Higher Per-Capita Income than Iceland, UK, France, Japan, Italy, the whole EU...

[mojowork_n]

Here's a list of countries, ranked by order of GDP income, divided up by the number of citizens.

Equatorial Guinea is number 20 on the list, "Per Capita Income"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_%28PPP%29_per_capita



So this news story caught my attention today.


[div class="excerpt" style="margin-left: 1em; border: 2px solid #6600cc; border-radius: 0.4615em; box-shadow: 6px 6px 6px #999999;"]The people of Equatorial Guinea ought to be among the world's wealthiest - but somehow the country's income from oil and timber doesn't reach them. Eight years after a failed coup, putting cash in people's pockets is not the president's priority.

Deep in the rainforest, a giant dome of steel and glass is the centrepiece of one of the most grandiose and expensive construction projects in all of Africa. The library of the new International University of Central Africa has the look of a spaceship docked in a jungle clearing...

...Earth movers, cranes and international construction crews from as far afield as Brazil, Poland and North Korea are turning the dreams of President Teodoro Obiang - Equatorial Guinea's self-styled Guarantor of Peace and Propeller of Development - into logic-defying reality.

The university is but one small part of the president's ambition to build Africa's city of the future. Oyala will be the country's new capital, a multi-billion-dollar plaything for Africa's longest-serving dictator....

Still run by a member of the same family elected to power in 1968, when Equatorial Guinea was given independence from Spain:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equatorial_Guinea

The New Boss is admittedly an improvement on the Old Boss:

[div class="excerpt" style="margin-left: 1em; border: 2px solid #6600cc; border-radius: 0.4615em; box-shadow: 6px 6px 6px #999999;"]From the wiki page: During Macías Nguema's regime, the country had neither a development plan nor an accounting system for government funds. After killing the governor of the Central Bank, he carried everything that remained in the national treasury to his house in a rural village. During Christmas of 1975 he ordered about 150 of his opponents killed. Soldiers dressed up in Santa Claus costumes executed them by shooting at the football stadium in Malabo, while amplifiers were playing Mary Hopkin's "Those Were the Days".

Also:

http://theburningsplint.blogspot.com/2010/01/francisco-macias-nguema-mad-man-from.html

But this is still life in Equatorial Guinea, today:



Most of the population lives on little more than $1 a day. Average life expectancy barely reaches 55.

Since they were granted independence, you can add Equatorial Guinea to the list of African countries -- like Congo -- that are so rich in natural resources. But trail the rest of the world in just about everything else.

.........By the way -- a question -- the other day there was a great post in "Breaking News" that got shut down, with the moderator's notation that it belonged in the "Latin America" group.

There is no "Africa" group in the "International" forum so there seemed no better place to post this than the World History Group, a sub-topic of "Arts & Humanities."

Should there be a "Colonialism" group, or a "World-Wide 1% Thieves" group, or a "Global Occupy Movement" -- or some other forum for this sort of information, or discussion of issues like this?

[RZM]

1. There probably should be an Africa group

I've wondered why there isn't. You might want to post something in the Welcome or Meta forums. I'll bet there would be plenty of support for it and you could get the group created.