"God" of Equatorial Guinea Takes a Hit at UNESCO

In 2003, the BBC reported that state radio in the small African country of Equatorial Guinea had described President Teodoro Obiang Nguema as “like God in heaven,” who has “all power over men and things” and can “decide to kill” without going to hell.

Indeed, the president seems to believe it. Maybe it flies in his own country, where in August political dissidents kidnapped from Benin months before were summarily executed moments after an unfair trial.

But yesterday in Paris, when the executive board of UNESCO voted to indefinitely suspend the UNESCO-Obiang International Prize for Research in the Life Sciences, it became ever clearer that to the rest of the world—including Equatorial Guinea’s African neighbors—President Obiang is not the god he may believe himself to be.

Fifty-eight members of the board, including 17 from the African continent, came to a consensus position to suspend a $3 million prize funded by Obiang, following a campaign of protest that included six Nobel laureates, scholars, writers, journalists, public health advocates, scientists, doctors, former government leaders, senators, and human rights and anticorruption groups from around the world. Notably, some 60 Equatoguinean citizens were brave enough to publicly enlist.

Obiang tried to save it. He even had his foreign minister plead with the UN General Assembly last month to help push the prize forward, calling civil society opponents “racist” and “colonialist.” However, when the likes of Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu, eminent Nigerian author Chinua Achebe, Nobel laureates Wole Soyinka and Mario Vargas Llosa, and former Mexican Ambassador Homero Aridjis joined the protest, the burden of moving forward with the prize was too much for UNESCO diplomats.

This is a good sign.

This week's decision is a testament to the power of an informed global citizenry to push aside the genteel norms of diplomatic “business as usual” and strip away the veneer of untouchability from a corrupt dictator with a god complex.

Now all UNESCO has to do is wipe this prize off its books for good and start working on developing the internal policies it needs to prevent another such fiasco in the future. Its decision yesterday was a needed first step to reassure the rest of us that when the next emperor (or dictator) comes knocking on the organization’s doors claiming to be showing off his “new clothes,” UNESCO won’t be blinded by the sack of cash he’s carrying.