"How Equatorial Guinea Turned Corruption into an Art Form"

For the past two decades, Equatorial Guinea has been one of Africa’s largest oil producers and on paper, it is a middle-income economy. Yet instead of spending the country’s oil riches on improving life for ordinary Equatorial Guineans, the government has squandered its enormous wealth on questionable infrastructure projects – highways to nowhere, empty 5-star hotels – where corruption is rife. A new Human Rights Watch report has found that a combination of gross mismanagement and high-level corruption has left the country’s health and education sectors on their knees, and among the worst on the continent. And as Researcher Sarah Saadoun tells Stephanie Hancock, with oil production in the country already in decline, the government has little time left to reverse course.