Christia Esimi Cruz, now residing in London.

Speaking to the BBC Focus on Africa podcast, he alleged that Vice-President Obiang was attempting to politically remove “anyone who could challenge his succession”.

The vice-president, alongside along with his mom, are suspected to be pushing apart anybody who threatens his path to the presidency, together with Gabriel Obiang Lima (one other son of President Obiang from a unique spouse), who was oil minister for 10 years after which moved to a secondary authorities position.

Those within the elite are thought to know issues about one another that they’d slightly was not made public, and movies have been used up to now to humiliate and discredit a political opponent.

There are additionally frequent accusations of coup plotting, which additional fuels paranoia.

But Mr Cruz additionally alleges that the authorities need to use the scandal as an excuse to crack down on social media, which is how a whole lot of details about what is basically happening within the nation will get out.

In July, the authorities briefly suspended the web after protests broke out on the island of Annobón.

For him, the truth that a high-ranking official was having intercourse exterior of marriage was not shocking because it was a part of the decadent way of life of the nation’s elite.

The vice-president, who himself has been convicted of corruption in France and has had lavish belongings seized in varied international locations, needs to be seen as the person cracking down on graft and wrong-doing at house.

Last yr, for instance, he ordered the arrest of his half-brother over allegations he offered a aircraft owned by the state airline.

But on this case, regardless of the vice-president’s efforts to cease the unfold of the clips, they proceed to be seen.

This week, he tried to seem extra resolute calling for the set up of CCTV cameras in authorities workplaces “to combat indecent and illicit acts”, the official news agency reported.

Saying that the scandal had “denigrated the image of the country” he ordered that any officers discovered partaking in intercourse acts at work could be suspended as this was a “flagrant violation of the code of conduct”.

He was not wrong that the story has attracted a lot of outside interest.

Judging by Google’s data, search enquiries that include the country’s name have shot up since the beginning of this week.

On Monday, on X, “Equatorial Guinea” was one of the top trending terms in Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa – surpassing at times interest in the US election.

This has left some activists who have been trying to tell the world about what is really going on in the country frustrated.

“Equatorial Guinea has much bigger problems than this sex scandal,” said Mr Cruz, who works for a rights organisation called GE Nuestra.

“This sex scandal for us is just a symptom of the illness, it’s not the illness itself. It just shows how corrupt the system is.”

Additional reporting by BBC Verify’s Peter Mwai.